Rugby’s biggest growth segment is pre-teen - and brands haven’t noticed

Rugby is growing. But the more commercially significant story is how  it is growing – and for whom. The figure of 8.46 million registered Rugby Union players worldwide in 2023, confirmed by the rugby union governing body World Rugby, represents an 11 percent year-on-year increase and a full post-pandemic recovery. Yet the number alone doesn’t speak of the structural shift that is occurring in rugby: A shift that is more significant than the recovery. The sport’s center of gravity has moved away from adult male club rugby toward youth formats, women’s participation and non-contact recreational variants.

For brands, retailers and investors in sporting goods, the relevant question is no longer whether rugby is recovering. It is what the composition of that recovery means for product demand, infrastructure investment and long-term market development.

The numbers at a glance

● 8.46m Global Rugby Union registered players, World Rugby, 2023

● 57 percent Pre-teen share of all Rugby Union players globally, World Rugby, 2023

● ~2m Female rugby players globally, World Rugby, 2024

Rugby Union is not developing in isolation. Rugby League – a distinct set of rules (or “code”) governed separately by the International Rugby League (IRL), with a playing base concentrated in England and Australia, as well as New Zealand and the South Pacific islands – is registering parallel structural changes: Youth age groups recovering while the adult open-age category continues a long-term decline. The two codes share a commercial footprint in apparel, footwear, equipment and infrastructure, even as their participation dynamics diverge. This report covers both, with figures kept distinct.

Across formats and codes, two forces are reshaping the market. The first is demographic: More than half of all rugby union players globally are now under 12, according to World Rugby, and women’s participation is expanding at nearly twice the rate of men’s. The second is geographic: While traditional rugby nations in Europe, Oceania and South Africa are consolidating, emerging markets – in the US, Africa and Asia – are entering a high-growth expansion phase timed, in the case of the US, to the country’s hosting of the Men’s Rugby World Cup in 2031 and the Women’s in 2033.

Rugby’s participation reset

World Rugby recorded 8.46 million active registered Rugby Union players across 132 national member unions in 2023 – an 11 percent year-on-year increase and a rebound from a pandemic-era contraction which reached only an estimated 7.62 million players in 2022. The latest figure is significant. And its significance lies not only in the increased number, but in the methodology behind it.

Pre-pandemic global rugby figures, frequently reported at between 9.1 million and 9.6 million, were built on exposure-based metrics that counted children attending school clinics, one-time introductory sessions and casual programs alongside committed club members. The 2023 number is an audited count of active registered players. This is not a like-for-like, year-on-year comparison – and the distinction matters commercially.

Participation data collection is being modernized, giving a more accurate commercial picture. New Zealand Rugby (NZR), for example, completed a transition to the Rugby Xplorer database during this period: A cloud-managed unified platform that eliminates double-counting and enables real-time tracking of player retention across age groups and gender. The model is widely cited as the direction of travel for national unions globally. Its commercial implication is straightforward: Brands, retailers and infrastructure investors can now work from defensible, addressable market data rather than projections built on school-attendance estimates.

So what are the participation figures for rugby?

Get Into Rugby, World Rugby’s school-based introduction program, historically engaged up to two million children annually at its pre-pandemic peak. However, the complete cessation of school sports during 2020 and 2021 pulled the foundational layer of the participation funnel offline. But the recovery from that disruption has been faster than initial projections: Clubs increased by 30 percent globally between 2022 and 2023, and the total estimated participant base – including casual, school and non-registered engagement – now sits at approximately 46 million, according to World Rugby.

That gap – between 8.46 million registered players and 46 million estimated participants – is the conversion opportunity that national unions and commercial operators are systematically targeting.

Source: World Rugby participation reports; New Zealand Rugby Annual Report 2025. (Note: Pre-2023 figures use exposure-based methodology and are not directly comparable with the 2023 audited count.)

Rugby League participation numbers tell a parallel story. Community participation – concentrated primarily in the north of England – hit a low of 75,238 players in 2021, rebounding to 97,958 registered participants by 2024. The IRL’s 2024 Annual Report records a historic peak of 72 international fixtures in the year, a structural sign of the code’s expanding global ambition.

