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Brett Robinson's first media briefing as new World Rugby chair

By Liam Heagney reporting from Dublin
Newly elected World Rugby chair Brett Robinson during his press conference at World Rugby House in Dublin on Thursday (Photo by Charles McQuillan/World Rugby via Getty Images)

Thursday was quite the life-changing day for Brett Robinson. The 54-year-old Australian woke up in Dublin as one of three candidates battling it out to succeed Bill Beaumont as the World Rugby chair.

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Come lunchtime he had beaten off the challenge of Abdelatif Benazzi of France and Italy’s Andrea Rinaldo to become the first administrator from the southern hemisphere to hold the administrative seat of global rugby power.

It was a joyous Marker Hotel victory, one celebrated with a few pints of the local brew before the initial fuss calmed and he made his way across to World Rugby HQ to host his first media briefing.

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The 20-min red card explained by referee Karl Dickson

Referee Karl Dickson explains the 20-min red card system that is in place during the Autumn Nations Series.

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The 20-min red card explained by referee Karl Dickson

Referee Karl Dickson explains the 20-min red card system that is in place during the Autumn Nations Series.

The former Wallabies international was joined by ex-England full-back Jonathan Webb, who was elected as vice-chair, and Word Rugby CEO Alan Gilpin for a session that spanned 18 questions over 40 minutes, a myriad of queries from in-person media – including RugbyPass – and others who tuned in from places such as Mexico. Here is the full transcript of how it all unfolded:

What are your emotions at this moment in time, what does it mean to you personally but also for the game as a whole?

Robinson: It’s a great privilege to be elected to the World Rugby chair. It’s a game I have been close to all my life and today, after being asked by colleagues to step forward, to be finally elected it’s a privilege and it’s just a really proud moment for me personally. I’d also like to recognise Bill Beaumont stepping down as chair after eight years leadership in the role and passing me the football literally. Also to the other candidates. Andrea and Abdul, Abdul and I played Test match rugby against each other, I played a Test against him in Ballymore, so we were combatives on the field. When I came over to play rugby in the UK he let me stay in his apartment in Biarritz so I got to know him well as a colleague, as a player and then obviously today. It was a really tight election, there were wonderful candidates, so to be successful is a great honour and a privilege.

I’m sure you have got things on your to-do list, can you walk us through what the next 30 to 60 days looks like for you?

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Robinson: Alan and I are going to catch up on Monday as we had discussed if I was successful coming into the role. I have been on the executive board for eight years now, so we have been on a journey together, we have made some big decisions around certain elements strategically and it’s important that we get together and map out the next three or four months as to how we reconnect. We reconnect with a new board, we reconnect with our members and we get to reset the next four years. There are going to be things that we reflect on that we are happy with, that is travelling as we would like. There might be some other things we want to elevate to be more important, and there might be some other things that we chose not to do, but it’s really important as the board chair I facilitate that connection with Alan and the team and also back with our members so that when we get to the middle of next year heading into the women’s World Cup we really are setting sail with what see to be the most important things for our game.

I read that you once said to the Australian media that when you were growing up, the well-being of everybody, of all people, was a priority for you and I am wondering on the side of welfare what that means for rugby?

Robinson: Well, Jonathan and I are both clinicians. Healthcare is at the heart of our personal purpose, so as ex-international players, we are passionate about the game but also to creating an environment where our players are safe. I myself am a concussion and research investigator with University of Queensland, Jonathan is directly involved as a clinician in everything to do with player safety and welfare. We love our game, we want it to be safe and will do all we can to make sure young boys and girls, mums and dads feel safe playing this great game because it has so much more to offer. This game is a beautiful game, a global game and it’s something we want to make sure has a long, long future.

How big a threat to rugby is the financial situation and are player salaries too high?

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Robinson: The last six months I spent some time talking to all of our members, engaging, listening and understanding some of the major challenges and that led to the heart of the four or five major commitments that I made in my statement to the members which I was elected by. I guess the number one issue I saw us facing, not necessarily within World Rugby, but within the world of rugby is the financial sustainability of our member unions. As a board we recognise this and facilitate it. Probably about two months ago a working ground came together here in Dublin where we brought the major union CEOs together to really understand collectively what were the revenue and cost leaders that we needed to stare into to deal with those economic challenges. One of those is wage inflation and player salaries.

