Key takeaways
-Rugby’s growth depends on meeting modern fans with fast, relevant, and accessible digital-first content experiences.
-Short-form content, social distribution, and platform-native formats are now central to how new audiences discover and engage with rugby.
-AI-powered content creation tech gives rights holders the scale, speed, and personalization needed to compete in a crowded global sports landscape.
Is rugby having its come-to-Jesus moment? It depends on who you ask.
In the last year, the rugby community has been preoccupied with R360, a proposed global league aiming to revolutionize the sport. The new league, which plans to launch in October 2026, is set to include eight men's teams and four women's teams that will compete in “grand prix” style events around the world.
According to reports, around 200 players have already signed pre-contracts with R360. But not everybody is thrilled about the initiative. In early October, the biggest rugby unions in the world joined forces to fight the rebel league, announcing that players who join R360 will be ineligible for international selection, essentially ruling them out of the 2027 World Cup in Australia.
In a sport geared towards international competition in general, and the World Cup in particular, this could be a kiss of death. Ironically, the imbalance between club and international play is exactly what the people behind the R360 are trying to fix. “Clubs are being propped up by the international game,” said England's 2003 World Cup winner, Mike Tindall, one of the founders of R360, “and are feeling the strain.”
The cost of the status quo
The strain rugby clubs are feeling stands at the heart of a new report by strategy consultancy Oliver & Ohlbaum. The sport's potential, notes the report, is huge: there are around 40 million highly engaged rugby fans across the top 10 markets in the world, the men’s World Cup regularly attracts an audience of over 200 million people, and the game generates $2.3 billion in annual revenue. Yet this doesn't translate to a year-round product:
– International rugby brings in more revenue from 67 matches a year than club rugby from over 700 games a year in the top markets.
-Almost all the top clubs are running at annual operating losses; in 2023/24, the combined losses across England’s PREM Rugby and France’s Top 14 totaled $100 million.
– Club rugby tends to attract relatively small TV audiences. In the UK, for example, average free-to-air (FTA) audiences fell by 57% between the 2018/19 and 2024/25 seasons.
“Rugby just isn’t moving fast enough,” said Mark Oliver, Chairman and Co-founder of Oliver & Ohlbaum. “The fundamental issue is the current system isn’t working, with the game running at a loss globally, outside the men’s World Cup. Rugby stakeholders have spent too much time focusing on trying to eke out incremental commercial returns without doing enough to engage fans and followers more regularly and meaningfully.”
Engagement as a growth strategy
One stakeholder that is prioritizing fan engagement is Six Nations Rugby. The biggest annual international competition regularly attracts TV audiences in excess of 5 million per match in the UK and France, but is constantly looking for ways to elevate the experience it offers through cutting-edge technology, data-driven insights, and fan-centric innovation.
Recently, Six Nations Rugby announced a new collaboration with French IT consultancy Capgemini, which will become its official digital transformation partner. Over the next five years, Capgemini plans to leverage generative AI innovations to help viewers better understand key match moments through enhanced data integration and enhance the viewing experience of fans.
The deal with Capgemini is the latest step in Six Nations’ revamp, which includes a new partnership with TikTok. As part of the partnership, the TikTok users will have access to a wealth of bespoke content, from match highlights and training clips to fan reactions and creator videos. “TikTok will play an important role in helping celebrate the game and its stars,” said Sarah Beattie, chief marketing officer at Six Nations Rugby, “as well as foster that incredible sense of community that rugby instinctively generates through compelling content.”
Showing up at digital scale
As rugby wrestles with reform and the push toward a more sustainable club ecosystem, the key lies in how consistently it can show up for fans. The sports that are thriving today aren’t just fixing their structures; they’re building year-round relevance by turning the moments actually happening on the pitch into short-form storytelling that gives fans what they’ve been missing: a steady, modern rhythm of engagement that matches how they consume everything else.
This is where technology becomes the difference-maker. AI-powered content platforms give rights holders a way to automatically package live action into multi-format clips for every market, app, and fan. When a sport can surface its best moments in real time, in the formats people already like, it stops relying on a handful of marquee events to carry the load. If rugby’s come-to-Jesus moment has arrived, this is the move that turns reflection into real momentum.
Actionable insights
-Audit your current video output and repackage key moments into short, platform-native clips optimized for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts.
-Build content workflows around speed and timeliness, and prioritize rapid publishing for social-first distribution during live events.
-Use AI tools to automate clipping, tagging, and distribution, so your team can scale output without increasing headcount.
