World Netball explores biennial World Cup, new Continental Cup competition

World Netball is exploring hosting the World Cup every two years instead of every four as part of a radical plan to increase opportunities at the elite level.

Yesterday, The Daily Telegraph reported the game’s powerbrokers of Netball New Zealand, Netball Australia and Netball England had partnered with World Netball to introduce a new competition, the Continental Cup.

However, World Netball vice president Shirley Hooper told Newstalk ZB the idea was “very premature” and only a prospectus as part of the global event strategy had been released. The hope was to grow the sport of netball and its commercial opportunities.

“We were essentially going out to market with a bunch of different ideas of things that we could do ... We’re trying to build on what we build on the very successful [2023 South Africa] Netball World Cup, build on the burgeoning interest in women’s sport and identify partners, whether they be agencies and investors and the like that we can work with to grow the sport of netball and those ideas that were expressed in that story are some of the ideas that we are thinking about, but we haven’t resolved anything, we haven’t confirmed anything at all.”

The Continental Cup was proposed to start next year with the top-ranked team from each of the five World Netball regions taking part – Asia, Oceania, Europe, America and Africa. It would be repeated in 2026 in a one-off move and held every two years from that point with the World Cup also moving to a biennial event, rather than the current four years, following the Sydney 2027 tournament.

Some of the prospectus goals reported by The Daily Telegraph included:

• The new biennial event, the Continental Cup, to be added to the international calendar.
• Netball Australia, Netball New Zealand, Netball England partner with World Netball in the Continental Cup.
• Possibility for Fast5 World Series to be held more regularly than once a year.
• Aligned global calendar.

Hooper said there were several discussions to have before anything was set in stone around the prospectus.

“There are so many things that we need to consider. So what we want to do is to take the time to consider that and it’s not just the top three nations that come into play there. It’s all the other countries as well who are arguably a lot less resourced in terms of figuring out how we get there.

“I think if we’re honest, money can solve many problems and so it also comes down to the question of how much commercial funding is out there for what it is that we want to create. That’s the step we have to go through first before we can even start to finalise all those things.

“There are a lot of incredibly positive signals out there. The next step for us is just figuring out what is the pathway through that gives us the greatest opportunity and what we know is we can’t do this on our own. We’re very much now in the stage of starting to work through that with what our options are and what we could do to build on for the next step.”

It comes after Netball New Zealand and Sky agreed to a one-year extension to their existing broadcasting partnership through 2025 in May. In addition, Netball NZ entered into a further 12-month partnership with TVNZ for free-to-air coverage of ANZ Premiership Saturday matches.