Gilpin: We recognise that it is a challenge for the game as it is in many sports. That’s not just about wage inflation, that’s not just about the costs that the employers, whether they are clubs, leagues, unions face in that part of the game, but actually maybe rugby has not done a good enough job of coming together and finding efficiencies, coming together and working to grow revenues together. We are fragmented in many respects in what we do and a big part of what has been discussed in the months leading up to Brett’s election has been we can do a lot more together. We can be more successful if we approach some of those cost management challenges, some of those revenue generation opportunities together as a sport. That was a feature of the discussions at our World Rugby council meeting. We know that is an opportunity. Now it’s about building up the opportunity and bringing rugby stakeholders together and collaboration more, for sure.

Brett Robinson World Rugby
Brett Robinson (left) with Alan Gilpin (right) and Jonathan Webb at World Rugby House (Photo by McQuillan/World Rugby via Getty Images)

In terms of law trials, some more were announced today. How close are we to just perfecting rugby’s law book or get it to a stage where we are not having trials?

Robinson: I am really optimistic about  the significant engagement our game has had in trying to deal directly with the shape of the game. The World Cup in France last year was wonderful but there were thing  coming out of it that were frustrating all of us. With Alan and the team in March this year we called together all of World Rugby’s major stakeholders to discuss some feedback we had from fan data that said fans were getting tired of senseless kicking. They wanted teams to be promoted to run the rugby ball and they wanted to make sure the stoppages in the game were being managed. We set up collectively a big bunch of working groups to deal with many of those issues and we came up with a bunch of trials that we have played with through The Rugby Championship, through the July window and now the Autumn Series which are dealing broadly with some of those frustrations. We have increased ball in play time by over three minutes by introducing some of those changes. There is still some things that are frustrating us, but that is a massive improvement in terms of that issue, the way that we are managing the senseless kicking by caterpillar rucks use it calls, the way we have put pressure on the chasers from the Dupont kick to enable contestability around the kick which is fracturing the ball and we are seeing good counter attack and not balls being caught and then another caterpillar ruck being set up. We have looked to prevent attacking a half-back so that we can get the ball in play. Lineouts that aren’t straight, if no one is jumping it’s just play on, let’s not have a scrum. So there are some wonderful things that we are doing that broadly if you talk to people in the market over the last six months the game is in a better place than it has ever been, but we have more to do absolutely.

Where are we with the 20-minute red card; and a few coaches in the last few weeks who are frustrated with the escorted kicking regulation crackdown, what is World Rugby’s why that is enforceable and needed to be cracked down upon?

Robinson: Today we had a discussion with all of the council members to say we wanted to delay the introduction of a global trial around the 20-minute red card, full red card and yellow card until we had some more data from the north. So we were asking for a vote today when we were only one week into the Autumn Series and we felt that was an unfair test of the question and we thought it was much better – and the southern hemisphere absolutely agreed with this by the way – to say we have had six years of data on the south, the north now needs to spend some time understanding this and broadly people are starting to understand how it can be a really powerful tool. But we are waiting until the end of the Six Nations to collate all those matches, look at the data. There is other data we can look at, we have got instrumented mouthguard data, other global related data to see what that all looks like. We all broadly felt that whilst we can still trail it and can learn from it, we might as well take the time because it is a contentious issue that is misunderstood by some. So it’s really worthwhile in doing that. Escorted kicking was a really good conversation because the game of rugby is about contests and free contest for possession but what we were seeing with escorting was with the box kicks predominately, players were being protected and there wasn’t an ability to contest for possession because platers were being shepherded basically. So what we thought we would do was put some pressure on those defensive teams to give free access to the attacking team to contest for the ball and I actually think it is wonderful. Because what we were seeing was we’d have a caterpillar ruck, we’d spent five minutes there, we’d put a kick in the air supported with escort runners, then we’d have a tackle and another caterpillar ruck and we’d kick it back again. What we have seen in the early days of this trial is people contesting for the ball in the air, often ball being fractured and some wonderful counter attack so it’s interesting, it’s worth exploring.