Both trajectories confirm the same thing: The contraction was real, the recovery is durable, and the data infrastructure underpinning it is now more reliable than at any previous point in the sport’s history.

Youth: Rugby’s structural majority 

More than half of all Rugby Union players globally are pre-teen. That 57 percent share of the active registered base is the single most commercially significant data point in the current participation dataset – and its significance is underweighted in most industry discussion of rugby’s growth trajectory.

It means the sport is not simply recovering from a pandemic dip. It is being structurally rebuilt from the youngest age groups upward, through a deliberate policy shift toward non-contact and modified-contact formats.

World Rugby and national unions have deployed a range of structural modifications designed to reduce barriers to entry, particularly in the youth game. Lowered tackle-height guidelines (which reduce the risk of head-on-head contact) have been introduced across community-level games. The Game On Global variations allow clubs to organize official competitions with flexible team sizes – from 10-a-side up to the usual 15-a-side – reducing the minimum participant threshold for organized play. Entry-level formats including tag rugby, touch rugby and T1 rugby, which require minimal equipment and no contact, have moved from peripheral offerings to primary participation pathways for the under-12 cohort.

And there is another important number within this youth player share.

One in four pre-teen players is female. The 24 percent female share of the youngest rugby playing cohort is the embryonic form of a broader women’s growth story – and it represents a gender-diversified future player base already in formation.

Rugby League’s age-segment data offers a complementary and commercially instructive picture. The youth bracket (U16–U18) recorded 17 percent year-on-year growth between 2023 and 2024: The strongest performance of any age group. The junior bracket (U12–U15) grew 4 percent. Whereas the open-age adult category fell 9 percent, continuing a structural decline evident for more than a decade.

The commercial direction is consistent across both codes: Growth is concentrated in youth and recreational formats, not in premium adult club gear.

The apparel market is beginning to reflect this. According to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, the global rugby apparel market is projected to grow from $1.83 billion (~€1.58bn) in 2025 to $2.37 billion (~€2.05bn) by 2031 at a compound annual growth rate of 4.35 percent. The kids and children’s end-user segment is forecast to deliver the strongest growth at a 5.21 percent CAGR – ahead of the adult male segment. Recreational-use apparel is expanding at 5.34 percent CAGR, outperforming club and performance categories.

Source: More Than a Sport Review: End of year 2024, Rugby Football League. UK-focused baseline. Open-age decline is a structural trend, not a data anomaly.

Women: the rugby growth engine

Female participation is the fastest-growing segment in global rugby. In 2023, registered adult female players grew by 38 percent in a single year, according to World Rugby. Female participants overall – including casual and school engagement – grew by 53 percent. Against a total participation growth rate of roughly 26 percent for men, women expanded at approximately 37 percent. These are not recovery figures. They are expansion figures in a segment where growth is policy-backed, investment-funded and increasingly commercial.

World Rugby counted approximately two million female players globally in 2024 – roughly 25 percent of all registered participants. 1.3 million girls were engaged through development programs in 2023 alone. The policy architecture underpinning this growth deserves attention. 

Working with strategy consultancy Portas Consulting, World Rugby developed a Social Return on Investment (SROI) framework quantifying the societal and economic value generated by grassroots rugby participation. The result is commercially legible: Each active female player generates an average societal value of $3,132 (~€2,709) against $1,900 (~€1,643) for a male player. The differential reflects physical and social health outcomes specific to female participation, including statistically significant reductions in long-term health risk. Global grassroots rugby generates $8.4 billion (~€7.27bn) in combined societal value; the women’s game accounts for $2 billion (~€1.73bn) of that total on roughly 25 percent of the player base.

The commercial implication is simple: Women’s rugby is the highest-return asset in the grassroots investment portfolio. Investment has followed.

