The full fixture list of 144 regular season match-ups in the new United Rugby Championship has been revealed, as well as kick-off times and TV details for the first ten rounds starting on Friday, September 24th and running through to January 2022.
The Cell C Sharks, DHL Stormers, Emirates Lions and Vodacom Bulls will bring the best of South Africa to take on the best of Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales across 18 rounds of action.
Every game will be shown live on TV to the widest audience in the league’s history with major free-to-air audiences opened up in Ireland on RTÉ and TG4, Italy, and the UK on BBC Northern Ireland, BBC Wales and S4C. They will line up alongside long-term pay-TV partners in Premier Sports and Supersport.
The tournament will get off to a flyer of a start with defending title holders and eight-time champions, Leinster, playing host to the three-time Super Rugby champions Vodacom Bulls. That game will be shown live on TG4 at 17:15 on Saturday 25th.
RTÉ’s opening game will be Munster, another multiple-time champion at home to the Cell C Sharks at 19:35 that same evening.
Cardiff Rugby entertain Connacht on the opening weekend while a battle of former champions will take place between Ulster and Glasgow Warriors.
“We believe these fixtures will ensure that the URC could deliver on its promise of a new era for our league where the very best from South Africa go head-to-head with our Celtic and Italian teams,” said Martin Anayi, United Rugby Championship CEO.
“As we carefully manoeuvre out of the pandemic, the URC will take its place as one of the leading leagues in global rugby and this fixture list should ignite our competition and take it to the next level.”
“This schedule is the most complex we have ever produced and the efforts of every one of our stakeholders to help us piece it together in the current climate have been monumental. We now have a format that will heighten competition, showcase our clubs, elevate our athletes and bring great excitement to fans and TV audiences right across our territories and beyond.”
To accommodate the very latest travel conditions across the URC’s competing territories the provisional fixtures had to be readjusted. The South African teams will now complete four-week tours of Europe to begin the season giving fans in Ireland, Italy, Wales and Scotland an early opportunity to see these new sides in person.
An important additional change this season is that the URC is committed to avoiding going up against international weekends with every round of the tournament to be played on a standalone weekend.
URC TV, the league’s own OTT player will be launched in partnership with RTÉ very shortly.
In the new format, all 16 teams will be ranked across a single table which will reward the top eight teams with their places in an expanded Final Series that includes a full Quarter-final stage, followed by Semi-finals before the best two teams meet in the URC Grand Final in June. These games will take place on successive weekends to June 18th.
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