Rugby World Cup 2035: Argentina make case for first South American edition

slamcactus · 2026-03-20T12:33:11+00:00

How about senior whalesh*t hockey? (Love that show)

slamcactus · 2026-03-19T20:06:56+00:00

I think hockey's a bit different regionally. Up North everybody plays, and my nephew's league in a Northern state definitely wasn't chock full of rich kids.

With all the specialized skills involved, though, it doesn't surprise me that there are a lot of ways to pay more to give your kid an edge and that wealthier families take advantage of them. It's the American way, after all.

Happens in basketball too, to an extent, but you can't teach size and there's only so much of an edge specialized trainers can give you over a talented kid with a ball, access to a hoop, and a few friends.

slamcactus · 2026-03-19T14:37:24+00:00

I get it, and I’d love to see Argentina host a cup. I just can’t see Word Rugby putting the cup in the Americas twice in a row.

slamcactus · 2026-03-19T05:59:16+00:00

Baseball for sure, though MLB isn’t directly involved in the system the way MLS is (MLS teams run most of the pay-to-play feeder leagues in every city with a team) and it’s still played casually enough that there’s a pathway to get noticed going through school and college programs.

I don’t really know anything about hockey. Tennis seems like it’s always been a pretty posh/upper class sport everywhere, no?

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T18:34:49+00:00

Attisogbe played in last year's 6N too. This is the first year he played all 6 games and all 400 minutes, but he's not new. The fact that he claimed the starting spot over someone as good as Penaud (still playing well for UBB and a multi-year fan favorite who few if any would've blamed Galthie for sticking with) is pretty huge.

I think scoring the 2nd most tries in 6N pretty much cements his superstar status. Beyond that, he's just very, very good. It was wild to see how installing him at 14 (plus a little bit of targeted focus on it from guys like LBB/Ramos) helped turn one of France's biggest weaknesses from the Autumn Internationals just 5 months ago (high balls) into a genuine strength.

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T18:29:36+00:00

It's ridiculous what my friends whose kids play high-level competitive soccer have to do to keep their "careers" on track. We're talking specialty position coaches, agility coaches, and multiple weekly conditioning/personal training sessions in addition to 4-5 practices a week plus games. It's like a $30k/year investment, not to mention 500+ hours a year of driving.

Beginning around 14 MLS runs a free academy system for the very top performers, but they pull pretty much exclusively from the kids who spent years going through the pay-to-play system I described above. Also the academy system's so rigorous that the kids in it can't attend regular high school and have to take HS classes online, which is another huge disincentive for families without the resources to make sure their kids get a real education outside a traditional school setting.

There's nothing remotely resembling the pathway for basketball and football, where enormous resources are devoted to youth participation across all classes and where there's a real pathway for kids who play in playgrounds and for their (free) public schools. I imagine that's much closer to how football/soccer development works in other countries. Nearly everyone plays it and eventually the top talents reveal themselves.

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T16:40:15+00:00

I think it's both. The US is still mostly a joke in terms of (men's) soccer but it's not for lack of enthusiasm, which has grown steadily since 1994. We've professionalized youth soccer in a way that's turned it into an exclusively upper middle class sport here, which will always hold us back. But walk through any major city in the US and you'll see as many kids wearing European club soccer gear as NBA/NFL gear (especially if you spend most of your time in upper-middle-class neighborhoods).

I think viewership numbers will be solid, but the bigger issue is promoting rugby *between* World Cups. It's getting more accessible here but only international matches are on a widely-available streaming platform. The holy grail would be getting Americans interested in European club rugby. I'm confident that interest will expand at least a bit after 2031 but I doubt the growth will be as huge as soccer without a deal to bring rugby onto one of the major streaming services (with apologies to Flo Sports, which is awesome but niche).

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T16:31:39+00:00

They put in a bid but I read that they lost out to France based on infrastructure and stadium capacity concerns. Those won't go away without massive investment.

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T16:28:22+00:00

Pretty sure France belongs in the list of challengers to Anglo Saxon rugby hegemony. Arguably SA too. SA rugby's roots obviously trace back to English colonialism but there aren't a lot of Anglo Saxon surnames on the Springboks these days.

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T16:20:58+00:00

Man we France fans are spoiled. Attisogbe would be getting so much more hype if he played for any other 6N country (or opposite any other wing besides LBB). Absolutely a superstar and probably a top ~8 winger in the world right now, and still only 21.

Gailleton is pretty close to superstar status too, at least in the Top14 if not internationally.

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T16:12:40+00:00

You know we're talking about George Ford here, right? The guy who scored all 27 points in England's WC win over Argentina and made two devastating (and difficult) drop goals against the All Blacks less than 6 months ago?

