Touch Rugby

Almost three decades after just five nations competed on Australia’s Gold Coast in the first Touch World Cup, England changed the game in Nottingham. Thirty-nine countries, 23 pitches, and thousands of players. ‘Non-contact’ rugby has never looked so good. 

Hackney Marshes might just be the spiritual home of grassroots football, with countless images of the seemingly endless football pitches emblazoned in our memory banks thanks to myriad adverts featuring the games greats. 

When it comes to rugby, there’s no obvious rival, at least not in England. Perhaps the Rosslyn Park School 7s, but for fans of the oval ball game, the sight of thirteen full rugby pitches at Nottingham’s Highfields Sports Complex would’ve been one to behold. That there were another ten on a secondary site just a mile away, only adds to the sense of rugby occasion. “The pitches are about 84m by 50m, so with run-off, they’re basically the same size as a full-size rugby pitch,” explains Chris Simon, the CEO of England Touch, who also sits on the board of Nottingham Rugby. “We had 187 teams, 39 countries, and thirteen different age categories of competition across 1,100-odd games. There were roughly 3,200 players, then you’ve got coaches, support staff, 200 referees, 300 volunteers, probably an overall supply chain workforce of 1,500 people.

“We’re not doing the final numbers yet,” he adds, “but we’re estimating about £10million pounds of economic impact.”

The Touch World Cup, the tenth edition, has become a big deal, even if for many it’s flown under the radar. “Logistically, it’s about two thirds the size of the Birmingham Commonwealth Games,” says Chris, crunching more numbers. “And in terms of participants, it’s just slightly smaller number than the current Paralympics in Paris, and that’s about 4,000 participants. 

“In terms of the internal side of the playing arena, it’s a big participation event, but in terms of the external arena – i.e. sponsors, broadcast, tickets, all of those things – we were much smaller.

“But,” he adds, “it’s been the biggest World Cup, by some way, in touch. Bigger even than when it was in Australia, where the sport there is very, very much more mature.

“The last World Cup was in Malaysia and had 115 teams, five days, 25 nations, so it was about a 70 per cent increase on that.”

He reckons around 6,000 people watched the finals day, seeing England secure their best-ever tournament – winning ten medals in 13 categories, albeit silver being the highest – but as its free-to-watch, there’s no way of knowing attendance specifics. 

What he does know is that touch rugby found new audiences, even if Australia and New Zealand won every gold. “The World Cup generated a huge amount of awareness of the sport, and within rugby circles we’ve had good coverage from what I would say is more traditional rugby media,” he says.  

Touch rugby in England has grown exponentially from where it first started to emerge on south-west London parks in the early 2000s. “We’re estimating around about 50,000 are affiliated to us [in England] through clubs, including direct members and then those that don’t need to join us because they don’t represent but they still play,” says Chris.

“And then I would say the same sort of number that probably play in some form of structured activity, let’s call it, but at rugby clubs, and in other leagues, we’d say that goes to around 100,000 players – that’s how many we think play touch in this country in some way, shape or form.”

But the touch world is much bigger. Mike Abramowitz owns In2Touch, an organisation that has built leagues across the country, and also ran the RFU-backed O2 Touch. “How many people play? It’s such a hard question,” responds Mike, who also sits on the board of the governing body, the Federation of International Touch (FIT). “We don’t know exact figures because so many people play the game informally. But I mean, in Australia at the last count, I think they had close to a million participants, and that’s in Australia, the biggest one. 

“In New Zealand, it’s a few hundred thousand, but it’s growing exponentially everywhere, especially places such as England and France. 

“It would be remiss to throw a figure around – like flag football did, with twenty million people, that’s not true, because it’s just nonsensical. But there are easily a few million people around the world playing this version of the game.”

Impressive as the numbers are, why should we – rugby union, that is – care? “Every single All Black played touch growing up, that’s sort of an indication in itself,” responds Mike. “Awareness, agility, spatial awareness, support lines, running into spaces – not faces. It’s fitness, handling skills. It’s just anything to do with the oval ball that requires you to be adept and have vision and movement, other than scrums and lineouts and kicking. 

“It’s everything else to do with what makes rugby union such a beautiful game to watch at its purest level. Unless you’re a hardcore front five who just wants to see an up-the-jumper kind of game.

“But even then, those individuals are now not the up-the-jumper kind of guys like they were in the 70s,80s and 90s – so even they can benefit from the skills of touch. It’s an absolute game that can be used at every level, for every individual to improve their skills, be that handling or footwork.”

The game began, at least formally, in Australia. “You’ve got to call a spade a spade and the sport developed initially out of rugby league in Australia, in South Sydney,” admits Mike, as if revealing a dark secret. “I think the Rabbitohs was one of the first areas to do it, and that was in the late 60s as a training game for the league players and for the people that had got too old or too sore to play contact.”

