There was one thing that really stood out at the final game of the South African leg of the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour at FNB Stadium over the weekend.
It wasn’t Jesse “Thighs of Justice” Kriel’s ego-crushing solo try. Or “Manie Gerber’s” mazy jinking run that will get clipped and replayed until the end of linear time. It wasn’t even the brutal discipline and fearsome technical brilliance that made casually mauling the All Blacks 40m for another exultant try by Malcolm Marx look as easy as falling.
It was the official attendance put up on the screen towards the end of the game: 85,967 people.
Almost 86,000 diverse, dedicated and delirious South African rugby fans flooded into a 95,000-capacity stadium in Soweto to watch a game of rugby.
And somewhere during all of this I found myself wondering whether anyone at World Rugby headquarters was feeling even slightly embarrassed. Actually, not slightly embarrassed, a lot embarrassed.
Because it’s been 31 years since South Africa hosted a Rugby World Cup, and watching the stadium go riotously, gloriously nuts during the game on Saturday gave rise to a profound sense of injustice that this is something that World Rugby apparently doesn’t want for a World Cup. Revved on an engine of pretty good pinotage, it was very easy to feed my indignation at World Rugby being seemingly unmoved by huge stadiums filled to capacity by a passionate and adoring rugby nation.
South Africa bid (unsuccessfully) for the right to host rugby’s premier event in 2011, 2015, 2019 and 2023. Then the way Rugby World Cups were awarded changed, becoming less about competing bids and more about “preferred hosts”. Australia has next year’s event, the US 2031, and we’re not bidding for 2035. So South Africa faces a minimum 40-year wait to be seen as “a preferred host” for a Rugby World Cup.
Forty years for an entire generation to go without experiencing rugby’s biggest event in their home country, all while our players have achieved things on the pitch that hardly anyone could have believed possible.
Taken individually, there is a perfectly respectable argument for almost every one of those World Cup events to have been awarded to the countries they eventually went to.
But taken together, they leave a massively awkward question.
A 40-year gap
How does a country capable of hosting the 2010 Fifa World Cup, repeatedly bidding for rugby’s version, subsequently producing the most successful nation in Rugby World Cup history, filling 85,000-seat stadiums and being formally judged by World Rugby itself to have submitted the best bid for 2023 end up facing a 40-year-plus gap between tournaments? And is the strategy that produced that outcome still defensible?
Before we scramble to shit-post WORLD RUGBY HATES US on a Facebook forum, there are some very good reasons not to hold the tournament here.
Money is obviously one.
The Rugby World Cup isn’t just “rugby’s greatest celebration” or whatever. It’s the ATM of global rugby, and global rugby needs that ATM to spit out as much money as possible.
France 2023 delivered a record £472m surplus to World Rugby for reinvestment in the game. It attracted 425,000 international visitors, almost three-quarters from elsewhere in Europe. That is an economic advantage South Africa cannot ever magic into existence.
The rand is weak and volatile, travel from many of rugby’s richest markets is difficult, and we have a government with somewhat more pressing things to spend its money on. Like themselves.
And SA Rugby agrees with this.
Earlier this year, its CEO, Rian Oberholzer, effectively conceded that neither South Africa nor New Zealand can make the commercial case for the 2035 World Cup. “New Zealand and South Africa will not make the money out of a World Cup that World Rugby needs,” he said.
And this despite World Rugby having tested our viability itself and coming to the conclusion that we were clearly the best place for the tournament. In 2017, it subjected the bids by South Africa, France and Ireland for the 2023 World Cup to a supposedly rigorous technical evaluation. Finance and commercial commitments accounted for 35% of the result. Venues and host cities another 30%. South Africa won the overall evaluation — and not just with sepia-toned pictures of Madiba in a Springbok rugby jersey, but with numbers. Overall, Ireland scored 72.25% and France 75.88%. South Africa: 78.97%.
The Rugby World Cup Ltd board unanimously recommended that South Africa host in 2023, and so let’s just say I wasn’t particularly sad when we beat France in that quarterfinal.
Not rich enough. Not broken enough
But this isn’t necessarily evidence of conspiracy. France presented an excellent bid and subsequently hosted an excellent World Cup. The more interesting explanation is that perhaps South African rugby has fallen into a peculiar crack in the landscape of the modern game. Basically, that we’re not rich enough to exploit, and we’re not broken enough to fix.
The first part is sort of obvious. The US is the biggest sports market on earth, and World Rugby plans to invest $250m-plus in that country before 2031, culminating in a World Cup it hopes will generate a surplus exceeding $1bn. That is the kind of attraction you can’t ignore — especially after America proved that it can turn a World Cup in a Sport It Doesn’t Really Understand into a certified success story.
It’s the second part that’s more complicated.
Japan 2019 is probably the best argument against giving South Africa a World Cup. World Rugby says programmes surrounding the tournament introduced 2.25-million people to rugby across Asia. Interest in the sport in Japan rose from 26% before the tournament to 44% afterwards. That’s what growing a sport looks like and what World Cups are meant to do. And you know what? There aren’t many South African players complaining about the growth of Japanese rugby these days — Japan has subsequently become one of the most lucrative destinations on earth for Springbok talent.
But World Rugby isn’t only meant to govern the game, it’s also meant to be a steward — and sometimes that means seeing warning lights before anyone else. And the finances underneath South African rugby are rather less impervious than four World Cup-winning teams and 85,967 people at FNB Stadium over the weekend might suggest.