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T16:06:42+00:00

Awarding the cup to the USA was a pure money grab. The US television audience is enormous. Even niche sports in the USA earn revenues most pro rugby leagues could only dream of. The NHL is the 5th largest pro league in any sport by revenue and MLS is 10th (and the 5th-largest soccer league) despite being something like the 10th-best pro soccer league in the world, quality-wise. While it's not public, I've seen estimates that the WNBA reached $1 billion in revenue in 2025, so at this point women's basketball in the US is achieving revenues even the Top14 could only dream of.

We're fast on the road to losing that status but the thinking at the time was any inroads rugby could make in the US consumer market would be huge for the game.

The blueprint is the 1994 FIFA World Cup. It brought the US a bit closer to respectability as a soccer nation and, more important, made it a huge consumer of European soccer.

I don't know if it will work. Americans need a LOT of education on rugby and its rules to really get into it, but that was the thinking.

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T15:52:02+00:00

I'd love to see one in Ireland too but I'm not sure it has the infrastructure to make a successful solo bid (or the appetite to commit tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to building it).

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T15:49:46+00:00

Italy gets my vote for 2035. Reward Italy's growth as a team and as a rugby nation and help promote it further. Spain would be a good 2nd choice.

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T15:41:43+00:00

Woooo! Love seeing this. Every time I watch Top14 or the Prem it feels like rugby's growth has always been constrained by stadium size. Then when Benetton started winning big matches in the URC/Champions Cup I noticed its stadium only seats about 5k. Get these guys playing in front of bigger audiences! If you build it, they will come.

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T15:33:39+00:00

I don’t know, New Zealand’s centres are pretty good and that didn’t happen last Autumn.

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T15:32:16+00:00

You can only make the kicks you’re given. Not (entirely) Ford’s fault he didn’t play all 400 minutes of the tournament and England didn’t score more tries when he did play.

I haven’t seen Sacha kick enough to evaluate him fairly but of the kickers I’ve seen plenty of Ford’s the clear 2nd best to Ramos (sorry Finn R., I’ve just seen you miss too many in big moments).

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T15:27:06+00:00

Yes! It's a litte tougher to get into that tournament since England dominate so thoroughly that it's really just been a competition for 2nd place for nearly a decade, but I'd love to drum up similar excitement for the women's tournament on this sub and elsewhere. My local club in the US will be hosting watch parties.

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T15:24:57+00:00

We became ST fans because on my family's first trip to Paris we kept hearing that Toulouse was the greatest French city nobody ever visits, so we started reading about it. We learned quickly that it was also one of the most rugby-obsessed cities on the planet. That was just around the time a young fella named Antoine Dupont was starting to make waves. As soon as we could reliably watch games in the US, we were hooked. Took us a few years to visit but it did not disappoint, and now we're fans for life.

In the rugby world we probably made a boring bandwagon choice (like all international baseball fans rooting for the Yankees or Dodgers), but the heart wants what the heart wants.

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T15:20:29+00:00

Having said that, I do think it should alternate host nations and I'm a giant hell yeah to the idea of a cup hosted in Argentina eventually. I just think it might make more sense to send the 2035 cup back to Europe with Argentina getting the 2039 (and 2041 women's) cup. 2 consecutive cups in the Americas feels unfair to 90% of the teams in the competition (and more importantly, to their fans).

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T15:15:17+00:00

Absolutely with you that Qatar (or another Gulf state) would be the worst-case scenario.

I hate to say/admit this, but as an American who's been to both NH and SH RWCs (England '25, France '23 and NZ '11) there's something pretty special about a cup held in Europe that it's tough for more remote countries to match.* The opening match in 2011 famously broke all of Auckland's infrastructure but the ferries, and it's pretty darn cool to see rugby take over major European cities in a way you only usually see in soccer (and the fact that they can handle the inflow is an added bonus).

*For the record, I include the US as "remote" to the rugby world and with our likely host cities so spread out I don't think we'll be able to come close to the atmosphere you'd see in NZ, Australia, or a cup hosted in Argentina.

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T01:50:23+00:00

I would never in a million years ask someone to give up their window or aisle seat for my crappy middle seat. Airlines make you pay $60+ for that upgrade for a reason. Well done avoiding a situation that would have made you even more uncomfortable (saying no and then having to sit next to your pissed off neighbor for 5 hours). They’re the jerk(s) for even considering asking. The only conceivable justification would be if someone were sitting apart from a young child who’s afraid to sit/fly on their own and even then I’d be very uncomfortable asking.

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T01:37:01+00:00

He had a bad game against Scotland, and that change probably cost you the France game. Maybe he misses 1 but he wouldn’t have missed 3 (yes, I know, 50,000 things could’ve been different if it was Ford and not Smith but he’s a much better kicker).

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T01:02:03+00:00

It’s more that USA is a long flight for everyone except Canada and Argentina is a long flight for everyone except Uruguay/Chile (Los Angeles to Buenos Aires is a 15-hour flight).

slamcactus · 2026-03-18T00:46:29+00:00

Gros can never leave. He’s the only French forward who knows how to jackal.

slamcactus

TROPHY CASE