Rugby is trending in South Africa. Obvs. Money is a perennial trending item too. Even more obvs.
Rugby and money trending together is rarer, though not unheard of, and the pair are about to find their apotheosis in an industrial US city best known for The Wire, blue crabs and a contact sport whose players wear (I know, hard to believe) helmets.
Baltimore, here come the Springboks and the All Blacks.
This Saturday, they play the fourth and final Test of their revived rivalry at M&T Bank Stadium, home of the Baltimore Ravens gridiron team. It holds 71,000 people and organisers expect it to be full.
The obvious question is: Baltimore?
It’s hardly Cardiff. It isn’t even New York, Boston or Washington, where you’d more readily expect enough South Africans, Kiwis, Brits and Irish to form a respectable scrum.
But Baltimore is a shrewder pick than it looks. The city itself has only about 570,000 residents, but it sits on the Washington-Baltimore corridor, a market of roughly 10-million people, with Philadelphia close by and New York in reach. Mostly, though, it has that 71,000-seat NFL stadium sitting empty on a September Saturday and a host city keen to fill it.
SA Rugby expects Baltimore to generate $4m–$6m more than would be made by staging the same Test in South Africa. Baltimore is the experiment to see if rugby’s administrators can export the game at something approaching London-scale economics into an entirely new market. Tradition is wonderful, but even world champions have invoices. And it will be useful: 2027 is a lean year for the South African union, with only three home Tests scheduled, and that squeezes both sponsorship and broadcast income.
The new Bok-All Black touring deal is an unlikely joint venture, splitting ticketing, sponsorship and broadcast revenue between the unions. They are even travelling on the same plane! Baltimore is the experiment in whether rugby can pull off the NFL’s own trick: don’t wait for a foreign country to fall for your sport — take the best version of it to them, make it scarce, and charge accordingly.
It is also pertinent because the US hosts the 2031 Rugby World Cup, with World Rugby pouring £200m into the US market and chasing a tournament surplus north of $1bn.
The US remains a strange rugby market. Its own professional league draws crowds that would barely trouble the parking attendants at Ellis Park. But offer Americans the Springboks and All Blacks instead and 71,000 seats sell out anyway.
A packed Baltimore stadium will not prove that the US has fallen in love with rugby. It may simply prove that Americans enjoy large, expensive sporting spectacles involving famous people colliding at speed.
For rugby, that may be quite enough.
