New Zealand’s award of the 2011 RWC was a missed opportunity. The IRB in all other ways are desperate to establish rugby as a global sport, but when it came down to it, the old boys club of the established nations made their deals in smoky back rooms and the Land of the Long White Cloud was given the nod over the Land of the Rising Sun.
RWC New Zealand 2011
The Rugby World Cup is now the third largest sporting event in the world and this was New Zealand’s last chance as a small nation to host the tournament. No-one can doubt that New Zealand is a rugby mad country and the All Blacks are a perennial force who have been favourites to win most of the six events held so far, but the RWC is too big a deal to be given to a country for romantic reasons.
When the British Lions toured New Zealand in 2005, New Zealand, for all its passion for the game, showed that it lacks the infrastructure to host an event of this size. An estimated 30,000 fans travelled with the Lions, necessitating cruise ships to be moored alongside cities and camper vans to be shipped over from Australia to provide enough beds. The travelling support for the Rugby World Cup will dwarf the Lions tour and with the best will in the world, building hotels for a one off event is not a sound economic strategy.
RWC England 2015
By choosing New Zealand, the IRB members also painted themselves into a corner for the 2015 World Cup. The RWC fills the IRB coffers with 95% of its revenue for the next four year cycle and is the main mechanism with which they fund the development of rugby in non-traditional countries. The last two World Cups, Australia 2003 and France 2007, were runaway financial successes, but it is already accepted that New Zealand 2011 will offer a return far below these tournaments, meaning four years of pain for the developing nations.
For this reason, Japan was too big a risk to award the 2015 competition. The coffers need to be refilled and the safest way of doing that is by holding it in the safe arena of the Northern Hemisphere, where potential TV revenues are higher and games can be held at viewer friendly times.
England’s bid offered the best chance of doing that, with the RFU estimating the profit from 2015 to be in the region of £300m, significantly more than New Zealand is likely to return.
This should not be seen as charity by the English RFU. English sport is putting together a very strong line-up in what is being called the, ‘Decade of Sport’, with RWC 2015 joining the 2012 Olympics, the 2013 rugby League world cup, and potentially, the Superbowl in 2014 and the 2018 FIFA world cup. This series of events will have a huge impact on the British economy. The RWC alone, is calculated by Deloittes to be worth in the region of £2.1 billion to the local economy.
Japan RWC 2019 Good for Rugby
The Japanese bid played heavily on the globalisation card, announcing itself a ‘Bid for Asia’, backed up by the nomination of Singapore and Hong Kong as venues. They also majored on their experience of holding big sporting events, three Olympic Games and the 2002 FIFA World Cup and stressed the untapped potential of the Asian market for rugby.
This added to the fact that the Japanese are fanatical about sport in general and boast around 125,000 registered players, the fourth highest number of active rugby players in the world means that it could be a master stroke by the IRB.
It’s just a shame it took them eight long years to make that decision.
