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Rugby union has had to do its fair share of soul-searching in recent years, but one tournament that seems immune to some of the existential challenges facing the sport is the Six Nations.
Even as it prepares to kick off its 143rd edition, which will begin on a Thursday for the first time in its history, the northern hemisphere’s much-cherished international tournament continues to sell out stadiums, command the attention of millions of television viewers every year and act as the focal point around which social plans over weekends in February and March are made.
Even so, Tom Harrison, the chief executive of Six Nations Rugby, which markets the commercial rights to the tournament, believes 2026 “feels like a really big moment for rugby union” as the sport continues its push to secure the attention of casual fans.
Indeed, this year will see the debut of the Nations Championship, a 12-team biennial tournament featuring the Six Nations and Rugby Championship unions, along with Fiji and Japan. The northern hemisphere teams will travel south for three fixtures in July before the southern hemisphere sides do the reverse in November, followed by a three-day Finals Weekend at Twickenham to crown the champion.
Organisers believe the Nations Championship will give more meaning to the international rugby calendar outside of World Cup years, create the jeopardy that sports administrators crave, and therefore deliver more value to commercial partners. At the same time, there have also been concerns about the tournament’s impact on player load and its potential to limit opportunities for tier two nations – though plans to introduce promotion and relegation have been mooted.
In one of his first interviews since taking up the role in 2023 following eight years with the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), Harrison tells SportsPro why the Six Nations stayed on free-to-air (FTA) television, outlines what the arrival of the Nations Championship this summer means for rugby, and assesses the challenges that lie ahead for a sport still battling for relevance among younger audiences.
You moved across from cricket to rugby in 2023. How have you found that transition and the experience of navigating rugby’s stakeholder environment?
It’s similar in some ways, in the sense that you’re facing similar challenges. You’re also driving the commercial interests of the game, and that’s similar across both. But what is very different is I’m very much one step removed from the coal face in respect of managing teams. The hopes and fears of the whole nation ride on the back of whether you’re, in my case, running the organisation around the England cricket teams. That came with an extra level of pressure, and certainly an extra level of focus in that high performance space.
How do you view the health of the Six Nations today?
I think we’re in great shape. I think it’s a tournament which has been in good shape for some time. And I think that coming into a job like this, you’re ultimately responsible for a crown jewel sporting property.
Your instinct is don’t try and change too much. It’s doing a great job. But you still have to move it on, you still have to innovate, you still have to push the boundaries. You have to ensure that it’s relevant in respect of the audiences that it’s trying to generate. And I think we’ve been successful in that space.
There’s a long-running debate around the merits of introducing promotion and relegation in the Six Nations. Given some of the challenges that Wales, for example, have been facing, do you think we could see any change in the coming years?
Look, I think Six Nations is not going to be a place where you see promotion and relegation in the foreseeable future. I think the situation is slightly different with respect to the Nations Championship.
We go into this [year’s] tournament thinking that there’s a huge amount of jeopardy and unpredictability, as there is every year. And there will always be those results that surprise and delight people, but we have a hugely competitive set of fixtures right from the start. Ireland in France [is] not an easy fixture for either side. And then we’ve got an amazing weekend with England-Wales and Italy playing Scotland in Rome, and the last time they (Scotland) were over there, they got beaten.
So that’s a blockbuster start to a tournament that continues to generate unpredictability and jeopardy. There’s not an awful lot of international sport where that is always the case, so we’re very lucky to have that.
One of the key reasons the Six Nations is considered a cultural event is its accessibility and availability on free-to-air television. There was speculation that the tournament could go behind a paywall from this year before you renewed with the BBC and ITV last year. Was that ever a real possibility? And what was the priority in those new deals?
At the outset, in any kind of media rights deal, and it’s not unique to rugby, you’re trying to balance reach, revenue and relevance. The dynamics are different depending on what kind of sports property you are dealing with.
We’ve got 15 games of men’s rugby, 15 games of women’s rugby and an under 20s tournament – 15 matches as well. But the premium content is obviously the men’s tournament. I think it focuses the mind in respect that that is the premium that you can drive from pay-TV. It’s something you look at, but it’s not an earth-shaking volume of content, so sometimes the potential upside of a pay-TV deal needs to be balanced against what you’re giving away in respect of reach.
