Four years ago the motto was “shock the world”. And they did, beating Fiji 30-27 for one of the bigger Rugby World Cup surprise results. This time around the Uruguayan team, better know as “Los Teros”, get their tournament underway against hosts France on Thursday night with a more ambitious goal: “make history”.
By history they mean qualifying automatically for the 2027 Rugby World Cup, and to achieve it they will need to finish third in Pool A. It is a big goal in a tough group because it means winning two games: against Namibia – where they are favourites – and against Italy, who despite being the least powerful force in the Six Nations are still one of the top 10 teams in quality of competition and budget. The goal is so clearly marked that Uruguay’s coach, Esteban Meneses, considers the match against France as the team’s preparation for the clash with Italy on 20 September in Nice. And it makes sense: the team has only played one game against a Tier One opponent in four years: Italy, in November 2021 in Parma, when they lost 17-10.
Why are Uruguay setting their sights high? Thanks to their natural evolution over the last four years, continuing to advance despite the disruption caused by Covid-19 and the strong status quo that governs rugby, by which Tier One teams close their doors to the possibility of maintaining regular competition with Tier Two.
This is the first 100% professional Uruguay team to reach the World Cup. In Japan 2019, all the players received a salary, but the majority had begun their preparation just a few months before the World Cup, while they remained amateurs at their clubs, both in terms of salary and in quality of competition.
All Uruguayan players in the current team have been professional for at least three years. Key to achieving this was the birth of the American Rugby Super League, today renamed Super Rugby Americas (SRA). The cross-border franchise tournament organised by Sudamérica Rugby was created to finally give professional competition to local players who do not get a contract with the top teams in the world, as is the case of its greatest figure, Santiago Arata, who shines for Castres in the French Top 14.
For SRA, Uruguay created the Peñarol Rugby franchise, a brave move that involved carrying the logo and colours of the famous soccer team. Under the risk of alienating those associated with arch-rivals Nacional, the bet was to attract a larger fanbase by appealing to football supporters, the national sport. The second won over the first, but also, it was a success on the pitch: Peñarol Rugby were SRA champions in 2023 and 2022, and finalists in 2021. But above all, it allowed more than 40 players to develop in a professional environment over the last three years. Twenty-nine current or former Peñarol players have reached the World Cup.
The SRA’s path was not easy: its original edition, in 2020, had to be cancelled in the second week as a result of Covid. The entire project was on the verge of collapsing and had to adapt to the new times: the teams’ budgets fell by a third in 2021, so they could only use local players and some isolated foreign reinforcements. In addition, the 2021 edition had to be played in a bubble, with the players locked up for three months in a hotel, with weekly covid tests and without any fans in the stands.
Despite all these problems, SRA is the model that allows South America to make a strong presence in France 2023. And it also explains Chile’s great performance against Japan in Toulouse last weekend. Chile are almost a miracle: three years ago they lost to Brazil and were the fourth force in South America. But between 2021 and 2022 they beat Canada and the United States to qualify for the first World Cup in their history.
Behind that success is a well-known name in Uruguay: Pablo Lemoine, the coach who brought Los Teros back to the World Cup in 2015 after a 12-year absence. His initial recipe is simple: sacrifice, hard work and, above all, conviction on the part of the players that they want to make a mark in rugby. Added to that hard work was the professionalism of the Selknam franchise at the SRA, and the results came.
What happened in Argentina is another logic: Covid made Super Rugby implode, so its players had to go abroad, just when Jaguares had been finalists in 2019. Los Pumas had a hard time adapting to the change, their coach Mario Ledesma was fired, and Australian Michael Cheika arrived to sail the ship to the World Cup. An accelerated renovation process began – on Saturday against England there were six World Cup debutants as starters – something always traumatic to undertake in the middle of a tournament. But he has plenty of talent in his squad, which should flourish in the quarter-finals, provided they can overcome tough opponents in Samoa and Japan.
Ignacio Chans is the chief rugby writer for El Observador newspaper in Uruguay and is in France covering the Rugby World Cup