In 2025, SA Rugby’s income passed R2bn for the first time. Sponsorship revenue leapt 51% to R739m. Roughly R500m went into the national teams and high-performance system.
And SA Rugby still posted a R40m pre-tax loss.
Warning lights
Now, this doesn’t mean South African rugby is bankrupt by any stretch of the imagination. It isn’t. Nor would hosting a World Cup simply funnel several hundred million rand into SA Rugby’s bank account. The money generated by a World Cup flows differently through World Rugby, the host union and the host economy.
But it is one of those warning lights.
As we speak, at perhaps the greatest sustained moment of Springbok success in history, with sponsorship booming, Tests selling out and revenues breaking records, the machine underneath the South African game is still having to work extremely hard to pay for itself.
And we’re not the only ones; New Zealand has a similar problem. It reported record income in 2025 and nevertheless finished with a NZ$7.5m loss. And these are two countries that between them have won seven of the 10 men’s Rugby World Cups.
Apparently being extremely good at producing rugby isn’t necessarily the same thing as being extremely good at producing money.
There’s an even more extreme version of this story in the Pacific Islands.
Fiji, Samoa and Tonga have spent generations producing frankly insane quantities of rugby talent relative to the size of their economies. The catch was always that most of the professional opportunities for that talent existed elsewhere.
Eventually World Rugby recognised this as a structural problem, helping to finance and create professional pathways for rugby hopefuls closer to home — purely so that the Pacific Island nations stood even a tiny chance of retaining some of the rugby talent they were churning out like toothpicks at the toothpick factory.
Now, South Africa isn’t Fiji; we have major professional franchises, established academies and enormous audiences. But there are enough underlying similarities that it officially constitutes A Warning. Because talent pouring out of a system isn’t necessarily proof that the system is healthy or economically impervious.
Economic self-medication
Which brings us back to South Africa and New Zealand, because something interesting has happened while both countries have apparently accepted that the World Cup isn’t coming to either of us any time soon.
Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry is not just four Tests between the Springboks and All Blacks. It is a jointly owned commercial property, with SA Rugby and New Zealand Rugby pooling sponsorship, ticketing, merchandise and global broadcast revenue on a 50:50 basis. The plan is to reverse the tour in 2030 and repeat the exercise every four years.
Yes, it’s a cash grab (and more on that just now), but it’s a cash grab for a very specific reason. It’s essentially economic self-medication. And just in case anyone wasn’t reading between the lines, SA Rugby and New Zealand Rugby are doing exactly what World Rugby is doing in 2031 — going to America. The final game in Baltimore is expected to generate $4m–$6m more than playing the match in South Africa. So, yes, it’s a decision that makes money sense, even if it’s yet to be proved that it makes rugby sense.
One of the events on the rugby calendar that always made both kinds of sense was a British & Irish Lions tour. The Lions tour of Australia in 2025 hugely contributed to the financial health of Rugby Australia, which that year took in A$260m and recorded an operating surplus of A$70.6m. It paid its debts and rebuilt some cash reserves. But World Rugby needs more than Rugby Australia just having a bit of spare cash lying around — it needs the Australians to be genuinely, passionately committed and competitive. Australia is hosting the 2027 World Cup in an attempt to bring that back.
This is where South African rugby can genuinely count itself unlucky, because the British & Irish Lions toured here in 2021, in the teeth of Covid, to closed stadiums. We got the rugby tour but lost the wider economic event. And more importantly perhaps, we lost the greater impact of the rugby event. No kid from Makhanda going to his first live game. No knock-on effect of touring Lions supporters generating a new rugby kinship in South Africa. No guy from Birmingham going back and telling stories of what South Africa is actually like to his mates down at the pub.
Because a tour like that, and similarly a Rugby World Cup, is more than just a cash machine — it’s an accelerant. It’s a Monster Energy Drink for the underlying culture of rugby.
Lessons from the Pacific
Which is where everything starts to get really, really tricky.
South Africa’s relative financial weakness makes it less attractive as a World Cup host, so rugby’s greatest financial and cultural accelerant takes itself somewhere that offers either greater financial returns or more strategic growth.
So, South African rugby gets passed over time and time again, and doesn’t get that shot in the arm. However, it carries on funding its structures, developing players, filling stadiums and producing a national team that keeps winning World Cups. It’s the South African way; it’s the reason people sell T-shirts that say “Fok Voort”.
That “fok voort-ness” of us — the resilience in the face of being passed over — becomes evidence that we don’t particularly require intervention, and then 40 years go by.
Which brings us back to the 85,967 people in Soweto. It is incredibly convenient for World Rugby to look at that crowd and see proof that South African rugby doesn’t need a World Cup, and perhaps it is right. Nobody owes South Africa a tournament.
But the lesson from the Pacific is that great rugby cultures aren’t natural resources. They are systems. They need investment, opportunity and emotional and cultural reasons for another generation to keep feeding into them.
South African rugby has spent three decades demonstrating extraordinary resilience, and the real sense is that the game’s governing body is mistaking that resilience for something inexhaustible. Because by the time the warning light is flashing in a way that everyone can see, it’s generally because the engine is about to fall out of your car. We shouldn’t have to wait until it gets that bad. So give us a fucking World Cup already.