Given the ambitions of the sport, given the role that the competition plays in the pantheon of sports and the culture of our countries, it’s really important to make sure you get that that balance right. And whilst there is always a calculation around what is the upside and what is the price you’re paying for reach, I think we’re very comfortable with the level of rights fee that we’re attracting from the free-to-air market, both from BBC and ITV, and our ability to adapt and innovate within the context of that partnership is super important.
You’ll see some differences in the coverage as we enter year one. For example, you’ll see squeeze backs in scrummages for the first time this year. Now that might be a little bit uncomfortable for viewers, but we’re not going to be missing any of the live action. But some of those commercial enhancements are the difference between being able to afford to remain on free to air or having to take a different decision.
So it’s about detail, understanding and taking time and energy to make sure those deals are done at an excruciating level of detail.
ITV will show more games than the BBC during this cycle and will include in-game ads in its coverage for the first time (Image credit: Getty Images)
There’s a difference in terms of how those deals are structured in this cycle, with ITV showing more games than the BBC. Does that come at the expense of a little bit of relevancy by losing that cross-promotion ability on the BBC’s platforms? And how does that new structure reflect the realities of the market?
I think it’s an accurate reflection of where the market is. You have to face into some realities that the market is really challenging at the moment.
Whilst there was a huge ambition to try and retain the free-to-air coverage, there was a big part of definitely me and the board which felt that we might not be able to do it this time around. This might be a hybrid type of solution that we were looking at. Being really honest, that’s where I thought we might end up. And the fact that we not only have all Six Nations, but also the Nations Championship on free to air really gives a sign of the effort and drive that we put into making sure that we understood in detail the payoff of a different kind of solution.
But it is a different looking deal. There is a reduced commitment from the BBC, both in terms of the number of matches and in terms of how those games are presented and produced, and that will be our responsibility this year – not the BBC. That’s a slightly different model to what it’s been before, and that’s just about understanding, again, in detail, the pressures that every one of our partners is under.
We also talked in detail to the pay-TV market – and the streaming market – just to make sure that we understood where this could possibly go, and there was a real understanding, I think, from the pay-TV market, of the importance of Six Nations being on free-to-air, and an understanding of the role that this tournament plays in British culture, French culture, and Irish culture too.
The Nations Championship will get underway in July after several years of trying to get the competition up and running. Why does international rugby need a new tournament and why do you think it needs it now?
It’s a fantastic development and I think rugby desperately needs this.
The fact that we now have that competition structure in place is transformational for how the rugby calendar looks. We are now able to answer that question in November of who the best team is at that particular time of year based on the balance of power between the southern and northern hemisphere. That’s something that rugby fans want to see and, by the way, it’s something that wider sports fans who occasionally dip into rugby – during the Six Nations, for example – also want to see.
I think it’s high time we got this up [and running]. It’s been a really, really difficult journey and a complex one, which has meant every union has had to be really open and transparent about how they make money, right down to a lot of financial transparency to ensure that we can get a revenue model away and a JV structure which enables us to run this tournament as a collective across 12 unions.
Player welfare has been key topic of conversation around this tournament, as well as its impact on the calendar and the potential to limit opportunities for tier two nations. How do you respond to some of those concerns?
Player associations have been involved in our discussions all the way through this. There’s obviously been a lot of business chat through most of last year, but there’s also been a huge amount of discussion around player load guidelines and the extent to which this tournament can make sure that we are meeting those or even improving those.
But the point about promotion-relegation is an interesting one. Yes, as part of this commitment, there is an agreement to introduce promotion-relegation in 2032. The interesting thing about that is we don’t yet know the mechanics of exactly how that’s going to work, and that working group has just been created very recently.
The important thing to remember about promotion-relegation is the benefits of promotion are manifest. Everyone wants to have the open-ended opportunity for new and emerging nations to come through and play on the biggest stages. So that’s an absolute given and I don’t think anyone would argue with that.
