Rugby to prove lucrative game as World Cup kicks off

The sport’s World Cup kicks off on Friday, marking the start of a tournament featuring 48 matches across England and Wales. Such is its popularity, the event is expected to generate £1bn.

Richie McCaw, the captain of the All Blacks, lifts the Webb Ellis Cup following the defeat of France in 2011. Cameron Spencer / Getty Images

The Rugby World Cup (RWC) kicks off on Friday as the hosts England take on Fiji at Twickenham.

For a competition first staged as recently as 1987, the RWC has quickly become a sporting mega-event.

England beat Italy, Japan and South Africa to the rights to host the eighth RWC and the tournament could be the biggest grossing one yet.

The championships will see 48 matches staged across 12 venues in England and the Millennium stadium in Wales and this is expected to provide a boost of nearly £1 billion (Dh5.66bn) to British GDP, according to research from the financial services group EY.

“We completed that report a year ahead of the tournament starting and since then ticket sales are progressing well and they are on target to fill their capacity,” says Peter Butler, the co-author of The Economic Impact of the 2015 Rugby World Cup report.

In 2008, Deloitte published research showing that a RWC can deliver for host countries what the agency describes as gross value added of between £260 million and £1.1bn, depending on the location.

EY’s more recent research estimates that the 2015 RWC will generate a total of £2.2bn, with a direct impact on GDP of £982m.

Although the last RWC was in New Zealand, EY used the 2007 tournament in France as a benchmark and says that tournament directly contributed £380m to the French economy.

The RWC will be watched keenly in the Middle East, where OSN will screen matches.

The sport’s profile in the region has been boosted by the increasing success of the Emirates Airline Dubai Rugby Sevens. Emirates’ involvement with rugby has been extended to the RWC. Last year, the carrier became an official partner of both this year’s RWC tournament and the next event in Japan in 2019.

Emirates cites a change in the marketing opportunities made available as a driver behind this sponsorship deal.

At previous RWCs, brands were not allowed to feature on the playing kits of players or match officials. That has all now changed.

At this year’s RWC and again in 2019, the Fly Emirates logo will be on the shirts of match officials and the airline’s branding will be seen around stadiums during the six-week long tournament.

Recent research from Repucom shows that 5.1 per cent of global rugby union sponsorship comes from airlines and that 64 per cent of rugby union fans agree that sponsorship is crucial to the success of professional sport, while 33 per cent would choose a sponsor’s product over a rival brand.

“Rugby’s in the top three in terms of interest across the UK and has been over the last few years,” says Jon Stainer, the managing director of Repucom UK & Ireland.

This year’s tournament is expected to generate record numbers of visitors as the English Rugby Football Union (RFU) looks to meet an £80m guaranteed return insisted on by the sport’s global governing body, World Rugby.

That guarantee was one of the reasons some of the matches are being staged not in traditional rugby grounds but at newer football stadiums with larger capacities.

In 1991, when England last staged the event – along with co-hosts Ireland, Scotland and Wales – the 5,000 capacity Cross Green Stadium in the small west Yorkshire town of Otley, in northern England, staged a match.

In 2014, with the RFU hoping to sell 2.4 million tickets, fixtures have gone to larger grounds such as the Championship football club Brighton & Hove Albion’s 30,000 capacity Amex Stadium – although the American Express branding has been temporarily dropped for RWC matches.

With more tickets available than ever before, the RFU is hoping for more visitors.

At the last RWC in 2011, there were between 35,000 and 55,000 extra visitors to New Zealand. At the French RWC in 2007, visitors totalled around 400,000 according to EY. Despite some naysayers claiming that such sporting mega-events can deter visitors, Mr Butler says he does not expect this to happen.

“The criticism of the impact of the Olympics was that it was in summer. September and October in England is not classed as holiday season,” he adds.

EY estimates that between 420,000 and 460,000 will travel to England for RWC with 60 to 70 per cent of international visitors expected to come from elsewhere in Europe.

EY estimates that international visitors are expected to contribute up to £869m in direct expenditure. About 2.2 million local people are also expected to travel to RWC matches in the 11 host cities.

This combined influx of visitors and travel movements around the United Kingdom will generate nearly £1bn for the transport and tourism industry according to recent research by the travel search engine GoEuro.co.uk.

The tournament will be the biggest generator for tourism to England since the 2012 Olympic Games in London, claims GoEuro, and the capital will again be the biggest beneficiary.

Nearly 1.2 million people will watch the 17 matches to be staged in London running up to the final at Twickenham on October 31. This, says GoEuro’s research, will produce an economic boon of £197m with £127.4m spent on accommodation alone.

On top of this figure, £15.4m will also be spent on transport by those visiting the three stadiums in the capital – Twickenham, the Olympic Stadium and Wembley – that will stage matches.

The Millennium Stadium in Cardiff will stage eight games and these will be worth £74.2m to the Welsh economy, according to GoEuro’s research, which covers transport, accommodation and other costs but not tickets to create an average estimate of tourist expenditure.

Even Manchester, in the north-west of England, which only stages a single match – on October 10 between England and Uruguay at the Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City FC’s Etihad Stadium – will reap revenue of £5.7m with another £519,000 spent on travel, GoEuro says.

The tournament has not been without investment. EY’s research shows £85m was spent on infrastructure to stage the event.

Given the various figures being given for the huge payday that the tournament is expected to generate, that is a small price to pay as the RFU prepares for a tournament that it also hopes will produce a major surge in participation on the field.

It is certainly worth a try.