Gilpin: Some of the frustration with coaches you have heard, what we are learning all the time in this process is the introduction and the amount of time they have to prepare for some of these changes of interpretation of match officials or some law trials and some changes and that, linked to the question about fans, is something we have got to think through. In simpler times we used to have a one-year moratorium on any change before men’s Rugby World Cups but we are now in much more complex cycle because women’s World Cups have become an important part, the Olympic Games with sevens, so it’s a much more iterative process. That’s great and as Brett is explaining, there is some really good stuff that is evolving the game really positively, great. But we need a period of bedding in so the fans and coaches and everyone can work and understand what we have got. Part of that, which again was discussed at our council meeting today, is simply things like simplifying technology, helping fans actually understand in simple terms what we are trying to achieve. There is work to do in that space without maybe always being seen to be tinkering with the game.

Robinson: One of the great things I have seen in the last two weekends is the interaction with the referee and communicating to the whole stadium. That has been really special. Fans have been confused before, didn’t understand the process the referees were working through. Suddenly the whole stadium is stopping to listen to the technical work-through and the process to get to an outcome and the go, ‘Okay, that makes sense’. It’s been a wonderful development. I chair the selection of the referees and I spent three, four days in The Lensbury last week working with the referees on these very issues. World Rugby has invested more heavily into refereeing and match officials in the last three or four years, the coaching and the support of them, but also the way we interact with coaches. Coming into the Autumn Series, I was on a Zoom call with all the major coaches around the world to discuss the key issues of focus coming into the series, take on board that feedback and to come into the series not being blindsided. So communicate, connect, prepare them so that they know what is coming. To Alan’s point the last thing coaches want is something to change overnight.

Is there enough being done for tier-two nations and what can you do better in the future?

Robinson: Certainly in my part of the world, Brisbane in Australia, we are very close to the Pacific Islands and in my time, World Rugby with New Zealand and Rugby Australia have done incredible things in developing and supporting the Pacific Islands through competition, through referees, the women’s game, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and now through the Drua and Moana Pasifika. World Rugby have invested heavily in the supporting infrastructure which ultimately means those teams are more competitive. We have done the same in Argentina over the years as well, we have supported Argentinian rugby and the Jaguares and only recently we invested heavily in the Pacific Nations championship which was a wonderful competition. It was a great final between Fiji and Japan in Tokyo. For me, it’s a great signal to the investment we are making. The Pacific Nations championship leads nicely into the Nations Championship which is this wonderful competition that we are not far from SANZAAR and Six Nations landing upon. But we as World Rugby are following hard with a second tier competition that enables us to have 24 teams competitive for Rugby World Cup in Australia in 2027.

It’s said rugby needs a strong Australia, can you speak about the important locally that you becoming World Rugby chair can have in the game there?

Robinson: One of the big points we wanted to me, Jonathan and I, is we are here to represent the interests of the global game so I just want to acknowledge when we spoke about coming together and potentially running together, it was about the impact we felt we could make on the global game and from my perspective by improving the global game, that has a direct impact on Australia. Now we have one of the most competitive football markets in the world and we are the canary in the coalmine in terms of change and dealing with that. But the things we have seen in Australia affect everywhere around the world. Certainly one of the great outcomes of the Wallabies knocking off Jonathan’s team last weekend [England] was the great energy it has given back to our sport. We have an incredible latency of support in Australia for the Wallabies and they want to believe and we have been through a really tough patch and this team have been through a tough patch where their confidence has been certainly low. But Joe (Schmidt) has been working so hard on rebuilding that confidence and culture. We have had some patchy performances this year, we have had 30 minutes, 40 minutes and then we have fallen away, but for the team to have turned up as they did on Saturday night and for Joe and the team to have half that moment is really powerful for what is coming for the game. And so next year the Lions and the tickets are already sold out, but that is going to make enormous interest around the tour, and then we have got a World Cup that is not far away. We, as World Rugby, will be launching our tickets not long after the Lions series is completed but for us, as World Rugby, it’s going to create even more interest in the competitiveness of Australia inside Australia in that tournament.