I think the cost of relegation needs to be really thought through. If the ambition of promotion-relegation is to grow the game, let’s make sure that the results of promotion-relegation isn’t that we shrink it. And so if the commercial implications of a union being relegated are so severe that it actually threatens the very existence of that union, then we should be really careful about just launching into a situation which is uncontrolled. So we need to make sure that isn’t the implication here, and I don’t think it is in anyone’s perspective.
The calendar is a perpetual discussion in rugby. The Nations Championship is slotting into two existing windows, but from a competition perspective, would it be better to have one window featuring all the matches to keep that momentum up for fans? Could the calendar be more optimised?
You’ve outlined some of the complexity of doing it. And when I say it, I mean calendar reform. The calendar reform which has been able to introduce the Nations Championship has been a really, really complicated and very elongated discussion across every stakeholder in the game. And I think you’ve just got to be eyes open about the fact that there are different stakeholders that rightfully, jealously guard their position in the calendar, and they’ve got really strong claims to that as well.
What we’ve been able to demonstrate through introducing the Nations Championship is a tournament that, frankly, its position in the calendar is not disputed. But we had to move our calendar, we effectively shortened the window for the Six Nations to ensure that we could secure the fourth weekend for the Nations Championship. But that was a debate that impacted a lot of different competitions and stakeholders in different ways.
The broader global calendar discussion will go on, and it’s due to have its next edition in the next couple of weeks at World Rugby meetings. I think we can go into that with optimism, but an understanding that this is really, really difficult stuff, and there’s no easy answer to it. I think there’s a great result possible for fans and for players if there are certain stakeholders that are prepared to take some hard decisions. I think we’ve demonstrated we’re prepared to make hard decisions, and I think we’ve adopted the right kind of approach to it, as I think every stakeholder has actually, because the prize is big in terms of giving fans that understandable calendar that every year you can look forward to getting.
But I’m not going to sit here and say I think it’s easy. I think it’s a really tough thing to do, and I wouldn’t expect this to happen within a week.
The Nations Championship serves as an example of rugby trying to do things differently, and there’s been a lot of talk about the sport’s challenges reaching new audiences. What do you think rugby needs to do to win over new fans and how are you at the Six Nations trying to do it yourselves?
We look at all sport on this spectrum of hardcore sport right down to hardcore entertainment, and you need to fit on that spectrum somewhere. And whilst you can automatically assume rugby delivers a huge level of entertainment, access and entertainment is probably the space where we need to push the envelope. And that is about access to players, access to coaches, I suppose uncovering what is happening on the field to a level which certain other sports are able to do.
Rugby is complicated and it’s got some complexity around, certainly the breakdown, certainly scrummaging – that is a dark art about playing in those positions. They’re very specialist, and they’re very technical and they’re incredibly physical, but I think we should be doing what we can to try and bring fans closer to that action, and do it through data so that we’re able to present it in a way which is relevant to fans who are desperate to try and find a greater level of understanding about what’s happening on the field.
That’s what we need to do, and we’re going to spend a lot of time trying to uncover what is the magic formula of that mix of data, the ingredients that we need in order to really bring that to life.
Harrison believes providing greater access to players will help bring rugby to new audiences (Image credit: Getty Images)
With new tournaments at the international level and conversations about the future of the club game, what do you think rugby is going to look like five, ten years from now?
I am massively optimistic about where rugby is going. I know we’ve had some difficult years. It couldn’t be in a stronger position than we are now. We’ve got a great platform, we’ve got new competitions, we’ve got a sport that wants to work together to grow. And this is despite [not] having an underlying global market that dominates like an India in cricket, for example, or a US or a China that can kind of really underwrite [it]. We’re doing this in very mature markets in the context of a really complicated calendar challenge, but we’re still doing it, and it’s going really, really well.
So I think in ten years’ time, we need to get more clarity on the global calendar. I think we need to be really careful around that player welfare space and make sure that we’re always on the right side of that argument. But the thing that we need to learn more than anything else is that we serve a fan, and to engage the fans in the way that some of our competitor sports are doing. We cannot lose ground.
So, we know how to answer that question. We’ve just got to do it and open up those channels to ensure we get that done.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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