Club World Cup: Southern hemisphere rugby sides could play best in northern hemisphere

European rugby chiefs insist there remains “real warmth” towards a Club World Cup but concede the new competition would not launch until 2028 at the earliest.

Dominic McKay, chairman of the European Professional Club Rugby, which organises the Champions and Challenge Cups, revealed that there is a strong appetite in both hemispheres to establish a Club World Cup which he believes would also attract considerable interest from broadcasters.

“There’s a warmth on trying to identify once and for all who is the greatest club in the world, I think that’s the mantle a lot of European and South African clubs like the challenge of, trying to settle that argument,” McKay said. “There’s a real warmth to develop a World Club Cup and a number of the clubs from France and the UK were pushing this quite hard.

“The one thing I would say is there is a real warmth behind this project in a way that rugby’s got lots of great projects that never quite see the light of day. This one has got one warmth from both the northern hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere and I’m very pleased about that.”

The current working model would be for eight clubs, which would include the South African franchises from the United Rugby Championship, to qualify from the Champions Cup pool stages, who would then face eight clubs from the southern hemisphere in a straight knockout competition contested over four weekends.

There had been plans to launch the Club World Cup in 2025 but this has now been delayed for at least three years as administrators work through the significant logistical challenges. McKay says that any new competition must benefit the players as well as becoming a sustainable part of the rugby calendar.

“We want to do something that’s meaningful and has a pattern of regularity,” McKay said. “We’re looking at doing something, if we can, potentially in 2028 and potentially 2032. We’re working towards that and we’re having great dialogue with our colleagues in the southern hemisphere. I suspect the next few months will be really instructive on that.”

McKay was speaking from the first EPCR club conference in Toulouse, which gathered representatives from 42 clubs, eight unions, three leagues, the Six Nations, World Rugby and figures from the women’s game. One of the overriding conclusions from the meeting, he says, is that “no part of the game can be successful without a genuine interaction between the club and international games”.

McKay also confirmed that launching a women’s version of the Champions Cup is “something that we’d love to do” although it is still in the early stages. “There is a very active discussion ongoing at the moment around that,” McKay said.

“We want to do that in a respectful and timely manner, so we’re at the foothills of that as a project but we’re very encouraged from the clubs and unions to try and deliver something in the short to medium term on that one.”

Yet despite potentially launching two new competitions into an already congested calendar, McKay conceded that the format of the showpiece Champions Cup needs to stay the same after several years of tinkering with the structure.

“We’ve got a job to do across the global game to ensure that we excite and inspire our existing supporters and the supporters of the future by making it easy and accessible for them to enjoy the rugby both in the stadium, but also on broadcast,” McKay said.

“The point about having settled structures and having easy-to-understand formats is really very uppermost in our mind. We don’t want to make changes just for the sake of changes in the future.”