For sevens the bells toll

IRFU tossing the men’s rugby sevens program out the window tolls alarm bells for the short-form game amidst Olympic presence.

“The timing of the entry to the Olympic Games allows us to fully establish the best possible player pathways to incorporate Rugby Sevens. The game could have a very positive effect on overall participation, both in amateur and the elite levels of the game…”

This was what Eddie Wigglesworth, Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) Director of Rugby, had to say in 2009, when the International Rugby Board (IRB) made the historic decision to include Rugby Sevens in the Olympic programme come 2016. Sevens had never been a strong suit for Ireland in rugby, but their jubilation did not fall short of matching the powerhouses of the game. Olympics were, after all, the biggest stage of the sporting world and Sevens seemed to be the sole gateway for rugby to be part of the play.

14 years and three Olympic rugby sevens events later, IRFU made the shock decision to axe men’s short-form program. While women’s program will continue to be supported as a pathway to the 15-a-side rugby and a key component to grow the game, Ireland will no longer field a men’s team.

The decision to be done with the men’s program came a year after Ireland shortly missed out on being a semi-finalist in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris with a close defeat against Fiji, the biggest team in the sport, and finished second in 2023-24 World Rugby Sevens Series – their best-ever result. The scrapping of the program, under these conditions, signals significant shortcomings in the governing of the sport at both national and the international level.

THE IRFU SIDE

Leinster is Ireland’s rugby development bedrock. It has been for a long time, and the 33 internationally capped players out of the 57 homegrown players they used in the past full season is as clear a demonstration of this as can be. All four provinces have their academies, and academy pathways for player development have grown to be a key part of IRFU’s strategy. This is perhaps best signalled with the tripling of the money IRFU allocates for academies.

Leinster has the most sophisticated academy program in all four provinces, as they use the money they are allocated to prop up schools in their systems, rather than investing in a single central academy like the other three do. While a lot of people express grievances over the axing of men’s sevens program by citing the money Leinster academy gets, it does not seem to be a main issue leading up to this result. The problem lies deeper.

IRFU announced a deficit of 18 million euros last season, but most of the cost comes from delegation expenses to annual fixtures and, as Terry Kennedy – former World Rugby Sevens Player of the Year – notes, from “the millions paid to bring foreign players over on short-term contracts”. The real issue at the national level, therefore, seems to be that the IRFU prioritizing the 15-a-side game over the short-form one, and not finding the pathway inflow it expected. But why does this lead to an overall tossing out of an Olympic program? The answer to this lies in the international structure of the game.

THE GLOBAL SIDE

World Rugby (formerly IRB) always had a problem with branding the Sevens format. They tried reversing the pathway by attracting legends like Jonah Lomu to take up the game, for the Olympic campaign they put on a grand show in Dubai in 2009 for the fifth edition of the Rugby World Cup Sevens, and in 2023, they relabelled the top annual circuit SVNS – a move that made sense to virtually no one.

In 2023, World Rugby reduced the number of teams competing in the top circuit from 16 to 12, and introduced relegation risk to teams placed 9^th – 12^th. This, without sparing enough and continued resources to grassroots developing the sports in various countries puts the underdeveloped programs at risk of being discarded in case poor results are obtained.

THE RECKONING

When the rugby sevens tournament in Rio 2016 concluded, the overview was nothing short of optimistic. The short and speedy game proved just what the Olympics needed to garner popularity among the youth that succumb to increasingly deteriorating attention spans.

Nine years on, it seems more that the Olympic inclusion overshadowed the overall calendar, and the national programs are suffering the most. Ireland had their best-ever run at the sevens series in the 2023-24 by finishing second, and were two minutes shy of ousting Fiji, the two-time defending champions, in Paris at the 2024 Summer Olympics quarter-finals. This season, they were relegated from the top tier of the World Rugby Sevens Series.

This should ring a wake-up call for World Rugby and national federations alike. The sevens format is easier to develop in a wider geography, but if World Rugby does not contribute to the sustained functioning of grassroots programs and pathways to professionalism, and the national federations keep treating the sevens teams as the unwanted little siblings, the sport will continue to bleed out – perhaps even to the point of getting dropped from the Olympic program.