More money is flowing into professional sport. Rugby’s challenge is whether it can capture more of it while building a sustainable business underneath the game.
A new forecast from Mordor Intelligence projects that Europe’s sports teams and clubs market will grow from $27.23 billion in 2026 to $42.23 billion by 2031, representing a compound annual growth rate of 9.17%.
That is a forecast for the wider European sports market, not rugby. Football accounted for 56.43% of the market in 2025, and much of the detailed public analysis concerns football. Rugby union is included as a separate segment alongside football, golf, cricket and boxing, but the publicly available report does not provide a rugby-specific market value or growth rate.
Instead, the report provides a useful framework for examining some of the forces changing the economics of professional sport — and asking whether rugby can capitalize on them.
First, a Caveat About the $42 Billion Forecast
The headline number needs context.
Mordor Intelligence says its market-size and forecast figures are generated using the company’s proprietary estimation framework, with the estimates updated using information available as of January 2026.
That makes $42.23 billion a research firm’s five-year market projection rather than a guaranteed future value for European sport. The publicly available material also does not provide enough methodological detail to independently reproduce the forecast.
Mordor identifies media-rights inflation driven by competition between streaming platforms as the largest positive contributor among the individual growth drivers it analyzes. Stadium attendance, women’s professional leagues and investment in major clubs are among the other factors it identifies.
On the other side is a familiar sports-business problem: costs. Mordor identifies escalating player wage-to-revenue ratios as the largest negative restraint among the individual factors it lists.
For rugby, that tension — growing revenue without allowing costs to consume the gains — may be more useful to examine than the $42 billion headline itself.
More Media Money — But Can Rugby Build the Audience?
Media rights accounted for 37.44% of the European sports teams and clubs market’s revenue mix in 2025, according to Mordor.
The report also says third-party streaming services held 43.36% of fan engagement in 2025, while club-owned OTT platforms are forecast to grow at an 18.48% annual rate through 2031.
Those are wider sports-market figures, not rugby figures.
Rugby, however, is making its own distribution moves.
World Rugby has a U.S. agreement with CBS Sports that makes Paramount+ the American streaming home for its men’s and women’s events through 2029. It includes Rugby World Cups, HSBC SVNS, WXV, the Pacific Nations Cup and USA national-team matches.
Then, on April 30, 2026, World Rugby and IMG announced a longer-term partnership covering U.S. and global media-rights strategy, distribution, content and in-market initiatives ahead of the Men’s Rugby World Cup in 2031 and Women’s Rugby World Cup in 2033.
That creates a test more useful than simply counting how many rugby competitions are available to stream:
Does wider distribution produce sustained audience growth and, ultimately, greater media and commercial value?
World Rugby now has broad U.S. distribution in place before hosting its own World Cups there. What matters between now and 2031 is what rugby does with that reach.
Women’s Rugby Now Has Its Own Evidence
Deloitte Global forecasts that global women’s elite sports revenue will reach at least $3 billion in 2026, up from $2.4 billion in 2025.
RFC examined that wider commercial shift earlier this month in “Women’s Sports Revenue Will Top $3 Billion in 2026. Is Women’s Rugby Ready for Its Share?” The question here is narrower: whether rugby can show evidence that it is capturing some of that growth.
Those numbers cover women’s elite sport globally. They are not a forecast for women’s rugby.
But rugby now has its own audience evidence.
According to World Rugby, the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup generated 147 million global broadcast viewing hours, a 336% increase from the previous tournament. It also produced more than one billion social-media impressionsand £201 million in media value for Rugby World Cup commercial partners.
World Rugby says sponsorship revenue increased 330% compared with the previous Women’s Rugby World Cup.
Those percentages need context. They compare one tournament with the previous edition and are figures reported by the sport’s own governing body. They should not, by themselves, be read as evidence that women’s rugby’s underlying commercial market grew by comparable percentages.
They do, however, show the scale of the audience reached by the 2025 tournament.
World Rugby also reports that 15% of RWC 2025 attendees were attending their first rugby match of any kind, while 44% were attending a women’s rugby match for the first time.
Its 2026 Blueprint for Growth adds another indicator, but with an important qualification. The findings come from World Rugby-commissioned research conducted across seven markets rather than a census of the global rugby audience.
Within that research, 49% of women’s rugby fans surveyed said they had become fans within the previous two years, 55% expected their interest in rugby union to increase and 53% said they discovered women’s rugby through television or streaming.
The next test is retention.
How many of the people brought into rugby around RWC 2025 are still watching, attending and engaging when there is no World Cup taking place?
That matters more than another percentage increase from one major tournament to the next.
Rugby’s Financial Problem Is Not Theoretical
Professional rugby already has evidence of what happens when club economics stop working.