In England, the Rugby Football Union (RFU) has tripled its annual funding for women’s and girls’ rugby since 2021 and launched a five-year action plan, Every Rose: Our Time, targeting 100,000 active female players – 70,000 of them club-registered – by 2030. In France, the Fédération Française de Rugby (FFR) recorded a 38 percent increase in female registrations at the start of the 2025 season compared to 2024, representing 70,000 players compared to 52,000. In New Zealand, female registrations reached a historic peak of 33,757 in 2024 – a 15 percent year-on-year increase.

Event visibility is compounding the grassroots investment. The Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025, held in England, sold 444,465 tickets and set a world-record attendance of 81,885 at the final. Fifteen percent of all attendees were at their first-ever live rugby match of any format; 44 percent were attending a women’s fixture for the first time. These are new audience conversion figures, not fan consolidation numbers – and new audience conversion is the leading indicator of downstream participation and product demand.

World Rugby estimates that closing the current gender gap would add 2.3 million female players globally and unlock an additional $2.8 billion (~€2.42bn) in societal value. The Impact Beyond 2025 program and Rugby Rising Play grants – operating across 42 unions and six regional associations – target the recruitment and retention of teenage girls, a demographic with historically high athletic drop-out rates. The program has engaged 35,500 teenage girls under the supervision of 980 newly trained sport-development professionals.

Source: World Rugby Impact Beyond 2025 Global Impact Report, February 2026. Program total: 35,500 teenage girls across 42 unions and 6 regional associations.

Geography: a two-speed market

More than 80 percent of the world’s rugby players remain concentrated in approximately 20 traditional nations. But the direction of growth has inverted. Traditional markets – the UK, France, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia – are consolidating rather than expanding rapidly. Emerging markets are growing at rates that established rugby nations cannot match, driven by a combination of state investment, event legacy and format accessibility.

The United States is the most commercially significant emerging market, for two intersecting reasons: The scale of the existing participation base and the institutional timeline ahead. Youth and high school rugby registrations surpassed 50,000 in 2024, growing 12 percent year-on-year, with the youth category (ages 8–14) growing 15 percent. In the 2024–25 season, for the first time in USA Rugby history, girls’ high school registrations in the fall season exceeded those of boys – a shift attributed in part to the cultural momentum generated by the US Women’s Sevens bronze medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

America’s domestic professional rugby pathway is maturing in parallel. The Major League Rugby (MLR) now fields rosters that are 84.38 percent domestic US players, establishing a viable career ladder for collegiate and academy graduates. The hosting cycle – Men’s Rugby World Cup in 2031, Women’s in 2033 – has created a nine-year infrastructure and participation runway that brand and retail operators are beginning to price into market-entry planning.

Africa presents the highest growth rate. Rugby Africa surpassed one million registered players continent-wide in 2018, with Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana and Zambia among the primary growth contributors. South Africa’s registered base of 635,288 players remains the largest in Africa and among the largest globally. Development programs reaching new demographics include the I Also Play Referee initiative, which trained 261 teenage referees aged 13–14, 45 percent of them girls.

Europe’s picture is more differentiated than its mature market status suggests. France recorded 424,293 licensed players in 2024, up from approximately 303,048 in 2022. The UK’s community base continues to develop, with England Rugby reporting 152,391 age-grade players across 907 clubs in 2023. Two European cases illustrate the range of what development means across the continent. Turkey grew rapidly in recent years through youth programs. Portugal, with only 52,270  registered players as of 2023, qualified for the 2023 Rugby World Cup through a highly structured elite pathway – evidence that high-efficiency development can compensate for a smaller grassroots pool.

In Asia, the legacy of the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan remains commercially active. The grassroots and legacy program Project Asia 1 Million initiative met its target of introducing one million new players nine months ahead of schedule in 2019, concentrated in non-traditional markets including India, China and the UAE. China held an estimated 113,686 registered players against a total estimated playing population of 215,056 in 2018 – an early-stage conversion dynamic consistent with the broader Asian pattern of high casual engagement and lower formal club affiliation.

