The English Daily Telegraph Newspaper is reporting this morning that agreement has been reached on a new Club Rugby World Championship which will take place every four years and will replace the knockout stages of the Heineken Champions Cup in that year.

The Top eight teams from the group stage of the European tournament, which from next year will also include leading teams from South Africa via the United Rugby Championship, will play against eight teams from the remainder of the Southern Hemisphere to be crowned the World Club Rugby Champions.

It is understood that the teams who do not progress from the Champions’ Cup will play in an expanded European Challenge Cup in that one year every four.

The report says that agreement in principle has been reached with English Premiership Rugby, the Final of which in that year will also be brought forward.

It is being driven by that organisation’s former CEO Mark McCafferty who is now a non-executive director of European Professional Club Rugby.

The suggested format is that the 16 teams will be divided into four groups with two from each side of qualification in each and that those four teams will each play three matches to produce four group winners who will then meet in semi-finals. The tournament would conclude with a grand final in May.

The first playing of the tournament would be in 2025 and it would precede that year’s British and Irish Lions Tour of Australia.

Gavin Mair’s report suggests that there will be one place given to the Japanese Club Champions and one to the highest ranked side from the Pacific Island but that all the other places would be purely on merit, a factor that may yet create difficulties in some areas given that England and Ireland would have had two teams each this year and France four but that each cycle would be down to action on the field of play with no guarantees.

There has been no reaction yet to the story from any of the different tournament organisers or teams but with the private equity investment in the sport it is inevitable that new formats with a clear international appeal will be sought and brought to life.

It will be interesting to watch over the coming days and weeks as the prospect is discussed and teased out.

Here is a link to the Daily Telegraph article by Gavin Mairs

 

 

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