America has shown that it will turn up for major rugby events. The harder challenge is turning that interest into a habit — and making the sport simple enough to follow that new supporters stay.
American rugby has already proved it can sell a major event. On September 12, 68,173 people packed M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore to watch South Africa play New Zealand, the largest attendance recorded for a rugby international in the United States.
Go to a local rugby club on an ordinary Saturday and the picture can be very different. Often it is the same 50 or 100 people standing around the field week after week. They know the players, understand the competition and know where to find the fixtures and results.
Those supporters have formed a habit around rugby. Someone who buys a ticket to see the Springboks and All Blacks has shown that rugby can command their attention, but that doesn’t automatically mean they will watch the Eagles, discover their local club or consume another rugby match the following weekend.
That gap between attracting someone to a rugby event and turning them into a rugby supporter may be one of the biggest challenges facing the sport in America before Rugby World Cup 2031.
Who is rugby built around?
Former Ireland international Andrew Trimble and London Irish chairman Dan McKeown recently approached a related issue from a very different direction in The Sunday Times. Their wider argument, published as “The 30-year test: what is holding professional club rugby back?”, examines the structure and incentives behind professional club rugby.
Their argument is primarily about the economics of professional rugby, particularly in England. They contend that clubs carry substantial commercial risk while lacking control over important parts of the product they are trying to sell, including the calendar and availability of leading players.
They point to England’s Professional Game Partnership, under which the RFU pays the ten Premiership clubs £33 million per season in return for greater influence over the management and availability of England-qualified players.
From that financial argument comes an observation worth considering beyond the Premiership: incentives influence who an organization ultimately serves. When a significant amount of a club’s income comes from a governing body, Trimble and McKeown argue, that governing body effectively becomes one of its most important customers.
American rugby has different structures and different problems. Premiership finances do not explain why an American college rugby result might be buried on Instagram, and the problems shouldn’t be presented as if they have the same cause.
But the incentive lens is useful.
How much of American rugby’s infrastructure is actually designed around the person trying to follow the sport?
Finding the rugby shouldn’t be the hard part
This is something we encounter constantly at Rugby Fan Central.
RFC began partly because we were rugby supporters trying to answer very basic questions: who’s playing, when is the match, where can we watch it and what was the score?
Those questions sound simple until you try answering them across American rugby.
College rugby is a good example. USA Rugby and the Collegiate Rugby Association of America announced a strategic partnership in July, with USA Rugby committing additional funding and resources to CRAA. The areas specifically identified for investment include staffing, operational support, technology, marketing and communications.
That may improve one important part of college rugby, but CRAA isn’t the entirety of the American college game. National Collegiate Rugby operates separately, while NIRA represents another important part of the women’s collegiate landscape.
For people already immersed in American rugby, those distinctions can be understood. For the parent who watched their first college match last weekend or the sports fan who has just discovered a local team, the structure can be difficult to navigate.
Schedules, standings and results can live in different systems. Conference and club websites contain some information. Social media fills many of the gaps. Sometimes finding a final score still means tracking down a team’s Instagram or Facebook account.
That isn’t necessarily the result of one organization doing something wrong. It is what happens when a sport develops through different governing structures, competitions, conferences and volunteer networks.
But the supporter experiences the result all the same.
A broadcast deal isn’t the finish line
International rugby presents a different version of the accessibility problem.
World Rugby’s agreement with CBS Sports has consolidated a substantial amount of international rugby on Paramount+ in the United States. Bringing more rugby onto one service makes the landscape simpler, but having a broadcast partner and providing a good fan experience aren’t automatically the same thing.
The USA Men’s Eagles’ Pacific Nations Cup third-place match against Canada on September 19 provides a useful example. The game in Tokyo kicked off at 3:00 a.m. Eastern Time, with USA Rugby directing American viewers to Paramount+.
A 3 a.m. kickoff is nobody’s fault. Rugby is a global sport, and matches played in Japan cannot reasonably be scheduled around American television viewers. That makes the replay more important.
When Rugby Fan Central checked Paramount+ following USA’s 19–16 loss to Canada, the match was not available to watch on demand. More than 48 hours after the match, when RFC checked again, a supporter who had chosen not to wake up at 3 a.m. still could not simply open the service and watch the Eagles.
