Big decisions need to be made to future-proof world sevens
Franchise models, commercial rights and television packages need to be on the table in a rethink of the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series to future-proof it as a major global sport, says Sporting Eric sevens’ lead and Team GB and England captain Tom Mitchell
It’s well over a year since the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series ceased trading in its chosen commodity: weekend-long rugby festivals held in stunning locations around the world, with a party atmosphere in the stands and the best sevens teams in the world competing for glory.
Dubai, Hong Kong, Cape Town, Vancouver, Hamilton, Singapore, London, Paris, LA and Sydney are the series stops which lay on an intoxicating sporting occasion for players and fans alike.
However, behind the glamour and the drama and the fancy dress, the commercial structure of the series just wasn’t working. It didn’t reward anyone particularly well.
The enforced shut down of the series last March gave everyone involved in the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series a chance to reboot and the impression I get is that the future of the series may look very different. There is a really strong collective feeling right now that we can’t carry on as we have been. And that’s a powerful consensus to have.
Commercial considerations must come first
What has to change – and what I believe is changing – is for commercial considerations to be placed firmly at the centre of everyone’s thinking. Sevens has got many things right over the years – not least it’s compelling campaign for acceptance onto the Olympic programme in 2009 – but Olympic approval was never going to be a commercial panacea. And so it’s proved.
For sevens to move forward into a more profitable and sustainable future, several matters need addressing.
Firstly, not enough of the ten tournaments on the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series make money. Dubai and Hong Kong are the poster tournaments for our series as they stand strongly on their own two feet. The other eight tournaments either make a loss, or just about wash their face.
The amazing thing is, when World Rugby – the rights holders to the series – invite bids for new tournaments, lots of cities apply. Cities want to host sevens tournaments even though they are not making money. Can you imagine how competitive that process would be if they did all make money?
The challenge for tournaments in making money is the centralised nature of the partnership model. Global bank HSBC are the title partner of the World Series and bring a prominent corporate presence to every leg. This fosters the idea of a travelling global tour, a series. However, if I am an individual tournament host, I want to sell my own rights for my own event as much as possible, I don’t want to be restricted by title sponsors as I’m not getting much from them.
Can sevens do a ‘Formula 1’?
Either we go fully in on a series where each host benefits more from whatever partnerships they have, or we do away with the series feel, and open up more commercial freedoms for individual tournaments. If we continue with the series feel, the title sponsors – which currently include DHL, Capgemini, UL as well as HSBC – need to see a business benefit in each of the locations, and I don’t know if they do right now. They are going to be getting far more out of Hong Kong than out of Hamilton in New Zealand, so that’s a major challenge.
I look enviably at where Formula 1 is. There are obvious parallels because, like us, they take the same teams to different locations around the world, on a series effectively. However, each of the stops is prestigious in its own right and I’m pretty sure most of those events are making a decent wedge somewhere along the line!
The big difference of course between F1 and sevens is the teams. F1 teams are commercially backed entities with a clear business objective, or funded by private money.
Whereas in sevens, to compete on the World Series, teams must seek an agreement from World Rugby to compete, and right now that agreement must be with a union. You don’t have to use your imagination particularly strongly to see that if you scrap that rule and permit unions to sell the rights to their team to an outside company, even for a period of time, some drastic changes will take place almost overnight.
Sponsors are agents for change
Take England as an example, if the RFU sold the rights to our team to an Ineos or a Sky, or anyone like that, everything the team does would be geared towards making the team a success on the pitch and therefore commercially as well. With England Sevens we were part of a bigger picture at the RFU where, generally speaking, we picked up whatever was happening on the 15’s side. The RFU weren’t making individual deals for brands to activate around sevens. On occasion brands came in specifically with that aim but that hasn’t happened a lot in my time.
We’ve got to be wary not to think that seeking private money is a fix-all that will solve our problems but there are examples out there of the positive effect it could have.
