On Thursday, the New England Free Jacks were escorted out of Quincy, Massachusetts, by the city police. Rugby teams usually receive such treatment after too much post-match socialising but this was pre-game, the Major League Rugby champions heading for a flight to California to defend their title against Seattle Seawolves.
From a team practiced in the art of promoting itself and its sport, it was a nice bit of stagecraft ahead of Sunday’s championship game. Nic Benson, chief executive of MLR, was headed west too.
“The San Diego team owners hosting the game are putting a lot into it,” Benson told the Guardian. “It’ll be a great event. Ticket sales are great. We’re looking like we’re going to come out ahead of last year [when around 10,000 saw the Free Jacks beat the San Diego Legion in Chicago]. We’ve got a great window on Fox. So we’re excited.”
The venue, Snapdragon, is “a beautiful stadium”, Benson said. It has been full for rugby once already this year, the All Blacks and Fiji attracting more fans than Manchester United did this week, for a friendly against Real Betis.
Attracting local fans is part of the push, building on the Legion’s grass-roots work and appealing to neutrals. It helps that Seattle and New England are two of the more successful MLR teams in terms of putting bums on seats, filling small stadiums week in, week out.
Benson said: “The challenge for both Seattle and New England is how to grow beyond that capacity. And that’s the problem that you want to have as a sports team owner. And I know they’re both working on on different ways of solving it.
“If you look across the league, our average attendance is up about 40% since 2022. So that’s good … it’s ebbs and flows but people are excited.”
MLR will complete its sixth season in seven years, 2020 having fallen to Covid. It is a moment of unusual visibility for US rugby, thanks to the Olympics – more on that later – but MLR does not always have things easy. Two champion teams, LA in 2021, New York in 2022, no longer exist. Other teams, two from rugby hotbeds, Colorado and Atlanta, have also left the league.
Asked what concerns him now, Benson said: “The same concern we’ve always had. We’re a challenger sport in the most competitive sports, entertainment and media market on Earth. So it’s really hard work to get local attention and the mindshare to build the consistency of crowds and the consistency of media attention.”
It’s a “good sign”, Benson said, that the Dallas Jackals, winless in their first season, made the western final this year. Another newer team, the Chicago Hounds, lost to New England in the east.
A new team went winless. Anthem RC is based in Charlotte, North Carolina, a joint project with World Rugby, seeking game time for American talent before the 2031 World Cup on US soil.
“I would hold up the Anthem project is one of our most significant achievements this year,” Benson said. “But it has very little to do with what happened on the field.
“Although I think they got better and they got more competitive, it’s about the story of the 2031 World Cup coming, creating that partnership with World Rugby around the development of American athletes. They’ve done things like with the Fijian Drua [in Super Rugby] but they’ve never done it with a private league before.
“To get Anthem over the line was a really important marker for our intent to be collaborative. We’re here to build the ecosystem with World Rugby because we all benefit together.”
Benson spoke of making sure Scott Lawrence, the men’s Eagles coach, “has access to the right players”, a process evident in a frustrating but not discouraging 42-7 defeat by Scotland in Washington last month.
Asked if MLR might take inspiration from the US women’s thrilling bronze medal in the Olympic sevens in Paris this week, Benson said: “First of all, it’s a women’s moment. They should have their moment.”
But he said: “We need to be evangelists of the game … so anything that gets a young boy or young girl excited about the game, looking into the game, researching the game, finding out more, is great for me. I don’t care if you’re a women’s sevens fan or an All Blacks fan, if you’re a rugby fan in the United States, that’s a win. Eventually you’ll be an MLR fan.”
Benson hoped the example of Ilona Maher, Olympic standout and social media star, might propel more kids onto a rugby field, there to “develop some of those instincts you need, especially in the key decision-making spots”.
In Sunday’s game, most such spots will be filled by imports. The Free Jacks fly-half, Jayson Potroz, player of the match in last year’s final, is a New Zealander, long with Taranaki. Reece Macdonald is a Kiwi too, although the free-scoring full-back made his name in the Shute Shield club competition in Sydney.
For Seattle, Mack Mason, an Australian with Super Rugby experience for New South Wales Waratahs, runs things at fly-half. His scrum-half, JP Smith, is a US international but was born in South Africa and played for a menagerie of its top teams, Blue Bulls, Free State Cheetahs and Eastern Province Elephants among them.
Still, from the powerful Seattle hooker Joe Taufete’e to the Free Jacks prop Kaleb Geiger, a sort of mobile Colorado Rocky who didn’t know what rugby was till a few years ago, the two finalists employ serious American talent.
“This year was our largest national media package by a pretty significant margin,” Benson said. “More games on FS1, more games on FS2. That’s obviously a really good window.”
A shop window, indeed. Now for the big sell.
The MLR championship game will be broadcast on Fox in the US and therugbynetwork.com elsewhere, kick-off Sunday, 4pm ET
