Rugby is changing. If you read this article back in a year, it’ll have changed again.
This is natural. Rugby (union) is still quite young as a professional sport, and it has experimented with several tweaks to the laws over the last twenty-five years to keep the core elements of the game fresh.
Actually, “fresh” might not be fully accurate. The biggest drivers of law tweaks have been either player safety-led or, far more fervently, entertainment value. That isn’t to say that World Rugby aren’t invested in player safety — they absolutely are — but that’s more of a ward against future litigation as much as anything else, as well as the driving belief that professional athletes should only be moderately broken up after their sporting career, where possible.
Every professional sports person, be they tennis players, basketball players, American footballers, hockey players or soccer players, pays a physical toll for their career in their late 30s, 40s and beyond. Rugby is a particular outlier here — only comparable to rugby league, ice hockey and the NFL — when it comes to the physical toll it can take.
Any law tweak towards player safety is usually fervently resisted, mostly by people who have a lot of testosterone tied up in rugby being the most dangerous, physical team sport you can play. World Rugby are aware of this and how it ties into the perceived entertainment value of the game’s more brutal aspects.
The biggest driver of law tweaks or outright changes has been to improve the game as a spectacle, mainly to help package it as a TV product that might appeal to more people.
This is a sport that needs eyeballs — new ones — and what the market research says those new eyeballs want is a simpler, faster game that doesn’t take too long to complete, that still has all the big hits and carries that rugby is known for, but that doesn’t get bogged down in the stuff that that the casual audience doesn’t understand, like the scrum, box kicking battles or complex breakdown rules.
When World Rugby’s Shape of the Game conference is finished this week, they’ll have been talking about things just like this.
These are the first three things on the agenda.
- Strengthening rugby’s global presence and impact
- Growing rugby’s audience appeal
- Law innovation and game presentation
That should tell you all you need to know. As it stands, Australia and New Zealand are looking to change elements of the game to make it more attractive to their domestic audience, who are currently being gobbled up by the NRL, or at least that’s how it feels to them.
They feel that the modern game has too many delays, that it’s too slow and too dominated by the scrum, even with all the attempts to nerf it.
In this season’s Super Rugby Pacific, Australia & New Zealand are applying law tweaks/interpretations/experiments that reflect where they want to bring the game globally.
• It will no longer be mandatory for the referee to issue a yellow or red card to a player on the defending team when awarding a penalty try. Any sanction will be at the discretion of the referee. (Law 8.3)
• Accidental off-sides and teams delaying playing the ball away from a ruck will result in free kicks rather than scrums. (Law 10.5 and Law 15.17)
• After the referee has called “use it” at the ruck, no additional players from the team in possession may join the ruck. (Law 15.17)
• Teams will be permitted to pass the ball back into their half before kicking a 50:22. (Law 18.8a)
• Players will be allowed to take quick taps within one metre either side of the mark, or anywhere behind the mark, if they are within that two-metre channel running parallel to the touchlines. (Law 20.2)
The intent is clear: reduce stoppages, punish teams for slowing the game down, and keep the ball in play. It is a reasonable set of instincts. It is also, if history is any guide, likely to produce at least one outcome that nobody in that conference room anticipated.
The Exploit Always Arrives
The pattern is consistent enough by now that it should probably be treated as a law of its own. World Rugby identifies a problem. World Rugby legislates against it. Coaches find the geometry of the new law within months, sometimes weeks, and begin extracting advantage from it in ways that often produce a new problem — frequently a version of the original one, just wearing a different coat of paint.
The breakdown is the oldest and most layered example. The jackal — the art of the arriving defender stealing possession over the ball — has been in a decades-long arms race with the laws designed to govern it. World Rugby has repeatedly tried to clarify what constitutes a legal clearout, what constitutes a legal jackalling position, and when a referee should blow for not releasing. Every clarification has been met with a coaching adaptation. Defences got better at the jackal; attacks got better at protecting the ball. Referees were asked to make faster, finer judgements under more pressure and at higher speeds. The laws got more complex. The game got more stop-start in exactly the areas the laws were trying to accelerate.
Kick escorting is the most counterintuitive example of all, and the most recent. The law tweak was introduced specifically to encourage a fair contest for the ball in the air, but with the secondary benefit of reducing the attritional, low-risk box-kicking exchanges that were making large sections of Test matches unwatchable.
