Rugby World Cup Sevens - all you need to know before the tournament this weekend

The Rugby World Cup Sevens is not to be confused with the Rugby World Cup, which is a separate tournament for a completely different version of rugby union. The Rugby World Cup will be hosted by France next year. The Rugby World Cup Sevens should also not be confused with the World Rugby Sevens Series, which is an annual season-long string of tournaments that run roughly from November through to May around the globe - more on that below.

So how does the Rugby World Cup Sevens work?

The men's and women's tournaments both occur concurrently in the same stadium, Cape Town Stadium, across the same three days of play. Like in a tennis major, for example, the men's and women’s matches share the facility throughout the days. This simultaneous tournament structure has become common in the sevens world as multiple events now double up as both men's and women's tournaments. 

Unlike in the World Rugby Sevens Series events, where there are pool stages, the World Cup (in both gender categories) is a straight knock-out format. Think of it like a classic cup competition you might see in football for instance. There are differences between each of the two tournaments, though, so let’s dive into them a bit deeper. 

The Men's Tournament

The men's side of the event comprises 24 teams. The top eight teams (based on the seeding system) begin their tournaments in what is effectively the second round. Only the bottom 16 teams play in the first round, providing eight winners, who then join the aforementioned top eight seeds in the second round. From there on, you can think of it as a classic round of 16 progressing to a quarterfinal, semifinal and then final stage. Simple! But also, not so simple.

As is the want of rugby sevens tournaments, teams typically don't just exit the tournament once they lose. Rather, successive groups of losing teams from each knock-out round branch off and play out separate mini knock-out brackets as well. This means more rugby for more teams and for the fans as well but also more specific placings. By the end of the tournament, every team achieves a rank from champion to 24th. 

To explain this a little further, the first eight losers from the first round, play out for what’s called the Bowl. This is effectively just playing for 17th place and lower in the tournament. Thus the Bowl determines the places 17th-24th. The losers of the first round of the Bowl phase play their own sub-bracket to determine places 21st-24th. Make sense?

A similar structure exists further on in the greater tournament as well. The teams that progress to the second round join the top eight seeds to form the 16-team Championship Cup phase, this is the final round of 16. The losing teams in this round form a mini-bracket and go on to compete for the Challenge Trophy, which is essentially just competing to be the overall ninth-best team. The winners in the first round of the Challenge trophy go on to compete for ninth to 12th spots, and the losers form a sub-bracket to determine 13th-16th spots. Still with me?

Focussing on the pointy end of things, the winners in the Championship Cup round of 16 continue to a classic quarterfinal to fight for the championship and the privilege to lift the so-called Melrose Cup. The losing teams in that quarterfinal phase form a sub-bracket and compete to determine fifth to eighth places. The winners, naturally, go on to the semifinals. After a bronze-medal match, the final determines the world champion of rugby sevens for another four years. It sounds more complicated than it is, really. Trust me!

The Women's Tournament

Thankfully, this part is a bit more succinct. The women’s section only comprises 16 teams and so that is a little easier to explain. It's just a classic round of 16, quarter-finals, semi-finals and final. It’s basically the same as the men's format except without the first stage and so without the Bowl bit, too. 

The losing teams in the round of 16 go on to compete for the Challenger Trophy (as with the men, to determine places ninth-16th). The losing teams in the quarterfinal phase play for fifth to eighth places and the quarterfinal winners continue to the semi-finals. The final and the bronze medal match determine the top four positions and a new women’s rugby sevens world champion is crowned!

But wait, who’s playing?

The Men's Participants

Qualifying for both tournaments is slightly peculiar. Let’s start with the men. The eight quarterfinalists from the last world cup in 2018, which was held in San Francisco, plus the host nation qualified automatically. In this case, the host nation South Africa is also one of the eight quarterfinalists from 2018. So, they qualified along with defending champions New Zealand, England, Fiji, Argentina, USA, Scotland and France automatically. 

The remaining 16 teams progressed to the tournament via continental qualifiers. Those teams are as follows. From Africa: Uganda, Zimbabwe and Kenya; from Asia: Hong Kong and South Korea; from Europe: Germany, Ireland, Portugal and Wales; from Oceania: Australia, Samoa and Tonga; from North America: Canada and Jamaica; and from South America: Chile and Uruguay. 

These teams are then pooled together and seeded through another mechanism to determine which teams enter the world cup at which stage. The 14 core teams from the World Rugby Sevens Series - that is, the 14 teams that are invited to every series tournament for the season - are seeded based on their performance in the world series. This was done by tallying the tournament points they attained in the 2019/20 season and the first eight rounds of the recently completed 2021/22 season.