It quickly developed structure, with state associations forming across the country. “They played interstate through the 70s,” continues Mike. “And then the first World Cup happened in 1988 on the Gold Coast, that was where the first official game of international touch took place, and that was between Australia and New Zealand. “I got involved in the 1995 World Cup and we took a team from South Africa. We thought we were the absolute guns of touch. We were so shit hot at touch, but we were playing ‘one touch’, the version we played in South Africa, and we just had no idea how the game was played. 

“The World Cup was in Hawaii, so an amazing location, and our ‘opens’ – guys aged 18 to mid-20s, the best basically – went and played against the Australian men’s 40s thinking we’d absolutely cream these guys. 

“We lost 21-1, even our one try was an intercept. It was quite a big eye opener to what touch really was.”

World Cup’s steadily grew, albeit attending countries varying due to the location – a hazard of amateur sport. So while nineteen countries competed in 1999 (Australia), just ten caught the plane to Japan in 2003. Consistent entries started from 2011, when 26 competed in Scotland, 25 arrived for the next in Australia (2015), then 28 in Malaysia (2019) and then to the 39 in England this year. “We currently have almost sixty members [unions], which is the Olympic point of reference. It’s played in more than those countries that we have as members, it’s just that some of those countries haven’t become members yet, but we’re working on a few more. I imagine over the next twelve months we’ll have more than 75 nations, all under the guise of the FIT.”

Touch in the UK has changed beyond recognition, from its early days as an almost entirely expat-driven sport. “It was initiated by expats coming in and playing the sport so Aussie, Kiwis and Saffas,” says Mike. “But it was a conscious decision taken by the England Touch Association and the commercial organisers of touch in England to take the sport elsewhere. We appointed an English chair and a president with the aim of getting additional English people onto that board.”

To give the sport a long-term future, a national touch series was launched. “Instead of it being very London centric, as it was for a long time, we needed to actually spread the sport. How do we do that? Well, let’s go and take this mixed touch version to different areas, we took an event that went to Manchester, and then went to Bristol, and it went to areas.”

Another big catalyst was the arrival of O2 Touch. “I heard that the RFU were looking to promote touch,” explains Mike. “O2 had done a tournament at Twickenham, which my company had run for them, and it turned out to be their most successful activation for their clients of the whole year and won an award for them. So they thought there was something behind this.

“They were already a partner of England’s and rugby said, ‘how do we engage more people in this game?’. And the RFU took a view that this could work, especially in an era of new strategies for growth.”

The series of tournaments would help to put touch rugby on the map, giving it uniformity as all of O2 Touch would be played under the governance of England Touch.

“Then in 2021,” continues Mike. “O2 decided to focus more on the women’s game, so they didn’t put money behind touch, the RFU had no more money, and they then had ‘Ready for Rugby’ – the post-covid game – and touch union, so it just stopped.”

It had worked phenomenally well to the point where, in 2015, just three years after its launched, the RFU announced it had brought in 10,000 registered players. “They [the RFU] pulled away from touch, but then they had to go back into because lots of things happened: the head injuries, the lawsuits, the tackle height stuff came in, which some people made a bit of a meal out of, and then they saw the groundswell that showed how much growth there was in non-contact – games of rugby that still evolved the oval ball.  

“Now it 100 per cent makes complete and utter sense to have touch being played in your rugby club.” 

But, rather than continue on the path with touch rugby, World Rugby, and the RFU, have instead followed a new path with T1 rugby, a new variant that includes variants of lineouts, scrums, kicking and breakdown.

Giving touch is so widely spread, and has so many obvious benefits to modern rugby players – even if, dare we say it, the six-touch rule and the chicken scratch restart, gives it similarity to rugby league – surely it makes sense for this to be the non-contact rugby of choice? At least you’d start introducing it with a good number of players understanding the rules, something that proved a challenge for many when Ready for Rugby was hastily introduced in lockdown. “It’s an ownership thing,” believes Mike. “They want to own every aspect of the game, and that’s not just the RFU, it’s World Rugby. They want to own every aspect of that game, and it’s an invidious way to get it, to try and own it, by going into a space. 

“I’m of the opinion that I don’t mind what you play socially,” he says. “But I think you should be playing a version that is being widely played, that has got legacy, that has got sustainability. 

“If someone’s playing with an oval ball and they’re playing a version of touch, at social level, I don’t mind what that looks like, as long as they’re playing and they’re getting more people to play our sport. And our sport is an oval ball sport.

“However, if you want to have pathways that are already there and already made, why wouldn’t you attach anything into this sport we have, and why wouldn’t you be promoting it? Other than if you’re fearful that this sport will eventually take over from what you have.

“And I think that’s what happened in some cases after this initial O2 relationship,” says Mike. “Touch clubs formed at rugby clubs, and those rugby clubs that were really open to it have massively benefited. Others were governed by a few of an older generation who didn’t want to move away from the way of doing things that had served them well in previous years, and felt the touch wasn’t part of their club.”

