Tue 9 Apr 2024
 
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The long-held dream of a competition to declare the best rugby union club side in the world has moved a significant step closer with a proposal drawn up between European Professional Club Rugby (EPCR) and Super Rugby Pacific.
A World Club Cup to be played in June 2028 is the aim, with that season’s Champions Cup knockout rounds replaced by a 16-team global tournament over four weeks.
It is a format first aired four years ago but a key development occurred last November when an EPCR clubs conference held in Toulouse saw the powerful French clubs push hard for the new competition to go ahead.
The Top 14, the Premiership, and the United Rugby Championship are understood to have agreed to move their domestic finals in 2028 back into May, to leave the way clear for the World Club Cup.
This is a major concession by the French in particular, who value their Top 14 highly, and usually play its final rounds much deeper into the summer. This in turn indicates a French broadcaster has backed the World Club Cup plan.
In a separate development, EPCR are planning to launch a women’s European Champions Cup in 2026, comprising four teams as a more modest affair in its initial stages.
Sixteen teams would participate across four weeks in June 2028, and again in 2032, and while the format and venues are still to be decided, the first edition of the World Club Cup is currently thought likelier to be held in one country in Europe, as opposed to clubs having home ties at their own stadiums.
The 16 teams would comprise that season’s eight qualifiers out of the Champions Cup pool stage and the top six teams from Super Rugby Pacific.
The remaining two sides will come from Japan’s Rugby League One (JRLO), although a team from the USA has been speculated about in the past. The remaining clubs from the Champions Cup pools would drop down to what has been referred to in talks as a “Super Challenge Cup”.
The four-week window points to a straightforward knockout competition. This would mean teams potentially travelling halfway round the world for one match, so it remains to be seen if a different format would address that problem.
Based on the standings of the three contributing competitions at the time of writing, a World Club Cup round of 16 could look like this:
Unfortunately the current Super Rugby Pacific standings would rule out some extra diversity in the form of the seventh-placed Fijian Drua and ninth-placed Moana Pasifika, but they have time to make up that ground. The top two teams in the Japan Rugby League one (JRLO) are currently Saitama Panasonic Wild Knights and Toshiba Brave Lupus Tokyo, who have world stars including Australia wing Marika Koroibete and New Zealand fly-half Richie Mo’unga on their books.
One of the big stumbling blocks has been finding a date in the year when the teams from both hemispheres would be at their strongest. The painstaking, slow-moving harmonisation of the global rugby calendar has brought the idea closer.
Plans for a match between the champions of north and south go back almost as far as the inception of the European Cup in 1995.
In February 1997, the all-conquering Auckland Blues showed that playing in pre-season was no impediment to performance, as Graham Henry’s Super 12 champions won a friendly with the newly crowned European Cup holders Brive, 47-11 in France.
In February 2002, the BBC were on standby to televise European champs Leicester Tigers against the then Super 12 champions ACT Brumbies, but the Super Rugby draw prevented it.
In 2013, Mourad Boudjellal, the ambitious chairman-benefactor of European champions Toulon, attempted a world club challenge with Super Rugby winners, the Chiefs, but the Waikato- based New Zealanders ruled it out when they couldn’t guarantee bringing their strongest squad.
All the way through, the exciting thought has been the likes of All Blacks ace Aaron Smith up against French great Antoine Dupont in their club colours – and the presence of Smuth and a load of stars in the high-paying Japanese league explains the likely JRLO involvement.
You might think that would be sufficient to create a standalone event – but the rugby calendar remains so congested that the plan doing the rounds is to trample all over the existing Champions Cup for one year out of every four.
And while the Champions Cup has many fans, and there are four scintillating quarter-finals in store this weekend, it does not make loads of cash for the competing clubs. i understands Investec’s current sponsorship is worth around £7m a year, compared with £5m a year from Heineken way back in 2002.
The distribution of revenue will be a major debating point, with historically successful clubs such as Leicester, Munster and Crusaders maybe keen on a cut even if they are not taking part.
The other main wrangle has been control and rugby politics.
Anything with a “world” element to it can raise questions over who is entitled to run an event bearing that adjective.
World Rugby proposed a format for a world club competition through then vice-chairman Bernard Laporte in 2020.
But the three main club leagues in Europe and South Africa – the Premiership, Top 14 and URC – speak through EPCR, who run the Investec Champions Cup and EPCR Challenge Cup.
And EPCR quickly hit back with the version that still appears the likeliest to get off the ground, if enough clubs across the world are in favour, and no other party raises a problem.
The biggest country not directly represented might be Argentina, but their players have been scattered round the world since the Jaguares Super Rugby team was disbanded in 2022.
EPCR have plans to start modestly with a European tournament that would arrive 31 years after the men’s version began, in 2026.
Four teams would contest the inaugural event: the winners of Premiership Women’s Rugby in England; the Elite 1 Feminine in France; the Celtic Challenge that has clubs from Scotland, Ireland and Wales; and the Latin Cup with teams from Italy and Spain.
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