World Cup venue decision delayed as World Rugby bosses step in to fix Rugby Australia’s mess
The decision on which Australian city will host the 2027 Rugby World Cup has been delayed, as World Rugby bosses turn their attention to helping fix Rugby Australia’s mess.
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The eagerly-awaited decision on which Australian city will be chosen to host the 2027 World Cup final has been put on the backburner as the sport’s global officials switch their attention to helping Rugby Australia (RA) fix the awful mess it finds itself in.
Sydney, Melbourne and Perth are all bidding against each other for the chance to host the sport’s showcase match in 2027 – and the stakes are massive because the winning city can expect to reap hundreds of millions of dollars from inbound tourists and the international exposure it gets from the worldwide television audience.
Normally, World Rugby, the global governing body that makes the final decision on where the sport’s biggest matches are played, would have already signed the host city contracts, but officials have hit the pause button because the decision has taken on added importance.
It is well documented that RA’s financial woes have left the code in Australia in a perilous state at the worst possible time after the disastrous on-field flop at last year’s World Cup in France.
Like everyone in the game, World Rugby are aware, and concerned, about RA’s predicament, but want to help so have been working closely behind the scenes to help Australia catch up to the other major rugby playing nations, where the game is absolutely booming.
“It is really important to us that the sport is strong here (in Australia), and we think it can be,” World Rugby chief executive Alan Gilpin said.
“We’re absolutely committed to working with Australia, and trying to move things forward positively.”
Rugby in Australia has never been at a lower ebb than it is right now, with the Wallabies struggling on the field and the game struggling financially.
But there is still some light at the end of the tunnel with a series of mega money-spinning events heading this way, starting with Australia hosting the British and Irish Lions next year then the men’s World Cup in 2027 and the women’s in 2029 and finally the 2032 Brisbane Olympics, which will include Sevens rugby.
If everything goes according to plan, the huge cash returns from these events should ensure RA can safeguard the future of rugby in Australia, but no one is taking anything for granted.
“We’re obviously coming up to a really exciting period, certainly in terms of international rugby in Australia,” Gilpin said.
“There’s some brilliant tentpole moments and what we want to do obviously with Rugby Australia is work around that, to get fans really excited about rugby and a strong domestic game.
“There’s a lot for rugby fans in Australia to be excited about. Obviously, the announcement around Joe Schmidt (as the Wallabies head coach) and Peter Horne, who’s obviously taken over as high performance director, we know those guys pretty well, they’ve both worked with us.
“They know how to get results and how to build winning cultures so there’s a lot of confidence.”
Gilpin said all the early forecasts were that the 2027 men’s World Cup would be a phenomenal success but even so, World Rugby wants to work hand-in-hand with the local organising committee – which includes, Sir Rod Eddington, dual World Cup winner Phil Kearns and managing director Chris Stanley – to help maximise their returns.
“There are clearly financial factors,” he said. “The financial factors obviously involve ticketing revenue, they involve hospitality and kind of premium experience revenue and what facilities are available to drive those revenues, to state government conversations to have from a financial perspective as well,” he said.
“But there’s fans and fan experience to consider in all this.
“So we’ve got to make sure that those really big moments and the opening game, as we saw in Paris, is a massive opportunity to start a tournament with a huge kind of bang, as it were.
“We need to do that right through to the semis and final, being the biggest games, so we make sure we were putting those in stadiums and in environments and cities ultimately where fans can have a great experience.
“There’s also hotel and accommodation considerations, there’s transport considerations. So there’s a lot to go into that mix.
“But we’re in a great position planning a tournament in Australia because there are choices there that wouldn’t necessarily exist in other countries from a hosting perspective.”
Gilpin said he hoped a decision would be made in the first half of this year, but selecting the cities for the feature matches wasn’t the only reason for the delay.
It is also because World Rugby recently announced it had agreed to expand the 2027 World Cup from 20 to 24 teams – a helpful boost for RA because it lift profits by increasing the number of games and new broadcast markets, including North America after the United States and Canada both failed to qualify for the 2023 World Cup.
World Rugby also agreed to shorten the length of the tournament from seven to six weeks, from October 1 – November 13, avoiding an overlap with the AFL and NRL finals.
Instead of the current format of four pools each consisting of five teams, followed by a three-round finals stage, the 2027 edition will be contested by six pools of four teams, then a four-round knockout phase.
Under the new streamlined system, the two top teams from each pool plus the four best third-placed teams will advance to a newly added round-of-16 before the quarter-finals, doubling the number of sudden-death knockout games.
This requires a full rethink on where all the fixtures will be played, including the possibility of adding extra stadiums or even tweaking the current format where the semi-finals, third place playoff and final are held in the same city.
That could open up the possibility that the Melbourne Cricket Ground, with a capacity of 100,000, and Sydney’s Olympic stadium, which hosted the 2003 decider, could split the finals, though no decision has been made yet.
“We’ve talked over a number of years about expansion and when will be the right time for expansion, but you need the right sort of host to enable that to happen and we have that with Australia,” Gilpin said.
“We’re not yet ready to start to confirm which cities will host what types of matches but there’s a lot of work going on so watch this space over the next couple of months.
“Australia’s got some fantastic venues so actually there’s choice.
“We’ll work through that format piece over the next little period and then re-engage with state governments to try and move forward and hopefully in the first half of this year, get to a point where we’ve started to lock that stuff down.”
Alan Gilpin will be one of the keynote speakers at the SportNXT 2024, a summit of global and domestic sporting leaders taking place at Melbourne & Olympic Park Precinct from March 19-21.
The conference is expected to attract around 1,000 delegates from around the world.
In addition to the Gilpin, the headline speakers include
• Casey Wasserman Chair and CEO, Wasserman; Chair, LA2028 Olympic & Paralympic
Games
• Andrew Liveris AO, President, Brisbane 2032 Organising Committee
• Catherine Carlson EVP, Global Partnerships, BSE Global
• Rowena Samarasinhe Owner, GENSport; Partner, LEVEL
• Octavi Anoro - International Development Director, LaLiga
• Andrew Dillon - CEO, AFL
• Travis Auld - CEO, Australian Grand Prix Corporation
• Tal Karp - CEO, Y Australia / Former Director, Australian Grand Prix Corporation
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