 

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Rugby has enjoyed a global explosion in recent years, what are the plans to continue expanding the game to usually non-rugby playing nations?

Robinson: It’s wonderful. The stats are close to nine million players and three million of those being women. That’s an incredible stat and as an Australian, when I talk to my rugby league counterparts, it’s a great stat I like to roll out against them. Our purpose as an organisation is to grow this great game and Alan and the team have worked really hard on that over many, many years. That is through being courageous enough to make decisions about where we do and don’t invest our efforts to maximise the opportunity for growth. Whether that be in the markets itself, in the women’s game, whether it be in the sevens product, it’s at the heart of the investment we make as a game. We are unashamedly here to support the growth of our game.

Webb: Our USA growth strategy is one of the key pillars of our belief we want to go into a market that is massively underrated in terms if rugby. It’s a huge population, they are sports nuts and so we know that growing there is going to benefit everyone and the stats, it is a challenge because you have to invest to be able to take over a market like that but we have a plan that is not going to take anything away from our members, but is hopefully then going to deliver back an enormous amount to our members at the same time as producing an epic World Cup in 2031 and who knows how many more avenues are going to explode out  of that venture.

Gilpin: It’s great to have a question from Mexico and Mexico is very much part of our thinking. Even in the conversations we are constantly having with Major League Rugby and the work we are doing with them, Mexico is part of that conversation. Obviously USA, Canada, the Americas as a whole, the opportunities. We are going to see Brazil in the women’s Rugby World Cup next year. There are huge opportunities where we talk a lot about markets like Spain… The challenge isn’t to seek out the opportunities, the challenge is to how best to attack those opportunities and one of the things that is really important and we have talked about it today with our council is that’s not about investing in growth markets at the expense of stability in the established traditional markets fir the sport, we have got to find the best balance we can between helping to continue to build stability in areas where the game is well established and invest in growth as, as Jonathan was saying, make sure we are finding a way that those two things come together and return for the sport as a whole. Rugby is not an easy sport to grow from a participation perspective, an audience perspective but we have got great opportunities and whether it is an incredible Olympic Games in Paris this year with the sevens being watched by more people than ever before, whether it is the World Cup we had last year again with new teams like Chile being a brilliant part of that, we are going to have expanded men’s and women’s World Cups in the next two editions. There are definitely more opportunities and the more opportunities we can create for teams to be part of those global competitions then the more we are going to drive invest and growth in the sport.

Incredible interest next year’s women’s World Cup record ticket sales, how important is the women’s game in driving the game forward as a whole?

Robinson: The investment World Rugby has made in the women’s game in the last few years, you sometimes forget where you have come from and how fast we have grown and what we have achieved. To go from the World Cup in Auckland post-pandemic which was wonderful and to have a sold out match between New Zealand and England was just wonderful. To see the growth of the sevens game; I mean in our market, the Australian women’s team are regarded as some of the best athletes in the country. Unfortunately they got knocked out of the Olympics to what has been a great outcome for World Rugby which was the Canadians and the US team being on the podium with the Kiwis which was fantastic for the growth of the game. And then next year is going to really be another significant for the women’s sport. Early indications about the initial ticket sales and the appetite, and the appetite from investors and sponsors, from sponsors that wouldn’t be traditional markets, it’s a really exciting thing for the game.

What is your message to South American rugby who missed out on two places on the executive board despite showing a lot of development in their market in recent years?

Robinson: Again, as a southern hemisphere domicile, World Rugby member, I am very, very close to South American and the important role that it plays. As a young rugby player having travelled and toured Argentina and South America and, in recent years, to have enabled them to come into the Championship and to now be top four or five in the world, they are a great rugby nation and we are absolutely ambitious about the opportunities to continue to grow the game in South America and to support them in every way as disappointing as it was for them today.

Treatment of injury slows down the game, are there any plans to speed up the game perhaps by moving players off the pitch for treatment like in football when it is safe to do so?

