Arguably, the most significant sporting event of 2025 will be the Women’s Rugby World Cup finals, which will be staged between August 22nd and September 27th in England. It will be the tenth occasion the women’s rugby world cup will be held, albeit, notably, half of those tournaments have been hosted between the UK and Ireland. Notwithstanding this, the 2025 tournament has been expanded from the 12 teams that participated in 2021, as 16 national sides will be involved when the event kicks off at Sunderland F.C.’s home ground, the Stadium of Light. Over 130,000 tickets have been sold for the month-long celebration to date, making it the biggest championship of its kind ever staged. New Zealand is the current World Champions, although England, defeated finalists in the 2021 decider, will be hoping to replace them next year, buoyed by the additional benefits being the host nation can bring.
Some interesting trends concerning the teams participating in the tournament are worth noting. For the first time since the 2002 Women’s Rugby World Cup, all six teams competing in the Women’s Six Nations Championship will participate in England, illustrative of the continuing strength of the women’s game across Europe. When England claimed the 2024 Six Nations Championship, more than 1.3 million viewers watched their final game live on the BBC. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Brazil qualified for its first-ever World Cup finals when it defeated Columbia in the South American qualifying competition earlier this year, whilst Pacific Islanders Fiji similarly emerged from the Oceania qualifying pool and will play for only the second time in a World Cup final tournament when the competition begins in little under 9 months.
Yet, the remarkable projected growth in the commercial value of the game is particularly striking and remains insightful to sponsors and broadcasters alike. World Rugby’s participation figures 2023-24 report confirms that a quarter of all those now playing rugby are women, and this figure continues to increase. This is the primary reason why the commercial value of the women’s game, in turn, is forecast to grow tenfold over the next decade and reach between Euro 155 million and 240 million by 2034. The 2024 Women’s World Cup will also be the first occasion when all matches will be shown ‘live’ by the host broadcaster, in this case, BBC, and the first time, likewise, when broadcast rights for the women’s finals were packaged and sold separately from their male counterparts – reflective of a strategy of ‘unbundling’ of such broadcast rights, equally apparent in decisions taken by FIFA and UEFA for women’s soccer, amongst other examples of this emerging practice.
Academic coverage of the evolution of women’s rugby has, broadly speaking, mirrored the game’s development over the past three decades. Precious little published research was evident in the period that followed the inaugural Women’s World Cup held in 1991. Jan Wright and Gill Clarke’s seminal work on the relationship between sport, the media and what the authors refer to as ‘the construction of compulsory heterosexuality’ was therefore significant in that it highlighted how print media’s representation of sport, in this case rugby, contributed to the denial of lesbian sexuality and social relations. They specifically drew attention to how the language and images that were used at that time (late 1990s) in the print media sought to promote the hegemony of heterosexual femininity. One of the most cited pieces of academic research in this field was first published in 2014 by Matthew Ezzell. From a different perspective, he, too, highlights the identity dilemmas too often faced by women rugby players, drawing attention to the concept of ‘defensive othering’ employed by some players when they were stigmatised and were required to deal with sexist and homophobic abuse from ‘outsiders’.
As the profound absence of good science on the physiological and anatomical demands of women’s rugby persisted, Nonhlanhla Mkumbuzi’s recent call to establish a meaningful intersectional women’s rugby research agenda is timely. Mkumbuzi argues that the absence of women rugby players and experts from ethnic minorities and the Global South in such research work merely confirms their experiences of marginalisation on multiple fronts. Instead, it is argued, that an intersectional rugby research agenda can move beyond a purely scientific analysis of women’s injury rate when playing the game, for example, to take account, too, of the gendered environments in which they train and play and how these also contribute to unique challenges faced by women rugby players.
On the eve of the participation of the first-ever team representing South America in the Women’s Rugby World Cup Finals and the re-emergence of Fiji in the sport, the case for the intersectional research agenda of which Mkumbuzi speaks is made evermore strongly as 2025 will again confirm the remarkable strength of women’s rugby and the unlimited potential the game possesses for further growth.
