Modern rugby union turned 30 last month. It was in the autumn of 1994 that Louis Luyt, president of the South African Rugby Union, announced that the game would turn professional after his country had hosted the World Cup the following year. Luyt was the first significant figure in the sport to say out loud what everyone else was only talking about in whispers. He was right. It took another 12 months, the actual anniversary of the International Rugby Board meeting at which the decision to go pro was made falls next August, but once Luyt had opened the box there was no closing it again.
Thirty years is no time. Rugby is at once so old that no one’s even quite sure exactly when it was first played, and so young that it’s still figuring out what it wants to be when it grows up. “We’re still very new relative to a lot of other professional sports,” says Mark Robinson, the chief executive of New Zealand Rugby. Robinson, who played nine Tests for the All Blacks in the early 2000s, has been their CEO since 2020. He has been doing the rounds this week, shuttling between interviews and meetings in advance of the World Rugby Council meeting in Dublin on 14 November, when he, and the other powers that be, will debate the game’s best next steps.