Source: World Rugby Global Participation Map, 2020. These are pre-pandemic figures; updated national-level audited data varies by union. The US and Colombia show the largest registered-to-estimated gaps, indicating the highest conversion opportunity as unions move to audited registration systems.

The state of play: 2026 and beyond

Rugby in 2026 is a sport in the middle of a demographic and geographic recomposition. The forces driving that recomposition – youth-first formats, women’s investment, data modernization, emerging market expansion – are not temporary post-pandemic corrections. They are structurally embedded.

The commercial opportunities within rugby sit in three distinct places.

The first is youth and recreational product. With 57 percent of Rugby Union players under 12, and the kids’ apparel segment projected to outperform adult categories through 2031, the growth in sporting goods demand is in entry-level product, soft equipment and recreational kit. Brands that have historically served rugby’s adult club market are operating on the wrong part of the demand curve.

The second is women’s product designed from the ground up. The growth in women’s rugby participation is coming from grassroots up, not trickle-down from the elite game. That means the product demand is for fit-for-purpose design – not men’s product adapted in colorway. The combination of RFU’s 100,000-player target by 2030, World Rugby’s SROI-backed investment infrastructure, and a post-RWC2025 participation wave creates a medium-term demand curve that is visible and quantifiable.

The third is geographic timing in the US. The combination of a maturing domestic professional pathway, record youth and women’s registrations, and a confirmed RWC hosting cycle from 2031 to 2033 creates a window for brand and retail operators to establish position in a market structurally under-served relative to its participation base. The registered-to-estimated player gap for the US – 131,748 registered against an estimated 1,478,190 – is the largest conversion opportunity in the sport.

The risk in reading this data is a familiar one: mistaking the pace of the elite professional game for the pace of the participation and commercial market. They are not running at the same speed. The participation market is moving faster than the product market. That gap is where the opportunity is.

SGI Editor Analysis

Rugby is not one global story. It is several regional ones, developing at different speeds and driven by different structural forces.

Asia – with China’s state-backed infrastructure investment and Japan’s enduring RWC legacy – is in a conversion phase: high exposure, growing formal registration, product demand still forming. North America is in a construction phase: participation infrastructure, a professional pathway and event hosting aligned for the first time in the sport’s US history. Europe is bifurcated – mature consolidation in the five dominant markets, meaningful secondary growth in Turkey, Greece, Spain and Belgium, and a women’s participation wave running ahead of the product investment following it.

For the sporting goods industry, the data points in one direction: Rugby’s fastest-growing segments – youth, women, recreational formats, emerging markets – are structurally different from the segment that historically defined commercial demand. The brands, retailers and investors who read that shift early are better positioned than those waiting for the elite professional game to lead them there.

SGI Europe will continue to track rugby sports participation, with coverage across the Brands, Consumer and Athlete Economy sections and deeper market analysis at key industry moments.

A note on sources and methodology

Participation figures in this report are drawn primarily from official publications of international sports federations, national governing bodies and independent research organizations. Where third-party or market-sizing research is cited, this is indicated in the text.

Rugby Union and Rugby League data are not directly comparable and are not aggregated in this report. The two codes are governed separately, operate in different geographic concentrations and use different measurement methodologies. Rugby Union’s 8.46 million figure (2023) is an audited count of active registered players across 132 national unions. Rugby League community participation figures are UK-focused and use a different registration framework.

Pre-pandemic Rugby Union global figures (2016–2019) used exposure-oriented metrics including school clinics and casual introduction programs. These are not comparable on a like-for-like basis with the 2023 audited figure. The methodological transition means the apparent contraction in global player numbers during the pandemic partially reflects data cleaning, not only genuine participation decline.

Total participant estimates of approximately 46 million for Rugby Union – including casual, school and non-registered engagement – should be treated as estimates. The audited registered figure is 8.46 million (approximately two million of them female).

Rugby apparel market projections are sourced from market research firm Mordor Intelligence and have not been independently verified bySGI Europe.

EUR equivalents in this report use the rate from xe.com at the time of drafting, June 9th, 2026.