To win, attract fans. To attract fans, form a cohesive game. 

Rugby 7s needs to choose a side.

After three days at the HSBC SVNS World Championship in Bordeaux (and 8 years following the sport as a casual fan), I think it’s standing at a crossroads. It can lean into being the 14-minute party it already is, or it can grow into a full, standalone sport. Right now it’s trying to be both, and that’s untenable. 

(For anyone who’s never watched: sevens is rugby boiled down to 7 players a side and two 7-minute halves. A full day runs more than a dozen games, back to back. It’s the tasting flight of athletic events.)

I argued last week that a sport’s heir wins by cutting the boring parts. Sevens already did the cutting (15 players down to 7, 80 minutes down to 14). It just never decided what it was cutting toward. 

If You Lean Into the Shortness

The short version is already good. It just wastes its own format. Two fixes:

1. Use the downtime. The games are too short for fans to bond with the teams, so spend the breaks building investment. Share stats on the players. Run through how important this game is. Each team is only on the field for under 20 minutes. That tightness is good. Use this time to reinvigorate the fans about the metagame. 

2. Vary the downtime. How many times can a crowd sing “Sweet Caroline” and watch the “sleepy cam” (the one that finds someone napping in the stands)? Once a day, the organizers seem to believe. These approaches are repetitive. Put a team on interstitial fun: t-shirt cannons, quick water-balloon fights, fan footraces for prizes, a costume contest for cash. You already have a fanbase that turns up in costume. Lean in.

If You Make It A Full-Length Sport

A 14-minute sport is not full-length. The organizers pack three days of tournaments together because each game is only 14 minutes long. What if they made it 2 hours instead? The ledger: 

What it has going for it

• Fast play. Almost no setup or positioning. All action.
• It’s a highlight reel. Lots of intensity, no dull moments, and a huge amount of drama. Most of basketball happens in the last 2 minutes. Rugby 7s has a new exciting event happening at least every minute. 

What it’s up against

1. No obvious fanbase. Rugby fans already have two codes to follow: union (15 a side) and league (13 a side). Sevens is a third, and a stripped-down union at that. Why would a rugby fan adopt a third version? And a newcomer has no particular reason to start with the niche one. (Except that sevens is the Olympic version. And that’s a big leg up.) 
2. Injuries. In 3 days I watched 9+ players get carried or helped off, 2 of them on stretchers. The playing base is growing fast (it looks like a blast to play, if you’re not attached to your future cognition). For a sport chasing families and casual fans, that body count is a bad look on camera. 
3. A touring format that fights fandom. There’s no home-and-away. A small set of core teams (8 this season) tours a circuit (Dubai, Cape Town, Singapore, Perth, Vancouver, LA), then 12 teams contest a 3-city World Championship (Hong Kong, Valladolid, Bordeaux). That’s a time-trial structure (Formula 1, tennis, the surfing tour), not a league. Great for a traveling roadshow, lousy for “my team versus your team”. 
4. Yearly churn. Each season the bottom of the top tier is relegated (down to “SVNS 2”) and new teams come up. So the division’s membership changes every year. Just as a new market learns its team, the team can drop out of the top flight. Hard to grow roots that way.

Changes I’d make

Regardless of which path Rugby 7s takes, these are improvements to the game: 