The 2020/21 season was mostly cancelled due to COVID - only two tournaments were played and many teams could not attend due to travel restrictions. Thus, it was overlooked in the seeding process.

The remaining 10 qualifiers are seeded based on a combination of rankings gained at the 2020 World Rugby Sevens Challenger Series (a second-tier international tournament) and their regional ranking positions as of July 2022. Combining all this leaves us with tournament seedings for all 24 teams and this determines which teams enter the tournament at the first or second stage and their position in the bracket. 

What’s slightly strange about this system is that the results of the previous world cup (a whole 4 years earlier) play a major role in qualifying for this tournament but not in the final tournament seedings. For example, this year, Australia did not qualify for the world cup directly as they didn't make the 2018 quarterfinals. Instead, they had to pass through the Oceania qualifying stage despite having a strong record in the recent world series seasons.  In 2019/20 Australia finished fourth overall and they actually won the 2021/22 world series.

This means that even though they went through a slightly longer qualifying process than, say, Scotland (who did directly qualify), they are seeded much higher, in second place, than Scotland, who are only seeded 12th. Therefore, Scotland must start in the first round whereas the Aussies will begin their tournament in the second.

At first glance it does feel like there could be a simpler way to do all this but, alas.

See the draw and follow the action on Flashscore.

Ones to Watch in the Men's

Hosts South Africa are the top seed and so possibly the favourites on home soil to win what would be a first world cup title. They won gold at the Commonwealth Games this year and had a good 2021/22 series, winning the most tournaments of any nation and finishing second overall.

Australia will be buoyed by their recent world series triumph and go into the tournament with real momentum, having won the series for the first time ever. One of their star players, Dietrich Roache (21), was the leading points scorer in the whole 2021/22 Series.

Traditional sevens superstars Fiji can never be overlooked and will be a real threat to add to their two world cup triumphs, they are also the defending Olympic Champions, having won gold in Tokyo last year. 

Rugby powerhouse New Zealand, who have won three of the seven world cups to date including the last two, go into the tournament surprisingly as just the fifth seed. But it is worth bearing in mind that they were unable to participate in almost half of the 2021/22 world aeries due to travel restrictions and so their seeding is much lower than their true rank. They did win the most recent tournament in Los Angeles in August, which is a better indication of their ability.

Samoa faced a similar issue and missed almost half of the last season. They could be somewhat of a dark horse starting as the 11th seed. They finished fourth in all of the four most-recent series tournaments so look out for them as well.

The Female Participants

The women’s tournament follows a similar qualification pattern to the men's but with some differences. The semi-finalists from the 2018 World Cup (Champions New Zealand, France, Australia and USA) as well as the hosts, South Africa, all qualified directly.

The remaining 11 places were drawn from continental competitions. Those teams are as follows. From Africa, and for the first time in any rugby world cup, Madagascar; from Asia: China and Japan; from Europe: England, Ireland, Poland and Spain; from Oceania: Fiji; from North America: Canada; and from South America: Brazil and Colombia.

As with the men, these teams are then seeded for the tournament. The ten core teams from the women’s World Rugby Sevens Series are seeded according to the points they accumulated across the 2019/20 and 2021/22 seasons. The remaining six teams are then ranked (11th-16th) based on regional ranking positions as of July 2022. The round of 16 draw is then filled out accordingly: the first seed plays 16th, the second against the 15th and so on. Pretty straightforward… comparatively!

See the draw and follow the action on Flashscore.

Ones to Watch in the Women's

There have only been three women’s world cups to date as opposed to the men’s seven. Australia won the first one in 2009 and New Zealand have won the last two (just like the men) in 2013 and 2018 and they are also the Olympic champions having won gold in Tokyo. 

Australia and New Zealand are the first and second seeds, respectively, and so surely the favourites going into this tournament. New Zealand won the most recent world series tournament in Toulouse in May and so probably edge the Aussies on recent form. The Australian team won gold at the Commonwealth Games, however. 

By and large, women’s sevens is dominated by these two antipodean giants. Of the nine world series seasons that have occurred, New Zealand have won six of them and Australia, the other three. What’s more, no other nation has registered a world series season second-place finish more than once. 

Of the rest of the field at the world cup, keep an eye out for the French team. France finished runners-up in the last world cup, won silver at the Olympics and finished second in the overall standings of the 2021/22 world series. Their star player, Jade Ulutule (29), was also the leading points scorer last season and by some distance, too.

