by Modern rugby union celebrated its 30th anniversary last month. It was in the fall of 1994 that Louis Luyt, president of the South African Rugby Union, announced that rugby would become professional 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 talked about in hushed tones. 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 the next August, but once Luyt had opened the box he was no longer possible to close it.
Thirty years is not the time. Rugby is both so old that no one knows exactly when it was first played, and so young that he’s still figuring out what he wants to be when he 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 has been making the rounds this week, shuttling between interviews and meetings ahead of the World Rugby Council meeting in Dublin on November 14. when he and the other powers that be debate the game’s best next steps.
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You’ll be able to see some of what they have in mind on the pitch this weekend. The international matches, England v New Zealand and Scotland v Fiji, are the first of the final autumn tests. In 2026, they are set to be replaced by a biennial Nations Championship, a competition of 12 teams in two conferences that will head to a final between the best teams from the northern and southern hemispheres. The tests will also include the use of the new red card law, meaning players sent off can be replaced after 20 minutes in some cases. Robinson is a key supporter of both developments and is keen for them to become permanent.
That’s why he wants to see former Australian flanker Brett Robinson win the race to replace Bill Beaumont as president of World Rugby. Robinson takes on Italian Andrea Rinaldo and, this is where things get interesting, the charismatic Frenchman Abdelatif Benazzi, who enjoys the support of Qais al-Dhalai, president of Asia Rugby, among others. Asia Rugby may be a minor player historically, but it includes some very wealthy federations. Notably Qatar, which offered $800 million to host the first final of the Four Nations Championship. Robinson himself says the All Blacks want to “keep an open mind” to the possibility of playing in the Middle East.
But he is less favorable to the idea of France taking over the management of World Rugby. It’s just about the only country in the world where the club game is thriving, and the authorities there have their own ideas about how the sport should develop. Among other things, they are the only major country to completely reject the new red card law.
They argue that this puts spectacle ahead of player safety. Robinson says the two sides fundamentally disagree on this point. “There is absolutely no change in how you would sanction a player within the exact same event,” he says. “We believe the time has come for the game to modernize in this area. There is no doubt that the threshold for red cards has changed significantly. There are simply many more unintentional and accidental events that lead to red cards. We need to ensure that the welfare and safety of the players is absolutely preserved, which is the case in this proposal, but that the enjoyment of the fans is also taken into account.
For Robinson, the new trial law and the new Nations Championship are part of a package of solutions to the same problem. “We need to listen to participants, players and fans, and put them at the center of things, which means making the game more accessible, more inclusive and safer,” he says. “Fans want faster matches, with shorter durations, fewer lengthy interventions and simpler rules.”
Robinson sees the Nations Championship as an opportunity for the sport to reinvent itself. “It’s a competition where you have to win every match because you want to get to a final, so all of a sudden it creates a completely different narrative around your competition. It’s going to create new opportunities in the way that the fans follow the sport and players He also says “it could potentially be used as an incubator for innovation around the laws of the game.”
At the same time, the All Blacks are also relaunching what Robinson calls the “old school” tour. They plan to play a three-Test series against South Africa in 2026, including five tour matches against provincial teams. “Again, it was the fans who started this project,” he says, “people said, ‘This is something we want.'”
Listening to him, there’s a lot of talk about what fans might want, less about what players might need. “We just need to be bolder and seize these opportunities as a sport,” he says. “And that’s why the upcoming vote on the future direction 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.
