The tectonic plates have shifted in football, but in rugby they remain rock solid, not the slightest hint of movement and a game with global aspirations seems no closer to fulfilling them than it was 30 years ago.
The World Cup is playing out in Qatar with a definitivesense of uprising, and while the last eight teams standing will mostly be established heavyweights, the tournament has shown there are multiple emerging forces.
What football has, rugby would love, but the unpredictability of the World Cup in Qatar 2022 will not be a feature of France 2023.
Rugby hasn’t been able to spread its gospel the way football has. Not even remotely close and in the last 30 years, Argentina is about the only nation to have found a way to claw itself up the rankings and stay there.
Japan is becoming an intriguing prospect but without access to a meaningful regular competition it will find it hard to sustain the one-off results it often manages against the top nations.
Italy have been granted a place in the Six Nations and done nothing with it and Georgia is most certainly an intriguing proposition, but no one seems to want to do anything to help it be any more than that.
Rugby has tried, not particularly hard, to find and build new contenders, but mostly failed. Football, on the other hand, has seen potential new superpowers emerge in the sort of numbers no one previously thought imaginable.
The question must therefore be asked, why has one sport succeeded and the other failed to build a global presence in the last 30 years — the sort that has seen teams from six continents make the last 16 in Qatar and left giants such as Germany and Belgium going home early having not made it out of the pool rounds?
It’s not quite a fair question as football has been working off a significantly more established base, but still, that doesn’t of itself explain why it has seen standards lift across the globe and teams such as Japan, South Korea, Morocco, Senegal and the USA reach the last 16, which would be the equivalent of Uruguay, Namibia, Romania and Portugal making it to the last eight of the Rugby World Cup.
Morocco players celebrate beating Canada and advancing into the round of 16 of the Fifa World Cup in Qatar. Photo / AP
The key to football’s success in building global presence and driving up standards lies in the simplicity of the game and the relative lack of intrusion and influence of officialdom.
The rules of football have barely changed in 100 years and it’s pretty much true that once you have learned about the offside law, you have learned the game.
What football has also done is invest in competitions globally and remove geography as a determinant of success.
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that half the countries in Europe didn’t even exist as sovereign states 30-plus years ago until the Soviet Union collapsed, the iron curtain came down and the Balkans War rearranged everything.
But opportunity was granted quickly and effectively for every new European nation that emerged and Croatia made the final of the last World Cup and North Macedonia qualified for the 2020 European Championships.
Compare this with rugby where even people who played the game at a high level 10 years ago, say they barely recognise it now.
A convoluted law book has proven a massive barrier to global growth and if anyone doubts that, don’t just look at how football has captured the world, but how sevens — a much easier game to grasp — has grown exponentially in popularity and seen countries such as Kenya, USA, Canada and Fiji compete in ways unimaginable to their XV-a-side peers.
And then there is the whole failure to provide opportunity. Samoa beat Wales in 1991 which enabled them to progress to the quarter-final, which they did again four years later.
For a period at least, there was hope that a new force had emerged but of course it didn’t last as the established world then did everything in its power to boot Samoa and the rest of the Pacific Island sides back down the ladder, because no one in the top tier seemed to like the idea of having a new pretender claim a place among them when the prospect became a reality.
No invite to any competition was forthcoming for Samoa, just as Japan still sit out in the cold, wondering after making the quarter-final of the World Cup in 2019, whether their fate will be similar.
In football, new nations just need to ask and the invite will be sent. In rugby, it seems there is a minimum requirement of making consecutive World Cup quarter-finals, before anyone will even consider discussing a nation’s competition future.
And even then, as Samoa discovered, that might not be enough either.