Worcester Warriors and Wasps collapsed during the 2022-23 English season. A UK parliamentary committee subsequently described the finances of Premiership clubs as “clearly unsustainable.” London Irish then became the third Premiership club lost in less than a year.
There is also a more recent financial baseline, although it needs to be used carefully.
The Guardian reported in September 2026, based on the available club finances, that the 10 current Premiership clubs collectively lost approximately £34 million in 2023-24 and none recorded a profit.
That figure is useful, but narrow.
It represents one league in one season. It does not tell us the financial position of France’s Top 14, the United Rugby Championship, Super Rugby Pacific or the global professional game. And because comparable league-wide figures for a more recent Premiership season are not yet available, it is not a real-time measure of English rugby’s finances in September 2026.
It is a baseline, not a verdict on the entire sport.
The Race Between Revenue and Costs
Mordor estimates media-rights inflation driven by streaming competition as having a +2.8% directional impact on its overall CAGR forecast — the largest positive effect among the drivers it lists.
Escalating player wage-to-revenue ratios have a -1.4% directional impact, the largest negative effect among its listed restraints.
Mordor cautions that these impacts are directional rather than additive.
For rugby, the contrast creates a straightforward question:
Can professional rugby increase revenue faster than its costs?
The £34 million Premiership loss gives us one imperfect benchmark. Future Premiership accounts can tell us whether those combined losses shrink, disappear or grow.
They cannot tell us whether professional rugby globally has passed the test.
For that, the same question needs to be asked competition by competition.
Then Comes the $1 Billion Test
The largest commercial experiment is waiting in the United States.
World Rugby’s 2026-31 strategy culminates with the Men’s Rugby World Cup in the U.S. in 2031. The governing body says it will partner with unions and invest £200 million in the United States in the lead-up to 2031, aimed at unlocking rugby’s potential in what it describes as the world’s biggest sports market.
World Rugby is also targeting a surplus of more than $1 billion from RWC 2031 to help fund the sport globally.
For context, World Rugby says the 2023 Rugby World Cup in France generated a record £472 million surplus for reinvestment into the game.
Those figures are not directly comparable. One is a historical surplus reported in pounds; the other is a future target expressed in U.S. dollars. The tournaments will also take place eight years apart in very different sports markets.
At roughly contemporary exchange rates, however, a $1 billion target is still substantially above £472 million. Reaching it would require the U.S. tournament to generate significantly greater financial returns than France 2023, whether through media, sponsorship, ticketing, hospitality, commercial scale or a combination of them.
World Rugby has not yet proved that outcome. It has set the target.
And even reaching it would answer only part of the American question.
A commercially successful six-week World Cup would not, by itself, demonstrate that rugby had established a sustainable U.S. market.
The Women’s Rugby World Cup follows in 2033, extending the opportunity — and the period over which the legacy can be judged.
Four Tests for Rugby by 2031
The next five years now give rugby some identifiable measures of progress.
Media: World Rugby has broad U.S. distribution through CBS and Paramount+, with IMG helping shape the longer-term media strategy. Success should be visible in sustained audience growth and increased commercial value, not merely more available programming.
Women’s rugby: RWC 2025 generated 147 million global viewing hours and brought first-time rugby spectators into stadiums. The next measure is retention: whether audiences, attendance and commercial support remain materially above their pre-2025 levels between World Cups.
Club economics: The 10 current English Premiership clubs collectively lost approximately £34 million in 2023-24. For that league, a clear sign of progress would be those aggregate losses moving materially toward break-even rather than remaining a persistent feature of the competition. Other professional competitions need to be judged against their own financial structures rather than the English number.
United States: World Rugby plans £200 million of investment before 2031 and is targeting a $1 billion-plus RWC surplus. France 2023 generated a record £472 million surplus. Financial success in 2031 should be accompanied by evidence that the American audience and commercial market remain stronger after the tournament than before it.
Those tests are not perfect, and some require data that rugby does not currently publish consistently.
That itself is revealing.
If rugby wants to demonstrate that it is building a sustainable commercial business, transparent measures of audiences, revenue, costs and retention will matter alongside attendance records and tournament headlines.
Mordor Intelligence’s forecast suggests a wider European sports economy in which media, digital distribution and new commercial opportunities could continue growing through 2031. It does not tell us that rugby will capture that growth.
Rugby has to demonstrate that for itself.
By 2031, failure would not simply mean missing World Rugby’s $1 billion tournament target. If major-event audiences repeatedly fall away between World Cups, club losses remain structurally embedded and U.S. interest retreats once the tournament leaves, rugby will have failed the more important commercial test — even if RWC 2031 itself is profitable.
Success would look different: sustained audiences between major events, healthier club economics, women’s rugby retaining a meaningful share of the fans acquired around 2025, and a U.S. market stronger after 2031 than before it.
The opportunity is real. Whether rugby converts it into a stronger business is now something we can actually start measuring.
