Rugby World Cup hosts
Rugby World Cup host nation
The Rugby World Cup host nation for both men and women is selected by World Rugby at a meeting six years before each tournament. Each of the Men's Rugby World Cups from 1987 to 2015 were hosted by countries that are considered the traditional powers in World Rugby. The first non Rugby Championship or Six Nations country to host a Rugby World Cup was Japan in 2019, after failed bids for the 2011 (awarded to New Zealand) and 2015 (awarded to England) tournaments. The women's version of the Rugby World Cup, which is known as the Women's Rugby World Cup, was first held in 1991, alternating with even-numbered non-leap years from 1994 to 2014 before switching to odd-numbered years from 2017 onwards.
Current criteria
World Rugby requires a country to possess the necessary facilities to host a Rugby World Cup. Stadiums must have a capacity at least 15,000, with the stadium for the final having a capacity of at least 60,000. The stadiums have other requirements, such as pitch size and floodlighting.
World Rugby also looks for hosts that will either generate significant revenue or hosts that will spread the geographic reach of the sport. According to World Rugby Chairman Bernard Lapasset in 2008:
"As the revenue generation is vital to our ongoing development plans, we recognise that the World Cup has to be held in one of our senior core markets on a regular basis . . . However, the commercial success of the tournament also means we can now consider placing the tournament in new developing markets to assist the game's strategic growth."
World Rugby also tends to rotate continents, with no continent to date hosting two consecutive World Cups.
The public source identifies “Rugby World Cup hosts” as rugby World Cup host nation. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Rugby, World and hosts.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rugby World Cup hosts” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.