Robinson: It’s a complicated area because you are trying to protect the players and the safety and welfare of related matters and that is the primary desire, but referees certainly find it frustrating sometimes to adjudicate on. We definitely have had some discussions in our World Rugby team about working with our medics and our match officials as to how we deal with that… that maybe the next frontier about moving faster.

Webb: As Brett alluded to earlier, we have made some gains as to the speed at which the game is played. The last two years, the World Cup and the start of the Autumn Series, I have seen some of the best rugby matches I have ever seen with ball in play, skill levels really high, and then players actually looking after each other. It’s not many years ago when an injured player was completely disregarded and play carried on and the opposition regarded it as an opportunity and yet last Saturday it was the opposition player [Rob Valetini] saying we have got to stop the game, there is a player down here [Tom Curry], so that is a massive improvement in the mindset of rugby as a tough man’s game, that it’s all about machismo. That’s gone so now we are in a place where we can look carefully at making the game as exciting, as skilful and challenging. We are not trying to remove physicality, far from it. We have to accept it is a physical game but then just do everything possible to make sure what can be improved in terms of medical care and pitch side care is done. I think we are getting there.

World Rugby Brett Robinson
Newly elected World Rugby chair Brett Robinson is congratulated by Phil Waugh, Rugby Australia CEO, following the election (Photo by Charles McQuillan/World Rugby via Getty Images)

How do you plan to support growth nations in Africa?

Robinson: South Africa are one of the greatest rugby nations in the world and to watch that country’s evolution over the last 20 or 30 years has been phenomenal. Even to watch the way the game has been embraced by so many within the African continent. Ultimately World Rugby invests heavily in supporting unions that may not have the infrastructure that major unions do and whether that be through our rugby services team, through training and education, through match official development, whether it be through non-contact forms of the game, support around the women’s game, World Rugby is there to support emerging nations with core rugby infrastructure that other major unions don’t. There is a tremendous commitment to that as a game and the point about World Rugby and some of the discussions we have had in the last few days is the significant runway we have of revenue generation and ultimately create surpluses for us to give back to the game. So World Rugby is here to create revenues, to create surpluses that are ultimately for the growth of the game in support of all nations, including those that may not have the infrastructure of the major unions.

Gilpin: There was great news for Africa, Herbert Mensah elected to the executive board which adds some fantastic experience the board, a great addition. We have seen, particularly in sevens, African rugby really starting to come into our major tournaments so beyond South Africa being a great rugby nation, we are now seeing Kenya and others really embracing different forms of the game. We are going to see to see it definitely in the women’s game as it moves forward. Egypt have been admitted to full membership of World Rugby today, so Africa very much front of mind when we think about future growth markets and the development of the game. As Brett said, the more we can drive revenue generation, that comes back to working together as a sport globally then the more we can invest in all of those opportunities.

How important are competitions like WXV, the Pacific Nations Cup and potentially the Nations Cup in driving those standards where everybody moves towards having a more competitive World Cup?

Robinson: The key levels of high performance is about training and high performance support but ultimately it’s about quality of competition. One of the great things in our part of the world is we are only a two hour flight to New Zealand who are this world rugby mega centre of high performance and so Australia have been able to leverage off that, young boys and girls being able to play through their lives against that. The role World Rugby is playing now is to give all those nations to play meaningful competitions with certainty and these interim formats, the Pacific Nations championship leading into Nations Championship, the great investment we have put in WXV to enable us to get the establishment of a great competition, that allows us to build into World Cups but also into the future of cross boarder fixtures, creating revenues to make the women’s game self-sustainable. It’s all a part of this journey of investing to build to create self-sustaining competitions.

With the reimagining of the international calendar, is there enough rest time for players and what can we do to balance that?

Robinson: Again, Jonathan and I from our backgrounds are very passionate about player safety and all of that, and the ability to understand player load. What loads are appropriate and what aren’t. The instrumented mouth guard which we introduced not only does that for head contact but also other volumes of player load. So ultimately how many hours of contact a week are appropriate? How many matches are appropriate? It’s actually gathering the data to better understand it and help inform what we might do to say okay. And players need to rest, they need to rejuvenate, the need to rebuild and to have long careers, you need to be going through a cycle of that allowing it. The more information we have the more can provide environments where we can protect our players.