In New Zealand, we’ve seen it happen with the union’s partnership with Red Bull where they held talent searches that have led to players getting professional contracts with the New Zealand Sevens team. That represents a very clear lining up of a brand with the sport in a way that benefits the sport and the union.
There’s been experimentation elsewhere as well. In the USA, the sevens team is funded three ways, by the union, by the Olympic committee, and by a philanthropic group of private funders called the ‘Golden Eagles’, who not only help fund the rugby side of the USA’s programme but also help players develop their careers away from the game.
As a group of high net-worth individuals, they don’t need to push their brand so much, but imagine the push that, say, an Amazon would look to give the team. So that’s an interesting hybrid approach.
I recently gained a glimpse of another alternative future for sevens: the franchise model. I was lucky enough to play in the inaugural World Tens tournament in Bermuda in October. It resembled the World Series in many ways except we weren’t playing for our country, and we had three more players on the pitch. I was part of the London Royals whilst other players competed under the banner of the Asia Pacific Dragons, the Miami Sun, the Ohio Aviators, Rhino from Southern California and Phoenix from the Middle East. Teams were thrown together by geography but there was no obligation to be from London, or Miami, or the Middle East.
The franchise model has been pitched to World Rugby before, and is something we’ve seen work really well in cricket with the Indian Premier League, where privately-owned teams can afford to bring the best players in the world to play in the league, helping it draw massive crowds in stadiums and on TV.
It’s no secret that the wages in sevens deter many rugby players from choosing to play the shortened form of the game. But what if that dynamic was flipped and sevens became rugby’s big money sport with each team able to lure some of the best 15s players in the world to play for them for a season or two?
Combining star attraction with sevens’ natural advantages as a sport could have a drastic impact on its appeal. Sevens already has many qualities that reflect where we are at in the world. It’s a bitesize version of the game – and it’s well talked about how young people prefer short, sharp consumption; it’s very accessible as you don’t need to understand it to appreciate the speed of the players, their ability to beat people, their power, and the scoring of tries which everyone can celebrate, and which come thick and fast. It’s also an extremely global version of rugby. At every tournament, sixteen men’s teams and twelve women’s teams are in the mix to win the title, and anyone can beat anyone. The likes of Spain, Canada and the USA have all won tournaments in recent seasons, with the USA almost winning the men’s and women’s series in 2019.
Television talks
Another key component which must be resolved is sevens’ TV package. This is all important for the series to be viable.
At the moment, a weekend of sevens is a hard sell to a broadcaster because no-one wants to block out two days of television for anything, let alone something with breaks where your country is not always playing.
World Rugby have toyed with the tournament’s structure a few times. At the Sevens World Cup in San Francisco in 2018 the competition was effectively a knock-out, which was met with mixed feelings. Whilst last season they introduced a ‘super session’ which was a two-hour window when all the tournament finals took place back-to-back. This was drafted with those broadcasters in mind who might not take the full weekend but see the benefit in the thrills and spills of sevens in a two-hour format when something is really on the line.
Improving your product on-screen, however, seems to come at the cost of the in-stadium product. I haven’t yet heard people talk about a solution that satisfies both. And this brings us back to the trade off between going all-in on the series concept, or freeing up individual tournaments to make the most of their events.
I have been a player on the World Series now since 2012, so I have to be careful to separate what I think is really working from what I like just because I am used to it. I’m not a traditionalist by inclination but at the same time I believe sevens has many existing qualities so it’s baffling to me that it hasn’t achieved the success it evidently has the potential for.
The good news is there is an appetite right now to put immediate self-interest aside and hone in on what is really important: making sevens a fiercely competitive commercial animal. The sport is no longer looking at how brands can fit into its existing commercial model; it’s now ready to work with brands to create a new commercial model that can send sevens into the stratosphere.
Tom Mitchell is the sevens’ lead for Sporting Eric and England Sevens captain.