The USA also have a pretty strong team, they have finished in the top four at all the previous world cups and will be encouraged by winning the Malaga leg of the World Series in January. Fiji and Ireland also had standout seasons.

Tournament Explainer

About Sevens

For the uninitiated, you might have been wondering all this time - what even is rugby sevens? To put it simply, it is a version of rugby union (what is usually a fifteen-aside game) played by only seven players on each team. It uses the same field as rugby union, the same points scoring system and most of the same basic rules but with some notable exceptions. 

Here are the main points of difference:

The games are much shorter than in normal rugby. They are comprised of two seven-minute halves (as opposed to rugby’s 40) with a two-minute halftime break. Matches that end drawn are decided by five-minute golden-point extra time periods. Each team has five substitutions per game (as opposed to eight) and a squad of 12. Yellow cards incur a two-minute sin-bin, scrums are contested by just three players from each team, and the scoring team kicks off to restart the game.

It is a very faced paced and often high-scoring game that essentially bottles all the fun, running parts of rugby and packages it into action-packed quarter-hour matches.

The World Rugby Sevens Series

The predominant iteration of top-tier international sevens is the annual World Rugby Sevens Series. As you have probably gleaned from the above, this is a series of events that are played from November through to May as separate two-day tournaments in different locations around the world. Points are accumulated by nations at each tournament that go towards standings for the season. 

Each year there is a group of core members that are invited to participate in every leg of the series. At some tournaments, there are regional qualifiers on top of, or instead of, these core teams. At the end of the season, the team with the most points gained wins the series and the worst core team is replaced through a promotion/relegation system. Uruguay, for example, have been elevated to core-member status for the next season in the men’s series.

The men’s and women’s series are pretty similar except for the fact that the women’s is smaller, having fewer core members and tournaments. Often the two occur at the same venue like the world cup this weekend.

Highlights from the World Rugby Sevens Series in LA

The Commonwealth Games and Olympics

Men's rugby sevens has been played at each of the Commonwealth Games every four years since its first appearance at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, which was the first major international multisports event to include the sport. Women's sevens made its Commonwealth Games debut in the 2018 Games.

Rugby Sevens is a relatively new Olympic sport and has appeared at the two most recent summer Olympics - Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020. Its elevation to the Olympic stage is a huge boon for the sport and goes some way to proving that sevens is the form of rugby with the best potential to be further globalised and access new markets.

One confusing thing that needed to be ironed out recently due to sevens’ Olympic participation relates to the so-called Home Nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In the Commonwealth Games, and previously in most of rugby history, England, Scotland and Wales have all competed as separate nations, as they will at this week’s world cup.

However, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) only recognises Great Britain (GB) as an Olympic participant. This means that England, Scotland and Wales must compete as one unified GB team in the Olympic sevens tournaments, which they did at the previous two Olympics and also in the shortened 2021 season. To make matters simpler in the future, these three nations have recently agreed to compete as just one GB team in rugby sevens from the 2022/23 seasons onwards. 

Another confusing issue arises with regards to Northern Ireland… because there is no Northern Ireland team. The Ireland sevens team, and the Ireland Rugby Football Union (which governs all rugby in Ireland) at large, draw their players from the whole island of Ireland and so do not distinguish Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland as separate rugby-playing nations. This just means, you can think of the Irish team as a united Ireland team.  

The Future

We’ve seen sevens expand from its World Series and World Cup into the Commonwealth Games and now even into the Olympics, as well. And with that, sevens has grown to incorporate newer Rugby playing nations into first-tier competitions in a way that the 15-man version of the game simply hasn’t been able to do because the gap between the established and the developing rugby-playing nations is currently just too wide. 

Perhaps the dynamics of sevens, as a more open, faced-paced game, lend it to providing a more even playing field. Thus making it easier to expand top-tier competitions globally. It’s certainly a less technically complex sport than classic rugby union, which helps in terms of teaching the game and in attracting new audiences to both live and televised events. The fact that men’s and women’s tournaments can dovetail and are packaged as single events also helps to attract a more diverse following.  

Sevens is still far from competing with rugby union in so many ways - the levels of professionalism, broadcast and attendance revenues, heritage, and even just general public awareness. However, for the reasons mentioned, sevens might just be the future of rugby in terms of its prospects of becoming a truly global sport, a sport that is played the world over.

So, who’s excited for the world cup this weekend?