Gilpin: It’s worth adding to that, the focus quite rightly now is on player load. It’s not on necessarily a simplistic number of matches or number of minutes, it’s about understanding the contact load and the training load and then the match load that a player experiences across a certain period and travel and injury rest time and so on and actually understanding, which we are more and more but that might be different in the women’s game than it is in the men’s with different load thresholds. We had the rugby athletes commission that we have annually through International Rugby Players and our partnership with them last week in Dublin. What that means is that all the national platers associations across the professional game come together and discuss these issues with us and that’s a really meaningful discussion now about how across the whole game we start to have some real measure, some real consistency about the amount of time players need away from the game in consistent blocks but also the rest they can get during the playing season. So what you will see in the next two to four years is rugby having a real focus on player load.

Webb: The sophistication of the data that we are now accessing, it’s fair to say we are ahead of a number of other sports who are now looking to us to say, ‘Wow, they have got this data, we would like to learn more about it’. Rugby league, NFL. And then the ability to tailor and personalise head impacts which is a obviously major focus for us so that it is not just the size of the impact but the frequency. You are going to be able to drill down.. and we will end up with a very personalised plan for every single player to be able to map out and predict ahead how many games can he play. What the coaches hate is that player can’t play tomorrow but if they have got foresight that this player will be able to play for the next three games in the next six weeks then he can plan and he will be happy with that and for the player that will be the absolute best outcome.

We have heard for years about the need for a more coordinated global calendar but the big changes that are talked about seem to be moving at a glacial pace, so what are your priorities for a global calendar, what are the obstacles and what is the latest on the planning for the Nations Cup which is scheduled to start in 2026?   

Robinson: I’m really excited. There has been some frustration in the Nations Championship not getting up the last time but it was a monumental decision in October last year at the World Cup that finally after 30 years for us to agree on this meaningful annual calendar that we would play twice in every cycle. We, as World Rugby, we learned some lessons last time about what role we play in trying to get Six Nations and SANZAAR to come together, so we have stepped away to hand over them and say, crack on, get this sorted and they are getting it sorted and we are very keen to follow quite quickly as to what it might mean for us. It’s a wonderful thing, one of the most significant things in my time in rugby that we have been able to achieve and particularly for that next tier of nations, particularly for our World Cups when we have got 24 teams.

Gilpin: It’s rugby’s great challenge since the game turned professional. We are in a better place than ever. That doesn’t mean that the decisions that we are working with are perfect. Going back to player load, rest periods and all of those things. But what we can say is we did a huge amount of consultation, a huge amount of work in men’s XV to get to where we got to last year. We know in 2026 the Nations Cup will start, two divisions of 12. It will bring real meaning, real competition to the July and November internationals. That’s what fans wants, that’s what players want. That will drive commercial interest and therefore bring more revenues into the game. It’s a lot of hard work and in the years when that is not being played, and this is sometimes forgotten, the agreements that we have collectively reached guarantee more crossover, more fixtures between the division one and division two teams than ever existed before. So to go back to that point about opportunity for the teams that are currently outside the two big annual competitions, the Six Nations and The Rugby Championship. Again, we are going to learn a lot as we get into that in ’26, ’28 and ’30 but it’s going to happen. It might feel glacial – it feels glacial to me sometimes – but it’s happening. Just as importantly we have been working with Sally (Horrox) and the team in the background on what  a global calendar for the women’s game should look like and learn some lessons from the challenges we have created. So get ahead of that before there are other blocks that are immovable in the women’s game so we are very close to having the global competition and the regional competition understanding in the women’s game giving more opportunities for more nations to be part of that. You are seeing even with just two years of WXV increasing competitiveness in the women’s game and we will definitely see that in a brilliant women’s World Cup next year. And then you add sevens, we have just come off the back of a four-year cycle that culminated in an incredible sevens competition in the Olympic Games. We have got more nations playing sevens than ever before and more nations with their governments and other agencies investing in rugby because of sevens and its Olympic status than ever before. How do we balance all of those things? That’s going to be disproportionally important in the women’s game because with their smaller athlete pool at the top end, there are more players playing sevens and XVs. So we have got to be really careful and really thoughtful as we put these calendars together and what is going to work in the next three or four years will need adjustment as it moves forward. As challenging as some of those conversations are, and the Nations Cup conversations have been in the men’s XVs, we have got better collaboration across that whole stakeholder group. That’s not just national federations, that’s professional leagues, that’s player associations, player representation groups. We have got better understanding, better collaboration, better conversations across those stakeholders that rugby has ever had. Change in professional sport, in a complex sport, is challenging and slow. We look enviously at sports that are able to move quickly because they are single country leagues like the NFL or the NBA or they are sports that have got simpler governance structures. But we have got a lot of competition owners and different interested parties in our sport we have got to work with and that’s a reality. Rather than rue that as a challenge, we have just got to get the next opportunity.

