Can India fall in love with rugby? The Rugby Premier League bets big on speed, power and spectacle

On Sunday, at Mumbai’s Andheri Sports Complex, on the opening evening of the league that ends on 29 June, a few hundred people gathered under a cloudy sky to watch the first three matches of the RPL. Some in the audience, first-time viewers of rugby, squealed and shuddered at the sheer physicality of the tackles, the speed of the runs and the muscle that Srinath mentions.

Three matches wrapped up in under two hours, despite the intermittent drizzle, which only adds more chutzpah to the players’ slides. The results of the matches matter less than what has transpired—and will over the next two weeks—which is India showcasing and playing a sport that many believe we don’t.

The shorter format of the sport—like T20 cricket—each team in rugby 7s has seven players. A match is 14 minutes long—or 22 minutes, including breaks. Its brevity, the RPL’s organisers believe, is its superpower.

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“There are two rules to this," says team Delhi Redz’s coach Tomasi Cama Junior, a Fijian who in 2024 became the head coach for the New Zealand’s All Blacks Sevens. “Rule 1, move. Rule 2, refer to rule 1."

The RPL has six teams, each with 13 players, including eight foreigners, playing up to 12 matches over 15 days. Of the 48 international players participating, more than 20 are Olympians or world champions. Teams are owned by some of the leading investors in sport, like Dream Sports (Mumbai Dreamers), KLO (which has teams in Ultimate Kho Kho, Legends League Cricket), besides newcomers like real estate developers RMZ (Delhi Redz) and mining company AvidSys (Chennai Bulls).

PLAYING BALL

From the moment he enters the sporting arena, Rahul Bose gets accosted—for a photograph, for a quick instruction, for a deep discussion. For years, as a player, he has been the face of Indian rugby. Over the last few years, he is also the president of the Indian Rugby Football Union (IRFU) or Rugby India, the governing body of the sport. The actor known for films like English August, Mr and Mrs Iyer, among others, has been explaining rugby’s fine virtues to whoever is willing to listen from the time he went to Sri Lanka for the Indian national team’s first international 7s match, two-and-a-half decades ago. The RPL, almost everyone who spoke to Lounge says, is the result of his efforts—finding the schedule window from World Rugby, getting some well-known names to play in it, convincing GMR and the others to put in the money.

“The kind of preparation we have done," Bose says, “has been marked by intellect, by analysis and by heart."

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The reason Bose has been at the forefront of pursuing a league is because, as one stakeholder says, “just because you don’t see it (rugby) does not mean it doesn’t exist". Bose avers to the over a 100,000 registered players, over 250 districts that play the sport across 25 states as a sign of its popularity.

The RPL’s been about two years in the making, Bose says. The teams first got their coaches, organised by IRFU, World Rugby and a little by luck of the draw, before an auction in April assembled the players. “The roster of coaches and players—categorised as marquee, bridge and Indian players—was done by IRFU and made available to all as a menu," says Vikrant Mudaliar, the chief marketing officer of Dream Sports.

Bose adds, “Elite athletes are snobs and I appreciate that. This is where we pulled the rabbit. When we told players that these are the six coaches, they realised we are not messing around."

The franchise fees has been kept low compared to other leagues, adds Satyam Trivedi, chief executive officer for GMR Sports, with player purses capped at ₹77-80 lakh. All matches will be in Mumbai, instead of a home-and-away format, to save costs. “This season we have a centralised system, a plug-and-play model, making this financial model efficient," he says, adding that the league will travel to a different city next season.

While most sports leagues in the country, barring the IPL, the Star Sports-backed Pro Kabaddi League (PKL) and Indian Super League (ISL), have stuttered, shut down or existed in the margins, RPL’s organisers believe they may have cracked the code here, having studied others’ failures and successes.

“A league has to be a team sport," explains Bose. “It’s difficult to gain fan loyalty unless it’s a team sport. Individual sports don’t lend to tribalism."

“Second, it has to be exciting on TV, not 90 minutes for a goalless draw. There is something every 45 seconds to a minute here, a score every minute. That’s a dopamine hit. Someone is getting smashed, someone is breaking through, a high tackle…

“Finally, and this is non-negotiable, (the players) have to be the best in the world. If I can flip channel and watch a better version, why would I watch this?"

A LEAGUE OF ITS OWN

James Turner, a member of The Aussie 7s, would have been in Fiji with his partner and new-born or just playing putty (Australian rules football), had he not got an offer for RPL. When he heard about it, his first reaction was, “This is different. I didn’t realise that Indians liked rugby," he says, leaning his tall frame awkwardly on a round bar table at RPL’s launch event.

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He immediately called up his Australian teammates, Henry Hutchison and Maurice Longbottom, and the three decided they were headed to the subcontinent. For Turner, familiar with the IPL and what it has done for the sport, the RPL presents an opportunity to be in the forefront of something nascent.

Mumbai also got Jerry Tuwai, a Fijian with two Olympic gold medals and World Rugby Sevens Player of the Year in 2019, “the most decorated 7s player in the world," according to Mumbai’s Australian coach Tim Walsh. “I want to use his knowledge, share it with other players. Sevens is a game of moments, small moments that make big differences."

For some players, the league provides an opportunity to stay in touch with the game when in many parts of the world this period is considered to be the off-season. Others want to ride the wave—if there is one—of a rugby revolution.

“My coach Paco (Francisco Hernandez, coach of Bengaluru) was coming too," says Spaniard Manuel Moreno, who plays for Hyderabad Heroes. “He said to me, it’s an opportunity to improve. It (RPL) was an easy choose."

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All teams practised for just two weeks prior to the start of the league. For the players, the challenge is not just to adjust to a short window of two weeks, but also the city’s hot-humid-wet weather, which makes the air heavy, the ball slippery.

“All the marquee players equal each other out—give or take. The winner would be decided by how well the Indian boys play," says Turner, who signed up for Mumbai.

THE LONG RUN

Bose presents a rosy picture for the future, believing that at the end of this season, the teams would send scouts to scour the country for young talent, returning with 30-35 promising young men for next year. There would be 200 male—soon female—players training for the next season.

When the ISL started over a decade ago, the inaugural season had some of the sport’s biggest names—retired and semi-retired. Robert Pires, David James, Nicolas Anelka, Alessandro del Piero among others joined in, before the wave fizzled out. RPL’s true test would be to sustain the flow, going past the initial momentum of season one.

“If you ask owners for RoI (returns on investment), the league will die," says Sanjith Shetty, one of the owners of the Bengaluru Bravehearts team and the president of Rugby Karnataka. “Nobody will make crores—we will all lose money. But there is some business sense to it."

Most team owners are looking for a 5-10-year run. Some talk of investing in the grassroots, others want to break the hegemony of cricket. There is perhaps a sense of altruism, while for Mihir Menda, a member of RMZ’s supervisory board, RPL gives them a foot into the world of sport.

“The responsibility here is to grow the game," says Walsh. “So that I can sit back and watch the Indian rugby team compete at the Olympics (which India has bid for) in 2036 for a medal."

“I can be smiling then, whether India wins it or Australia does."

Arun Janardhan is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers sports, business leaders and lifestyle.

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