1. A score shouldn’t end the game. Right now, if you’re up by two scores when the clock hits zero, you’ve effectively won but everyone keeps playing until one of a number of game events happens (the ball goes out of bounds, e.g.). It’s an anticlimax. Either call it the moment it’s decided, or flip it and give the trailing team a lifeline: they keep playing as long as they keep scoring. 
2. Let the halves run longer. Fast doesn’t have to mean 7-minute halves. Hockey is just as fast and handles the gas-tank problem with constant substitutions. Roll players on and off and you can stretch the game without melting the athletes. (Note: You can’t just make it longer. They tried. World Rugby cut their finals from two ten-minute halves down to two seven-minute halves in 2017 precisely to avoid injuries. You have to add fresh legs and deepen the bench.) 
3. Host it in party cities. Amsterdam, Budapest, Las Vegas. The core audience wants to drink for 3 days straight in costume while watching sport. Put the event where that’s already the local economy. (Bordeaux, in fairness, understood the brief.) 
4. Make the drop goal matter. The scoring: a try (similar to a touchdown in American football) is 5, a conversion (like the kick after a touchdown) is 2 (so a converted try is 7); a penalty or drop goal (similar to a field goal that’s not after a touchdown) is 3. Which means a team down by two unconverted tries can claw back exactly to a tie (7 + 3) but cannot win it. Bump the drop goal to 4, maybe even 5. The drop goal turns from a museum piece into a live weapon, and “up by 10” stops feeling safe. 
5. Publish the draws earlier. Tell fans when their team actually plays. As it stands, you find out the morning of the first match, which doesn’t help fans. Currently, a bunch of fans missed the first half of the first day. If your team is playing in the morning, would you make it to the first game (early) and then have a nap? Definite possibility.  
6. Stop the clock during dead time. The clock keeps running during penalty kick-outs, after a score but before the restart, and between a scrum call and the scrum itself (a scrum is like a hockey face-off where three teammates are tied together). That warps the game and rewards stalling. It bites hardest on a yellow card, when a team who’s playing 6 players against 7 for 2 minutes can just bleed the clock. Stop the clock and the gamesmanship dies.
7. Trim the pool stage. You play 3 pool games to cut 12 teams to 8, and then the real tournament is also 3 games. Half the days are positioning, and the pools barely change anything. That’s too much foreplay for the payoff.
8. Make the final feel like a final. Today the final is the same length as every other game. Give it longer halves, or make it a best-of-3 with the 3rd/4th-place match slotted in between for the breather (if you’re concerned about injuries). 
9. Fix the scrum. Over the last 3 days, I cannot recall a time when the team rolling the ball lost possession. That makes scrums in rugby 7s basically just a restart with extra steps. This one needs a revamp, because as-is it’s just wasting time. 

If rugby 7s keeps sprinting the direction it is, it’s going to get tackled. Time to keep tinkering and pick a side. 

Today’s Games Played

The cheese standoff. A vendor slices me 200g of emmental and quotes 3 euros 50. I say card. She says 5-euro minimum on card. I say card is all I’ve got. She says no deal. I walk to the monger two stalls down who sells me 200g of emmental for 5 euros 40. Partner points out how, in the US, the vendor grumbles but eventually takes my money. I’m reminded of the time $20 was as good as 20€. 

The bottle-cap. A French security officer asks if I have bottles. He squeezes the bag. It crunches. He says, “Bottles.” He tells me to take off the cap and bin it. I take off the cap, walk towards the bin, pocket the cap, and walk past him into the stadium with the bottle. (Once inside, I reapply the bottle cap: this wasn’t mere sport, I wanted to use that bottle cap!) French security continues its purposelessness. 

To win the rugby match, score the most points. To score points, move the ball forward. 

Rugby 7s is my favorite spectator sport. My favorite move: the kick-and-chase. The move is what it sounds like: kick the ball into the space behind the defense, then run it down before they can. (Context for the unfamiliar: rugby is a sport similar to American football. In rugby, you cannot throw the ball forward.) 

Here’s why it works.

1. Speed wins the chase. Some teams and players have wheels (the Kenyan men, Japan’s number 3, Mariana Talatoka for Fiji’s women). When you’re that fast, the kick is more a pass to yourself (it’s harder to run with the ball than after it), and you win the foot race more often than not.

2. Nobody’s home in the back. With only 7 per side, teams can’t afford a defensive sweeper. Drop one player from the line and you’re defending six across, and 6-on-7 gives a free space to the offense out wide. 

3. The defense is facing the wrong way. The instant the ball leaves your foot, you’re already sprinting. They have to stop, turn, and go. How many of them will make it there faster than your teammates? 

4. Even a miss pays off. Lose possession and you’ve still gained sizable yardage — and their ball-recoverer will need support to mount a reasonable offense. No second man means no ruck (pass through the legs, during which only your team can grab the ball) and no ruck means they hand the ball right back. The kick-and-chase-to-tackle-and-recover pipeline is a strong one. 

5. My favorite: the bluff. Just having a kick-and-chase in your bag forces the defense to pick a poison. Guard you tight and your kick gains more value. Sit back to cover it and the holes open up for your runs. The threat alone bends the whole defense. If a team restructured their strategy around it (instead of simply playing rugby 7s like it’s a faster rugby 15s), the metagame could easily undergo a paradigm shift. 

So if anyone’s ever complimented your speed (e.g. if Partner referred to you as “having wheels” and I made oinking noises in reference to you being a greased pig), develop your kick. Then go chase it.

— HSBC Sevens World Finals Day 1, Bordeaux, France