How important is the player personality in rugby’s growth, allowing our big stars to be able to shine?

Robinson: It’s everything it. As I was told by my boys before I came over here, The Good, The Bad, The Rugby is this thing you have got to get on because that is all they listen to. The way that my children embrace and engage in content is very different to the way I do or my father does and I think that as we know from the magnificent US national team player Ilona Maher is a super star and my daughter was showing me, ‘Dad, this woman is on dancing with the stars in the US’ and she has become a rock star. So these people, personalities, different profiles, a diverse group of people is rugby and we want to promote it and bring them to light. And it is about the players, let’s not forget. This is a players game. We are here for the players and we were all once players and not good at it anymore but certainly for that period in our lives that we sought the fulfilment and joy of our game and we want to make sure that we never lose sight of that as administrators.

One thing you are really looking forward to getting stuck into?

Robinson: I am really looking forward to sitting down with Alan and mapping out the next six months. We have got some really good plans in place. There is an opportunity to improve. But the other thing I really want to do is unite the game. We have got differences of opinion, we have got some challenges and there will be some people who will be disappointed out of the election. It’s really important in my role that I bring the game together and we agree what shared success looks like and we pursue it together because as a game we know that they teams that are the most united are the most powerful – and I guess my role as chair is to facilitate that happening.

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Comments

8 Comments
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SteveD 18 days ago

"Now we have one of the most competitive football markets in the world and we are the canary in the coalmine in terms of change and dealing with that."


And there lies the rub. We don't care about your problems with Aussie Rules or Rugby League. If you're in the job just to save your union from competition by making our fantastic game more like one-dimensional boring league then all the rest of your promises are just BS. We'll be watching you like hawks to try and keep you in line, but - like Beaumont - you'll probably be able to push through whatever you like and the game will lose once again, but this time potentially terminally. I believe that your selection could be the worst decision WR have ever made.

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Mitch 16 days ago

He doesn't want to turn rugby union into rugby league. What he would like is to avoid having a rugby match take 106 minutes to complete like last year's World Cup final did.

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J Marc 26 days ago

Olympics were incredible : only seven tournament this year, anyone in Europe....

Speed the game, less replacement and player welfare...

Abdul is a friend and any french in WR council...

La vie est belle...

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Ed the Duck 26 days ago

Only Scottish rugby could fcuk it up like this…

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Ed the Duck 26 days ago

Only Scottish Rugby could fuck it up like this…

H
Hellhound 26 days ago

A new broom always sweeps clean. I don't know the man, I just hope he doesn't leave WR in the same mess as the Aussies rugby. If he is so good, why did he not save Australian rugby?


I have no confidence in any Aussie taking over at WR HQ. I don't know the man but now are forced to hope he doesn't screw up. We don't have a choice or say in the matter.


WR doesn't need an CEO, they need a board made up of several countries that makes the decisions.

S
SteveD 18 days ago

I should have read your excellent comment before launching my own protest. Dark days IMHO. 🤞 for rugby union's future.

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