by MOrn Rugby Union turned 30 last month. In the autumn of 1994, Louis Luyt, president of the South African Rugby Union, announced that the sport would become a professional sport after his country hosted the World Cup the following year. Luyt was the first major sports figure to say out loud what everyone else only spoke about in whispers. He was right. It took another 12 months, the actual anniversary of the International Rugby Board meeting at which the decision to turn professional was made falls next August, but once Luyt opened the box there was no closing it.
Thirty years is not time. Rugby is simultaneously so old that no one knows exactly when it was first played, and so young that it is still figuring out what it wants to be when it grows up. “We’re still very new compared to a lot of other professional sports,” says New Zealand Rugby chief executive Mark Robinson. Robinson, who played nine Tests for the All Blacks in the early 2000s, has been their CEO since 2020. He is on the road this week, shuttling between interviews and meetings ahead of the World Rugby Council meeting in Dublin on November 14. when he and the rest of the powers that be will discuss the game’s best next steps.
You can see some of what they have in mind on the field this weekend. The international matches England against New Zealand and Scotland against Fiji are the first of the final autumn tests. In 2026, they are scheduled to be replaced by a biennial Nations Championship, a 12-team, two-conference competition that will feature a final between the best teams in the northern and southern hemispheres. The tests will also include the application of the new red card procedure law, meaning players sent off can be replaced after 20 minutes in some cases. Robinson is a key supporter of both developments and wants to ensure they become permanent.
That’s why he wants former Australian flanker Brett Robinson to win the race to succeed Bill Beaumont as World Rugby chairman. Robinson will face the Italian Andrea Rinaldo and – here’s where it gets interesting – the charismatic Frenchman Abdelatif Benazzi, who will be supported by, among others, Qais al-Dhalai, the president of Asia Rugby. Historically, Asia Rugby may be a minor player, but there are some very rich associations. Not least Qatar, which provided $800 million to host the first four finals of the Nations Championship. Robinson says himself that the All Blacks want to “remain open” to the possibility of playing in the Middle East.
However, he is less enthusiastic about the idea of France taking over the Rugby World Cup. It’s pretty much the only country in the world where club sports are thriving, and authorities there have their own ideas about how the sport should develop. Among other things, they are the only large country that completely rejects the new law for red card processes.
They argue that the spectacle is more important than the safety of the players. Robinson says the two sides fundamentally disagree on this. “There is absolutely no change to the way you would sanction a player for the exact same event,” he says. “We believe it is time to modernize the game in this area. There is no doubt that the threshold for red cards has changed significantly. There are simply many more unintentional and random events that lead to red cards. We need to ensure that the welfare and safety of the players is fully respected, which is what is envisaged in this proposal, but that the enjoyment of the fans is also taken into account.”
For Robinson, both the new procedural law and the new Nations Championship are part of a series of solutions to the same problem. “We need to embrace the participants, the players and the fans and put them at the heart of the action, and that means making the game more accessible, more inclusive and safer,” he says. “Fans want faster games with shorter playing times, fewer lengthy interventions and simpler rules.”
Robinson sees the Nations Championship as an opportunity for the sport to reinvent itself. “This is a competition where you have to win every game because you want to get to the final, and so suddenly a completely different story emerges around the competition. It will lead to new ways in which fans follow the sport and the players.” He also says: “It could potentially be used as an incubator for innovation around the rules of the game.”
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At the same time, the All Blacks are also reviving what Robinson called the “old school” tour. They plan to play three Test series against South Africa in 2026, including five tour games against provincial teams. “Again, it’s driven by the fans,” he says, “people said, ‘This is something we want.'”
If you listen to him, there’s a lot of talk about what the fans might want, less about what the players might need. “We just have to be braver to take advantage of these opportunities as a sport,” he says. “And that is why the upcoming vote on the future leadership of world rugby is so incredibly important. We see this as an opportunity for the sport to take further steps forward and become more progressive.”