The point isn’t to assume why. From the outside, we cannot know whether the delay resulted from rights, production, processing or another issue, and Paramount+ does carry on-demand rugby.
The issue is what the supporter experienced. A committed rugby fan will probably keep looking. Someone only beginning to develop an interest in the Eagles may simply watch something else.
Broadcast rights generate revenue rugby needs and professional coverage costs money to produce. But when international kickoff times make live viewing impractical, prompt and predictable on-demand availability should be part of the product.
In a market rugby is trying to grow, accessibility has commercial value too.
Three things American rugby can make easier
None of this requires every rugby organization in America to merge or surrender its independence. It does require greater cooperation around the parts of the sport the supporter sees.
First, USA Rugby, CRAA, NCR and NIRA should establish a working group around common standards for basic match data. Team identities, competition names, dates, kickoff times, venues, match status and final scores should be structured so information can move accurately between governing bodies, competitions, clubs and independent platforms.
USA Rugby’s new investment in CRAA technology and operations creates an obvious place to start, but it cannot be the end of the conversation. NCR and NIRA would need to participate as independent partners rather than being expected to adopt a CRAA system. The objective should not be one organization owning all college rugby data; it should be making basic match information interoperable regardless of who runs the competition.
There also needs to be an incentive to participate. USA Rugby could make interoperability with a common match-data standard part of the technology, communications and pathway support it provides to collegiate competitions, while each organization retains ownership and control of its own competition.
RFC would benefit from such a system, as would any independent platform trying to make American rugby easier to follow. That is precisely why we are disclosing our interest in it. The larger beneficiary, however, would be the supporter who no longer has to search several websites and social-media accounts for a fixture or final score.
Second, World Rugby and CBS should make prompt on-demand availability part of the expected U.S. broadcast product, particularly for overnight USA internationals. If an Eagles match starts at 3 a.m. Eastern, supporters should know when the replay will become available and where to find it.
The incentive can be built into the rights relationship itself. When World Rugby negotiates or reviews U.S. distribution agreements, on-demand availability and replay turnaround could be treated as defined service expectations alongside live distribution. That would turn prompt replay access from something supporters hope for into something the rights holder and broadcaster are expected to deliver.
Third, World Rugby should publicly report simple fan-access measures alongside its fan-centric U.S. strategy. Growth should not be judged solely through major-event attendance, broadcast agreements or participation numbers. World Rugby could also measure and publish indicators such as how much major USA rugby is available live and on demand, how quickly replays become available, and whether supporters can consistently find fixtures, results and viewing information.
Public reporting creates its own incentive. If fan accessibility is something the sport measures and reports, improving the supporter experience becomes an outcome organizations can be held accountable for rather than an aspiration in a strategy document.
These aren’t particularly glamorous pieces of infrastructure, but they put the supporter directly into the definition of success.
2031 is the opportunity
Rugby World Cup 2031 will expose the sport to Americans on a scale it has never experienced. There will be packed stadiums, international supporters traveling across the country and people attending their first rugby match simply because a World Cup on home soil is a major sporting event.
The tournament can create attention. American rugby’s job is to turn some of that attention into a lasting relationship with the sport.
That doesn’t always happen through a governing body or competition. Ilona Maher has demonstrated another route: people can discover a personality first and rugby second. In a country where rugby competes with established leagues and an enormous entertainment industry, recognizable players can help connect people who encounter the sport at a major event with what happens next.
The pathway after 2031 therefore needs more than packed stadiums. It needs accessible broadcasts, reliable information, recognizable players and clear connections to rugby being played locally.
Someone who enjoys their first World Cup match should be able to find their next rugby match without first learning the organizational structure of American rugby. They should be able to discover the Eagles, college rugby and clubs in their area, understand when they play and know where to watch.
That is where Trimble and McKeown’s argument remains useful without pretending that English professional rugby and American rugby suffer from the same problem. Their argument asks us to look at incentives and identify who rugby’s structures encourage organizations to serve.
America can ask the same question of the infrastructure it builds before 2031.
Make the score easy to find. Make the next game easy to discover. Make an overnight Eagles match easy to watch the following morning. Connect the person who attends a major international to rugby happening closer to home.
Baltimore showed that America can be persuaded to come to rugby. The bigger test is what happens when everyone goes home.
The legacy of Rugby World Cup 2031 shouldn’t simply be how many came. It should be how many stayed.
