Peter Burke
The World Rugby council voted to expand the tournament from 20 to 24 teams for the 2027 Rugby World Cup. 2027 will be the first expanded tournament since 1999 and means four additional slots with added countries or geographical regions coming into into play. Asia will have 2 teams with Japan already qualified one more will come from Asia 1. Europe will have 4 subsections – Europe 1, 2 ,3, and 4 repectively.
There will be changes made to North America and South America and Oceania, as they will now play for the Pacific Nations Cup (PNC), so what we will have is three from Samoa, Tonga, Canada and the USA will qualify as PNC 1, PNC 2 and PNC 3. Fiji and Japan have already qualified.
So looking at who might join the pre-qualified twelve at Rugby World Cup 2027? From Asia you’d put your house on Hong Kong to qualify over South Korea. From Europe it is Romania, Portugal, Spain and Georgia. Namibia you’d fancy from the Africa 1 and the three Pacific Nations Cup sides are likely to be Samoa, Tonga, and the USA with Uruguay qualifying as South America 1.
So the 12 Teams already qualified for RWC 2027 are:
- South Africa
- Japan
- England
- France
- Ireland
- Italy
- Scotland
- Wales
- Australia
- Fiji
- New Zealand
- Argentina
The other 12 slots to be filled will likely be Hong Kong, Georgia, Portugal, Spain ( If they don’t mess it up again), Romania, Namibia, Samoa, Tonga, USA and Uruguay. The last remaining places to be filled by two of Holland, Canada, Brazil and Kenya.
Bill Beaumont has said he wants to expand the game which is an admirable ambition to have but in RWC 2027 I can see records broken for all the wrong reasons, for example New Zealand v Hong Kong will be a cracker of a game (can you detect the sarcasm). We will see more and more teams being hammered 150-0 probably so how is that expanding the game? Surely this will just put those supporters off watching. Maybe I’m wrong but we shall see
The RWC 2027 in Australia will kick off on October 1st with the final being played on November 13th.