I debated a few topics for today's post. Baseball teams have made their tender/non-tender decisions with players who had option years, and Hot Stove season is now truly set to begin. But next week will be pretty much all about baseball with the awards being announced, so I'll take a little break from that today. There's also some Winter Olympic news--for both 2026 and 2030. Martina Navratilova suggested the WTA needs new leadership. And, of course, there's the mess at Michigan that keeps getting messier.
But I'm not gonna talk about any of those. Instead, I'll talk about the Rugby World Cup, which just came to an end in France. It was the last Rugby World Cup to feature just 20 teams. Right before the final, they confirmed the long-rumored expansion to 24 teams for the next edition in 2027, along with a few other changes. All of which are necessary and welcome.
The top three teams in each pool automatically qualify for the next Rugby World Cup, which means 12 spots are already accounted for immediately after the previous tournament ends! Granted, that guarantees most (all?) of the top nations will be in the tournament without having to worry about qualifying. But making all of the non-qualified teams compete for just eight spots definitely made it unnecessarily tough. By expanding that to 12 teams, they aren't just opening it up for increased representation, they're making it so that four good teams don't miss out.
There have been suggestions that the expansion to 24 is because the United States didn't qualify for this year's tournament. Did that have something to do with it? Perhaps. Was it the only reason? Of course not! It's more because it was just time. The Rugby World Cup hadn't expanded since going from 16 in 1995 to 20 in 1999. It took them 28 years to add four more teams!
Ensuring global representation isn't an issue, either. The 12 countries that automatically qualified based on their finish this year represent all five regions (the Americas count as one, and, in fact, both the U.S. & Canada didn't qualify so there weren't even any North American teams in France). And they can easily set it up where the four extra teams come from a combination of directly through continental qualifying and/or through the final qualification tournament.
Then there's the schedule. This year's tournament lasted seven weeks! They played 48 games in 49 days. World Rugby has acknowledged that's entirely too long. Adding four teams will actually reduce the length of the tournament by a week while simultaneously increasing the total number of games.
A shorter tournament is an absolute necessity! One of the reasons the FIFA World Cup is so popular is because the tournament only lasts just over a month. The Rugby World Cup is too drawn out with too many off days between games. It's enough to make even the most hard-core fans lose interest, let alone fans in places like the U.S. (where getting people to care was already gonna be a challenge without them in the tournament). And they need American fans to care heading into 2031, when they'll be trying to fill NFL stadiums during football season.
One of the reasons the tournament lasted so long was because group play took forever! Four groups of five meant everybody was playing four games. However, the odd number also meant that one team in each group had to have a bye on each matchday, which meant a long gap between games. There was also a minimum number of off days teams were required to have between games, so they all got pretty much an entire week off. The result was a month-long group stage!
They haven't decided exactly what the new format will be, but let's, for argument's sake, say they do six groups of four, which is the most logical route. I think that minimum number of days between games is five, so it's easy enough to play both games in a group, give them their five days off while each of the other groups play, then they go again. And, since it's an even number of teams, no byes are necessary. They all play every sixth day. And that takes only 18 days to complete (19 if they have the opening game as a standalone event).
Going to six groups of four would also necessitate the addition of a round of 16, which isn't a bad thing, either. Under the old format, they went right from group play to the quarterfinals, which resulted in some pretty good teams being eliminated before the knockout stage. That would be far less likely this way, and it wouldn't increase the number of games a team has to play, either. They'd simply be replacing the fourth group game with a fourth knockout game, but it would still be seven total for the two finalists. (And they could easily adjust the automatic qualifying for the next edition by increasing it from 12 teams to the 16 that reach the knockout round.)
Another benefit of six groups of four is that it'll create a more balanced tournament. With only four groups, there was really no way to avoid top teams facing each other in group play. But they also seeded it based on the results of the previous tournament, with the draw taking place three years ahead of time. As a result, there were three top-five teams in Pool B (#1 Ireland, #2 South Africa, #5 Scotland), guaranteeing one wouldn't make the quarterfinals. Meanwhile, #7 Fiji was the highest-ranked team in Pool C.
Not only that, but the automatic qualifiers were seeded 1-12, regardless of their ranking. That's not really much of an issue. But what it essentially guaranteed was that the eight nations that had to go through qualifying had absolutely no chance! Sure, they'd play each other. But their reward for qualifying was getting their butts kicked by at least two of the world powers! Playing them would be cool, but that's about the extent of the benefit.
For 2027, the draw won't be made until much closer to the start of the tournament. That, along with spreading the teams across six groups rather than four should even things out a little. And, even though there will be four additional teams, the lower-ranked nations will actually go in thinking they have a chance. Only playing three group games, not four, and the addition of a round of 16 suddenly make advancing to the knockout round attainable. THAT's how you grow the game. Not having them get slaughtered by New Zealand or South Africa or England or Australia.
So, I see nothing but positives in World Rugby's decision to increase the Rugby World Cup field to 24 teams in 2027. Frankly, it's long overdue. The tournament in France was great. The tournament four years from now in Australia should be even better. Because those four additional teams should make the event more competitive, not less.
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