The passion of Americans for rugby 7

The countdown is almost over: on the weekend between 25 and 26 February, while rugby fans in Europe will be keeping their eyes on the Six Nations, Los Angeles will welcome the American leg of the World Rugby Seven Series. This particular contingency between one of the oldest trophies in the history of sport and the extraordinary dynamism of the “seven” variant poses an interesting reflection, which starts from a question: why do Americans follow Sevens so much, while almost completely ignoring traditional rugby?

Let’s start with the objective data. The rugby sevens it is precisely a variant of traditional rugby in which seven against seven are played, on a field as large as a fifteen-a-side rugby one. Obviously, managing spaces becomes fundamental, especially in defense.

Games last 14 minutes, divided into two halves of 7. Scrums and lineouts are played by only three players from each team. All this makes Seven a very dynamic sport, in which explosive and physically strong players prevail, but also a much more spectacular and televised sport than the rugby we are all used to.

These are mainly the reasons why, Since the 2016 Rio De Janeiro Olympic Games, Seven has become a medal-awarding discipline. A truly unique case: a main sport is not an Olympic discipline, but a variant of it is. As if you chose to keep only futsal, or basketball 3, or beach volleyball.

However, the entire world movement of Seven is under the aegis of World Rugby, which organizes the World Series every year, a series of tournaments around the world between the best national teams. At the end of the season, the ranking points are added up and a winner is decreed. Then there is the specialty World Cup, every four years.

However, the geography of rugby sevens excellence is not identical to that of the more traditional and widespread rugby fifteens. New Zealand, South Africa, Australia are also among the strongest national teams in this world, but next to them there is no France, there is no Wales, there is no England, on the contrary. In place of the British national teams, for some years there has been Team GB, the representative team of the United Kingdom, which is functional because every four years it is the latter that will compete in the Olympic Games. The other strong teams are Argentina, Samoa, Fiji (which won both gold medals up for grabs, both in Rio in 2016 and in Tokyo in 2021) and, precisely, the United States.

If you really want to understand why the Americans, the same ones who invented WWE and with it the concept of “sports entertainment”, like Seven so much, go and see the times of the matches of the Los Angeles leg: it is played at (time Italian, ed.) 18.15, 18.37, 18.59, 19.21, 19.43, 20.05, 20.27 and so on until 23.40. Fifteen games in five hours and twenty-five minutes, one every 22 minutes. A television binge that collects commercials, sponsorshipbut, above all, goals.

It is said that during the 1994 World Cup, there were very few American fans in the stands, because almost all of them were watching the futsal matches organized by Fifa as a promotional event. This for two reasons: because there were more goals and because, above all, there was air conditioning in the arenas, while not in the stadiums. Something more American than ever, testifying to the fact that often, in the United Statesi, sport goes beyond the concept of competition we have in Europe and takes on a more global sense, linked to general entertainment, rather than what happens on the pitch. An example. On February 8, during the third quarter of the game between the Lakers and Thunders, LeBron James surpassed the all-time record for points in the NBA, which Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had established in 1989. At the time of the basket, the game stopped to celebrate James and to have Abdul-Jabbar himself reward him. Photos, prizes, smiles, confetti and off we go, the game has resumed. In Europe such a thing would never have happened.

Ultimately, does the Seven take away space from traditional rugby in the United States? Not exactly. On the contrary, it is the right weapon to let the public discover a sport that has never caught on too much. After all, Netflix is ​​filming a documentary on the Six Nations precisely to sell a product to that market, given that the 2031 World Cup will be organized there. If you see a growing wave of enthusiasm for rugby in America over the next eight years, don’t be surprised, it’s all part of the plan.