‘Set up to fail’: Cards still stacked against smaller nations at Rugby World Cup

Days after his team suffered a crushing 71-0 defeat at the hands of England, Chile coach Pablo Lemoine vented his frustration at rugby’s glaring inequalities in an interview with French sports daily L’Equipe.  

Lemoine highlighted the great divide between the sport’s traditional heavyweights and the smaller nations lagging behind – a discrepancy he portrayed as a mismatch between “the clowns on one side and the big landowners on the other”.  

“People rave about the small teams putting up a fight, and everyone is thrilled to see Chile play in their first World Cup, but behind the scenes nothing changes,” said the head coach of Los Condores (The Condors), as the Chileans are known. 

Read more‘Special moment’ for South American rugby as Chile join Argentina and Uruguay at World Cup

His remarks won the backing of Argentina’s Agustin Pichot, the former deputy chief of World Rugby, the sport’s governing body. 

In a message posted on the social media platform X, Pichot – who played with Lemoine at Paris club Stade Français in the early 2000s – said his former teammate was right to complain that rugby’s “clowns” had been left out of the sport’s exclusive “boys’ club”.  

The comment was widely interpreted as a dig at rugby’s governing body, which he quit in 2020 after failing in his bid to secure the top job and enact sweeping reform. 

Lopsided contests

Chile’s Lemoine said his team’s historic qualification for the World Cup owed much to the creation of a professional South American rugby league, with support from World Rugby. 

“We’re here because we received funding for this year,” he said. “But for this to be effective, it needs to be sustained over four, eight, twelve years.”  

He cited fellow South American squad Uruguay, which he played for, and whose fighting performance against the French hosts in their group clash on September 14 was widely acclaimed.  

“People talk about Uruguay now, but we (Uruguay) were already at the World Cup in 1999. More than 20 years have gone by and nothing has changed,” he said. “Romania, Namibia, Samoa, Tonga … They were all present [in 1999]. Have they progressed since? On the contrary, they have declined.” 

Uruguay, who play their last World Cup game against New Zealand on Thursday, will bow out of the tournament with a single victory against Namibia – a less prestigious notch in their belt than the Fijian squad they upset four years ago at the World Cup in Japan. 

As for Namibia, the event’s perennial stragglers, they are yet to win a single World Cup game in seven participations. Following their 96-0 defeat at the hands of France, several pundits even questioned the wisdom of having such lopsided contests at the World Cup.  

“It’s important to remember that Namibia has a population of two million and only counts 6,000 licensed rugby players (against 315,000 for France),” former France captain Thierry Dusautoir noted in an article for L’Equipe. “This type of match shows how much work they still have to do.” 

The tournament calendar also penalised the Namibians, retired US international player Will Hooley wrote in The Guardian, arguing that the have-nots had been “set up to fail”. He noted that Namibia’s four pool games were crammed into just 17 days, against 28 for France – a daunting schedule for a team ill accustomed to facing the likes of France and New Zealand. 

Their relative inexperience reflects another glaring inequality: in between the last World Cup and this tournament, Namibia played only a dozen international fixtures, as opposed to 41 for France. Their highest-ranked opponents were Uruguay, ranked 17th in the world, meaning Namibia’s players got precious little practice going into the World Cup. 

A bigger tournament? 

Namibia’s scarce international fixtures included a rare defeat to Ivory Coast in July 2021. For retired player Bakary Meïté, who was part of that Ivorian squad, developing the sport on the continent will require long-term investment.  

“If rugby wants to become truly global, more money must be allocated to the smaller teams,” he said. “The sport is already present in many African countries, but we must give it the means to thrive.” 

Meïté, now a pundit for FRANCE 24’s French-language programme “Planète rugby”, stressed the need to set up a competitive league in Africa in which national teams can face off regularly. Such a league must offer better conditions for players, he added, recalling trips abroad when the Ivorian players were required to play up to three games a week in order to cut costs. 

Read moreRugby World Cup 2023: Fixtures, kick-off times and results

Scrutiny of the smaller teams’ competitiveness is likely to increase in the coming years with plans to enlarge the next World Cup to 24 teams from the current 20.  

At a press conference in Paris last week, World Rugby’s chief executive Alan Gilpin called for efforts to expand the pool of teams competing for a World Cup berth, without confirming rumours of an enlarged format for the tournament. 

“We want more teams able to qualify for future Rugby World Cups and we want more teams able to be competitive in Rugby World Cup and, ultimately, more teams capable of winning Rugby World Cups,” he told reporters in Paris. 

That will require substantial and lasting support for the sport’s emerging nations – and potentially taking on the “big landowners”. Indeed, rugby’s traditional heavyweights from Europe and the southern hemisphere are already at work on a new annual competition involving only a dozen teams, which would leave little space for rugby’s hopefuls.

This article was translated from the original in French.