Olympics could be turning point in history of Rugby Sevens

Being in from the start when something morphs from curio to cultural mainstream is a financial fantasy for moneybags everywhere. Sport is no different, although impressing a jaded public palate makes the task very difficult indeed. Betting on Rugby Sevens bucking the trend mightn’t be the worse investment ever made.

Basketball was arguably the last to really make the jump on a global commercial scale. The NBA is less than 70 years old. The game was included in the Olympics in 1936 after initially flourishing in high schools throughout North America. Now it's ubiquitous, the sporting world unimaginable without it.

Gimmicky hard-sells have followed on lots of other stuff, provoking brief spikes of popularity, often revolving around individuals and the cultish following attracted by their so-called charisma.

Ireland’s current fixation with Conor McGregor and MMA is a case in point. McGregor’s meteoric rise to fame is a cultural phenomenon. The sport, however, remains largely a curio, something implicitly acknowledged by the man himself proclaiming that his colleagues are riding on the tails of his Copelands.

The long-term implications for MMA on the back of the obscenity that was Joao Carvalho’s death are unclear given the dichotomy between public revulsion and its appetite for blood. A lot clearer is the likelihood of its broad appeal in Ireland vanishing as quickly as the brief 1980s surge for American football did once McGregor finally gives up his own hard-sell.

Rugby Sevens is starting to get a hard-sell on the run-in to its Olympic inclusion in Rio. HSBC Bank has produced a report into rugby’s prospects over the next decade and, maybe not surprisingly since it is already involved in sponsoring Sevens tournaments, it identifies the shorter, quicker, smaller version as the 21st-century future.

More significant are the figures throwing their weight behind them, including Brian O’Driscoll, who has pointed out how Sevens requires fewer resources and opens rugby up to potential new worldwide audiences on the back of its Olympic exposure.

“Rugby will increasingly be about new formats and new audiences,” the blessed BOD has proclaimed. Clive Woodward chipped in with: “Sevens is this sleeping giant of rugby. I think it can really help develop on a world level . . . Rio will be the springboard to take it global.”

A sceptic might suspect an element of ‘singing-for-supper’ in such statements but nevertheless it requires a particularly blinkered blazer to logically dismiss the potential lurking within a format which contains everything that makes the 15s game enthralling, while sidelining much of what makes it worrisome.

Irresistible forces

If space is what is so lacking in top professional rugby, to the extent that, in this part of the world at least, much of what passes for entertainment is little more than an exercise in immovable objects crashing into irresistible forces, then the Sevens game provides it in spades.

The result is a fast, dynamic, running spectacle which puts an accent on what purists adamantly maintain is what rugby is really about – fast hands, fast minds and fast legs. No sport, especially one as physical as rugby, can be child-proofed to ‘stand-up-in-court-yer-honour’ standard but with space, three-man scrums, and the priority put on avoiding tackles rather than attracting them, the plusses of Sevens, as the XVs trend remorselessly continues towards size, and the headaches, both real and metaphorical, that come with that, are obvious.

It is just as obvious why Sevens, like basketball a century ago, is prospering in schools. The safety aspect is one element, but another is that compared to some of the frantic pressure being put on some kids, the smaller game simply looks like a lot of fun. And as every moneybags factors into the spreadsheet, fun and kids equals potential spend.

Like most things it will come down to supplying a demand and as yet Sevens mostly remains a curio, both financially and in spectator terms. But it doesn’t require a huge leap of the imagination to see that starting to change in the context of Olympic participation by star players like Sonny Bill Williams and Bryan Habana.

Potential

In the context of the IRFU’s overall promotion of the game it is too pat to say they have been typically late in recognising this potential. However, those who know about such things maintain Irish rugby’s ruling body has missed an Olympic trick and are playing Sevens catch-up. Only time will tell the extent of how big a missed-trick it is.

There’s an obvious problem in making it an ‘either-or’ situation between the different rugby codes, just as there are obvious problems in Sevens breaking into the mainstream.

Matches lasting just 20 minutes hardly encourage them to be perceived in singular ‘event’ terms, the sort to convince people to make a weekend of it. There’s also a suspicion of show over substance about Sevens that provokes suspicion among veterans of the scrum and ruck wars. But these are hardly insurmountable problems considering telly is king and flash bite-sized action is telly catnip.

There’s a logic to the potential of Sevens expanding rapidly over the coming years that is hard to argue with, something unlikely to prevent arguments anyway considering the illogicality of what ultimately appeals enough to make us pay for it.

However, if the ambition is to expand rugby throughout the globe, then a game which encourages speed rather than brute force looks a massive plus. Cricket purists tut-tut about the one-day and Twenty 20 game compared to Tests but that hasn’t stopped its rapid expansion. Sevens rugby could be a similar beast.

Crucially it opens up a different avenue from what is increasingly perceived as brutal professionalism to provide rugby with a potential clean slate.