Justin M. Fitzpatrick
Rugby’s TV footprint has a strange shape. Massive spikes at the top, then a long, flat line across much of the club season. The sport can still create events. It struggles to create routine.
What’s broken
1) Club rugby is too small, too stagnant, and too easy to ignore.
Club competitions typically attract small TV audiences and those audiences have largely been stagnant. The Premiership example is blunt: average free to air audiences down 57% and pay TV averages down 47% over the period cited.
2) Ticket price is a conversion lever
If the goal is to turn “I like rugby” into “I go”, pricing matters. High regular-season prices push fans into occasional behaviour, thin crowds, and quieter atmospheres. That hurts the matchday product and the broadcast product, which then makes conversion even harder.
France shows a more sustainable approach. The Top 14 keeps an obtainable entry point, with league ticketing advertising marquee games from €30 for semi finals and €35 for the final, and clubs commonly offering lower starting prices for regular matches. The result is simple: more regulars, better noise, better TV, better habit.
That is not messaging. It is a product people do not feel compelled to return to.
3) Rugby does not export well week to week.
For most competitions, non domestic media rights are minimal, typically 5% or less of total media income.
If the weekly product does not travel, stars do not travel either. The ceiling stays local.
4) The audience is ageing while competitors build under 35 habits.
The audience skews older, and broadcasters are increasingly chasing sports more attractive to the social media generation.
At the same time, rival sports are reforming faster with formats and initiatives designed to capture attention and expand globally.
5) The calendar dilutes the one thing TV needs: eventness.
Top nations effectively operate across 11 months, with fixtures almost every week.
When everything is on, almost nothing feels like an appointment.
What fixes it
Build a unified watch and highlights layer for club rugby.
If non domestic rights are 5% or less, rugby needs a distribution rethink, not another rights negotiation.
Create one front door. Create one weekly guide to what matters. Create a highlights ecosystem that is fast, consistent, and designed as an on ramp for younger audiences.
Convert volume rugby into appointment rugby.
Standardise kick off windows. Reduce dead weeks. Concentrate premium rounds that feel like finals, because finals are where attention and attendance naturally concentrate.
Protect stars and manufacture visibility.
Overload limits players’ ability to build a global profile and following.
If rugby wants conversion, it needs recognisable faces and repeatable stories, not just once every February or every four years.
The Stadium Is the Strategy
If rugby wants growth, it has to stop treating stadia as places you visit 12 to 15 times a year and start building them as places the community returns to 300 days a year.
Too much of rugby’s economics are trapped inside matchday. Matchday is volatile: form, weather, scheduling, broadcast picks, injury lists. You cannot build a modern sports business on 15 big days and wishful thinking in between, especially when most top clubs are loss making and losses are often underwritten by owners, unions, and in some markets local councils.
The clubs and leagues that are winning the next decade are doing something different. They treat the stadium as a community anchor and a real estate engine. A district that produces revenue and belonging whether the team is playing or not.
What modern stadium ownership actually means
Not just owning seats. Owning or controlling the destination.
Food and beverage that stands on its own. Retail people use even when they are not in team colours. Conference and events space. Concert ready infrastructure. Hotels. Public realm with plazas, parks, and community facilities that make the venue feel like the town square.
Because the stadium is not just where you sell tickets. It is where you build habits.
The upside in the real world
MLS is building the blueprint.
Inter Miami’s Miami Freedom Park is being positioned as a mixed use campus with over 1 million square feet of retail, dining, entertainment, and office space, a 25,000 seat stadium, and 750 hotel rooms, plus a major public park and community athletics facilities.
That is the pro team placed at the centre of a year round district.
Minnesota United’s Allianz Field area development has been planned to include a hotel, an office building, restaurants, open spaces, and community facilities. The intent is to turn stadium day into district life.
Other sports show the financial ceiling.
Atlanta Braves Holdings reported mixed use development revenue of $27m in Q3 2025, up 56% year on year.
The Battery Atlanta is widely cited as a model that franchises study because it creates year round footfall and off field revenue that stabilises the organisation regardless of season performance.
Rugby’s warning sign
Twickenham has been cited as unused for 340 days a year, and compared with venues like Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and Wembley hosting 30 to 32 non football events annually.
Whatever you think of the politics, the business logic is clean. If your stadium is dormant, your growth is capped.
Why this matters beyond money
Rugby’s advantage has always been community. Belonging, shared codes, multi generational identity. But too many pro clubs still operate like pop up shops. Turn up, consume, leave.
A modern precinct flips that.
- Fans do not just attend. They belong.
- The club becomes a platform for weddings, coffees, clinics, business breakfasts, school finals, charity nights, watch parties.
- The stadium becomes a third place where the community naturally gathers.
That belonging is not soft. It is what keeps people paying when the table looks ugly. It is what turns a casual fan into a fan of my club fan.
The Treadmill Must End
Rugby is trying to run two different businesses, international and club, on one overloaded body.
International rugby generates more revenue from about 67 matches a year than the club game does from 700 plus matches across senior nations.
Revenue per match reinforces the point. Internationals are around $11.7m per match, while major club leagues sit roughly in the $1.2m to $2.3m range.
And the cost is not just fatigue. It is marketability. Workload rises while wages fall behind other sports.
You cannot win a modern attention war with an 11 month grind and a scattered product.
A Practical Conversion Plan
If rugby wants to convert interest into habit, three moves matter more than slogans:
- Make rugby findable. Build a global watch and highlights layer that makes discoverability a priority.
- Make weeks matter. Build fewer, louder rounds and a calendar that concentrates meaning instead of diluting it across 11 months.
- Build year round engines. Invest in stadium precincts that generate revenue and belonging beyond matchday so clubs are not permanently living on financial life support.
Hopeful close
Rugby already owns the peaks. Six Nations scale and World Cup reach prove the appetite is real.
The next decade is about building what happens in between. A weekly product people can find. A calendar that creates moments that matter. Club homes that function as real community centres.
Rugby does not need rescuing. It needs designing so the people who already like it have a reason to come back next week.
Thought provoking piece Justin.
I’m guessing this is primarily aimed at the USA market and its preparation for the Rugby World Cup.
However, many issues are synonymous across all markets. The decline in TV viewing in England is understandable, too many pay per view platforms dilute the offering and raises the overall cost of ownership, whilst free to air is often poorly scheduled and lacks awareness to audiences that are not already die hard rugby fans. Hopefully, the deal the Rfu have struck with ITV helps to address both concerns . Equally, each market needs a pipeline of players to feed into the elite game again visibility re TV is important but so to is the opportunity to to play the game itself. Too often in the UK and especially in England we are loosing huge amounts of potential players and supporters due to the lack of state schools playing the game. Also many county rfc’s do not look at state schools and deprived areas when picking county squads. There seems to be a lack of willingness to look at value add that such players could benefit from given good coaching to match with natural ability. Everything is aligned to public schools and specialist state schools who players have had the advantage of years of top level coaching.