If a team kicked the ball in play, they could no longer “glove” the catcher — form a wall in front of the winger of fullback to prevent a genuine contest — so kicking was super-charged.
The idea of “escorting” chasers away from the kicker was something of a fudge in the law interpretations after a rash of aerial collisions and cards in the early to mid 2010s, as the game got to grips with the box kick, itself an evolution of the 2009 ELVs.
This has created a modern game where the maths are changing block to block on what winning rugby looks like.
Laws are Fast, Coaches are Faster
The reason this pattern keeps repeating is structural and probably irreversible. A law revision committee meets periodically, works from data collected over seasons, consults widely, argues, compromises and produces a change that attempts to close a loophole or shift a strategic incentive. It is a slow, institutional, consensus-driven process. A professional coaching staff, by contrast, has one job: find every available advantage within the current laws. They are faster, more motivated, better resourced in terms of analytical tools, and completely unsentimental about the spirit of any law versus its letter.
This is not a criticism of coaches. It is a description of the system. The game is supposed to be played at the edge of what the laws allow. That is what elite sport is. But it does mean that any law change should be evaluated not just for what it intends to prevent, but for what new behaviour it will incentivise — and that analysis is extremely difficult to do from outside a high-performance coaching environment.
World Rugby have made efforts to bring coaches and technical experts into the consultation process, and the Super Rugby Pacific trials represent a more empirical approach than full global implementation. That is the right direction. But the history of the game suggests that even well-designed, well-tested changes will produce surprises. The game’s ecosystem is too complex, and the people exploiting it are too good, for it to be otherwise.
The Team That Didn’t Wait
Which brings us to France. While World Rugby have spent the better part of a decade trying to legislate the game into something more attractive — faster, more continuous, more tries, less grinding breakdown attrition — France’s coaching staff appears to have simply asked a different question. Not “what will the laws allow us to do?” but “what does the defence need to reset, and how do we deny them that?”
The answer they arrived at was the ruck. Every time a ball-carrier goes to ground and a ruck forms, the defence gets a pause. Bodies flood back. The line reorganises. Channels that were open a phase ago are now plugged. The ruck is not just a way of retaining possession — it is a gift to the defence, and France decided to stop giving it.
Across their three Six Nations matches to date, France’s ruck counts were 96, 84 and 89. For context, Wales ran 125 rucks against France in a single game alone. France produced 56 offloads in the tournament — more than double Ireland’s 25 in second place. They lead the tournament in retained kicks percentage, metres per kick, and kicks bounced — the number of kicks that hit grass without a defender catching it first.
It has produced three bonus point wins, 18 tries scored, and a Grand Slam surely in their sights over the next three weeks.
None of this required a law change, well, bar the escort law two years ago.
It required a coaching philosophy, a player skill set developed culturally, and the willingness to accept the risk of offloading in contact rather than the false security of just one more ruck. France did not solve rugby’s entertainment problem through legislation. They solved it on the training ground.
France have decided that the most energy efficient way of playing is by kicking long to defend, rather than to contest shorter range kicks. They have also decided that the second most energy-efficient way of playing is in attacking transition. If you do the former well, the latter will present itself by default.
France doesn’t play any phases that they don’t need to. They take three phases max inside their own 10m line — mostly to find the edge of the field — and then kick long to pressure with their hard-working, pacey wingers and midfielders, all of them with similar physical profiles, hunting kick receivers and looking to force the opposition onto the back foot with a very traditional, non-blitz defence that looks to stop momentum and invite the kick back.
The irony of the Shape of the Game conference is fairly pointed. The game that World Rugby is trying to manufacture through law innovation — continuous, offload-heavy, kick-and-chase rather than kick-and-reset, with fewer stoppages and more tries — is the game France are already playing. They built it within the existing laws.
The laws of rugby will keep changing. The coaches will keep finding the exploit. And occasionally, while all of that is happening, a team will come along and solve the problem from the inside. Not because the laws forced them to, but because they worked out that the way everyone else was playing was leaving points on the table.
That might be the most important lesson the Shape of the Game conference could take away. The game doesn’t need to be redesigned. It needs stability and imagination within the framework that we already have.
