Alan Gilpin is chief executive of World Rugby. He spent nine years at IMG negotiating the commercial rights to the 2003, 2007 and 2011 Rugby World Cups. So when he says next year’s tournament in Australia brings him full circle, he means it literally: he’s selling the same tournament from the other side of the table.
The men’s quadrennial World Cup brings in around 85 to 90 per cent of World Rugby’s total income.
And he’s set himself a big number. World Rugby’s plan targets a surplus of more than a billion dollars from the 2031 World Cup in America, in a market where it can’t make FIFA’s demands of NFL owners and where, as he admits, putting on an event is far more expensive.
But the most striking thing is how candid he is about his own sport. Rugby’s biggest problem, he says, is self-inflicted: “we’re competing amongst ourselves.”
We talk about FIFA, R360 and LIV, private equity, the women’s Lions, what the streamers want, and whether sevens can ever pay its way.
Chapters
00:00 Football, North America and everything else
01:50 What rugby learned from FIFA’s World Cup summer in the US
04:30 Hiring FIFA’s people and the host-city process
05:40 Narrow NFL pitches and the venue shortlist
07:00 Why rugby can’t demand commercially clean venues
08:50 Margin over revenue, and 68,000 in Baltimore
10:00 The NFL owners and “should the NFL buy rugby?”
11:00 Why the US: the Japan 2019 precedent
12:00 France 2023’s losses and the end of the outsourced hosting model
16:20 A £1bn tournament: six revenue streams, one dependency
18:40 The federated model: who gets the money
23:30 Private equity, Prem Rugby and institutional capital
28:00 “We’re competing amongst ourselves”: rugby’s fragmentation problem
30:00 R360, LIV Golf and “disrupt from within”
31:20 The player welfare pitch and the national-team moat
35:00 Player wages and the professional women’s game
38:40 Same or different? The women’s British and Irish Lions
43:00 Streamers, eventisation and rugby’s product suite
48:00 RugbyPass, digital numbers and the wrong metrics
49:50 Clips, grazing and going the wrong way up the funnel
52:00 Sevens, T20 and the Olympic effect
57:30 What’s next: the shape of the game and the road to 2031
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