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Rugby and entertainment: When professionalism outgrows the game

Quade Cooper for Brisbane City. (Sportography)
Roar Guru
22nd January, 2015
28

There’s a schism occurring in rugby. Some may not yet see it, but it’s gaining momentum.

If you ever played the game, you would have referred to yourself as a rugby player.

But had you become serious enough to sacrifice hours training to reach higher levels of competition, to focus on doing all the right things to extract each and every per cent of improvement with the goal of making it playing the game you love, that’s where the schism is occurring.

Today there is a class emerging. They once were players but now they can only be described as athletes – rugby athletes.

At the highest echelons of the game players or athletes are bigger, stronger, fitter and faster. They are an entirely different beast from those we are used to playing on suburban grounds. They are subject to increasing levels of science, be it via nutrition or physical training. Professionalism has created a new class of rugby. One that may be rapidly outgrowing the game.

Professional rugby is now 20 years into its venture into the world of sports entertainment. Take note of that last word: entertainment.

While professionalism has brought a great deal of money and growth to the game, the emergence of the rugby athlete looks set to potentially alter the game at its highest level, taking it away from the game played in parks by kids and adults alike. Because professional rugby is now played by athletes capable of covering more ground quicker, doing so for longer and hitting one another at forces well beyond the past. The game may begin to stagnate.

Not necessarily because of the game itself, but because of the athletes involved, who will only continue to improve. Will this lead to pressures being placed on World Rugby to effectively create a new form of the game?

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Professional rugby is a game with the same base structure as the game we are currently familiar with, but with different rules and compositions all enacted for the sake of maintaining the entertainment value while keeping pace with the growth of the rugby athlete.

Some may now begin to scoff (if they haven’t already begun) at the premise of this piece. However, in the pursuit of the consumer dollar you cannot just summarily dismiss the possibility that one day rugby could see a distinct separation of the game between the amateur and professional wings far beyond what we see today.

What will professional rugby look like? Who knows. Will there be fewer players on the pitch? If so, then how many? 13, 12 or even 11? Will we see the removal of the ‘hit’ from the scrum? Not the depowering of it but efforts to speed it up and keep the ball in play? Will the scoring change to promote more tries?

These are all pure speculation but some of these rules are currently being trialled in the likes of the Varsity Cup in South Africa and the National Rugby Championship in Australia.

I doubt anyone has the answers. But one thing is clear: there is a schism in the game. It’s growing and will be interesting to watch.

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