The first Women’s Rugby World Cup ran on grit, goodwill, vodka and raffle tickets. Back in 1991, the men who were in charge of the sport did not just refuse to sanction the new women’s competition, they made legal threats against the four organisers, who had to design their own team and tournament logos to avoid a copyright lawsuit.
The women approached more than 600 businesses for support, but could not persuade one to sign on so the 12 teams had to cover the cost of their own transport, food and accommodation. The Russian team did it by trading the booze they had brought over with them.
Sport, and society, has changed so much since the first tournament that the 10th, which begins when England play the USA at the Stadium of Light on Friday night, feels almost unrecognisable from the first. The opening match is a reprise of the first final, when the USA beat England 19-6 in front of a crowd of 3,000 at Cardiff Arms Park.
By the fifth final, England v New Zealand in Edmonton in 2006, the crowd had doubled to 6,000. By the sixth, which was the last to be held in England, it had doubled again, with 13,000 coming to watch England lose to New Zealand at the Stoop. This year’s match will be at Twickenham, in front of a full house of 82,000.
The life of the World Cup can be counted in a few years, but its growth has to be measured in hundreds, thousands and millions. It feels like proof of progress. It is one little corner of the world where things really are getting better. In the space of a generation the sport has become more equitable, open-minded and inclusive, its leaders more supportive and the society around it open to the possibility that there are myriad ways to be a woman.
Rugby resonates. In an era when social media use is fuelling an epidemic of body anxiety among girls, rugby’s oldest principle, that all shapes, sizes and styles are needed on a team, is newly important. The USA’s Ilona Maher’s body-positivity social media content has made her the biggest star in the sport.
“Take up space,” Maher tells her eight million followers. “Pitch it faster, run harder, put another plate on the bar and never tone it down.”
Her success is the best illustration of how the women are outperforming the men. Maher and her teammates have attracted the one thing all sports want, a newer, younger audience. When she joined Bristol Bears the number of women and girls buying tickets increased by a quarter and the number of people under 35 buying tickets increased by two-thirds, the average attendance doubled and their social media following spiralled by more than 3,000%. They became the biggest women’s team on Instagram.
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World Rugby’s research shows that 49% of the fans of women’s rugby have discovered the sport in the past two years and that as well as being younger, and more likely to have children, than fans of the men’s game they are also more likely to try playing it themselves.
More than 40% of them do not support a club team and only 15% cited an existing personal or cultural connection to women’s rugby as a reason for their interest. They are more likely to be drawn in by seeing the clips or matches on streaming services, by the players sharing their own stories on social media and the reciprocal link between brands they love and the sponsored athletes they admire.
It is the women who are going to provide the game’s growth over the next decade. World Rugby used to shun this competition, but now it is at the front and centre of its global development strategy. The organisers have already sold 375,000 tickets, more than double the number who attended the last tournament in New Zealand three years ago.
More than 500 journalists are accredited to attend, which is five times the number they had then. England’s women, who once funded their run to the final in 1991 by flogging raffle tickets to family and friends, have signed sponsorship deals with Clinique and Mattel, who have launched a new line of Barbie-branded Red Roses clothing.
Twenty-four years ago, the teams were bunking down together anywhere they could find a bed. The England team had to share the floor of a conference room the night before their semi-final when it turned out their hotel rooms had been double-booked. Today, World Rugby is paying for the teams with the furthest to travel to fly in business class. Where the women used to play in borrowed kit, now they have their own individual training bases and teams of specialist coaches.
They need to do more. The sport has accelerated so quickly that it is experiencing growing pains. The professionals are underpaid, while the gap between the top teams and everyone else is too big and has been exacerbated by professionalisation.
The competition director, Yvonne Nolan, says that these teams are “on various stages of their journey” and despite World Rugby providing the semi-pro teams with access to specialist coaching before the tournament there will be some very one-sided scorelines. The flip side of which is that the top teams, such as England, have not had a whole lot of experience of being under the pressure of close competition.
There is a risk, too, that professionalisation, and commercialisation, will have a deadening effect on the very things that make the game so appealing, in the same way many would say it has for the men’s version. But if there are one or two reasons to worry, there are a lot more to feel cheerful. Because something is happening here and if you are one of those people who does not know what it is, you are missing out.