Steve Grainger has been with the RFU for more than a decade as director of rugby development. “We’ve had a long relationship with all sorts of formats of non-contact,” Steve tells Rugby Journal. “We had a long-established relationship with ETA around touch, around O2 Touch, but what we’ve experienced of late is a demand for a much more recreational game. And, I mean crudely, something that can be played at a slightly slower pace. 

“Touch is brilliant,” he adds, “and it’s great for fitness. It’s great for high energy. It’s great for high impact, but it does require a certain level of fitness. During covid, we came up with Ready for Rugby, which was a game that people could play that had some of the same sort of USP of rugby union, but didn’t involve the same amount of contact. And it proved really, really successful. 

“It was very inclusive in that it sort of reverted to the classic, all shapes and sizes could genuinely get involved. So, it had the introduction of a scrum, which wasn’t really a scrum as we would know it, but it created a break in play that allowed the less fit people to recover a little bit, and allowed the rest of the players to sort of reset, the sort of stuff that we’d see in in fifteens.”

The success of Ready for Rugby is perhaps up for debate, but T1 – the new variant being rolled out globally – seems to be cut from a similar cloth. There’s kick-offs, seven touches (not six), players rip the ball from the team-mate (no roll), there’s three-man passive scrums, and no-lifting, no-contesting lineouts. “When we got together as unions across the world, everybody was sort of developing their own versions [of non-contact],” says Steve. “Because they were seeing more pressure, both from the rugby community, but also from schools and education establishments, that are saying, ‘we want to keep playing contact rugby, but we need something else, for either kids or parents who don’t want to engage in it’.”

There was a need, says Steve, for a ‘flat pack’ version of rugby that teachers could deliver, whether they’ve got rugby experience or not. “We’ve made the decision now that T1 is the sort of thing we’d formally adopt,” he says. “We had an independently chaired review of all our non-contact activity about nine months ago, and they looked at all the different options and analysed them all, they took some player and non-player feedback. It doesn’t mean touch or, indeed, tag aren’t still being played in lots of clubs, but the area we will put our weight behind now is T1.”

Not that this should impact the growth of touch. “Our main focus is going to be on introducing it to schools and colleges: we’ll put balls and put some resources into a whole array of schools over probably the next decade, but certainly a commitment to the next four years.

“We deliberately designed that this doesn’t need coaches going into work in schools with teachers. It’s just really about, to be honest, getting a rugby ball into more kids’ hands.

“I genuinely don’t think this is about ownership,” he adds. “I think it’s about something that’s got synergy with rugby union. There’s multiple versions of touch out there, there’s multiple law books, there’s the FIT version that the ETA adopt, but there are multiple other variants. 

“Even if you wander around London on a Tuesday night in the summer you’ll see a whole array, and there’s no way anybody wants to stop that, right?”

In the eyes of the RFU, there’s a clear division between the roles of T1 and touch rugby. “It’s not like there’s been a divorce here,” he adds. “We’re continuing to have a relationship with the ETA, we’re going to meet quarterly with them and with Sport England and youth sport trust and other organisations in the space, because we all share a common goal, to get an oval ball into people’s hands.

“T1 is a recreational game, it’s a destination in its own right. There are people that just want to get together and play. They don’t want to play in a league, they don’t want to play in a competition, they don’t want to go to a World Cup.

“We’ve got a soft agreement with the ETA that they’ve got their version of touch in the BUCS university program, and we are not going in the university space, we want recreational rugby. You know, rock up and play. So, I definitely think there’s harmony in all of this.”

The post-covid years have been tough for grassroots rugby, but as the RFU embarks on its adult registration programme, there are signs of improvement. “We’ve got 80,000 adult players registered,” he says, of the system implemented during the summer. “And they say it takes three to five years to get your proper baseline [for figures such as these], so, that’s pretty encouraging.”

And touch, he says, could have a role to play in how those numbers grow. “In ten years’ time, if we’re talking about a rugby club, we’ll have people going there and they’re playing traditional fifteens, they might even be playing a reduced contact variant of the game. And you know that already happens in some clubs, they’re playing T1 rugby, ETA touch, tag, it really doesn’t matter. We want people to be playing rugby. 

“And as for how rugby clubs are doing, it’s a really interesting one, because that narrative is changing. Ten years ago, when I was going into clubs, I said, ‘how’s the club doing?’, the narrative that would come back is, ‘oh, you know, we think we’re going to get relegated’, or ‘we’re looking for promotion this season’, and they were talking about the adult men’s first team. 

“The great narrative now is you go into clubs and say, ‘how are the club doing?’. And they say, ‘we’ve got five hundred juniors playing, we’ve got something happening on Wednesday night, Thursday night, we’ve got walking rugby on a Friday, two women’s teams playing, and the first team are doing really well as well. 

“I don’t care what order, but that’s got to be the rugby club of the future.”

Touch rugby must surely be part of that future, with the social aspect – not least because it has mixed sides at the highest level – playing a big role. And, luckily, it could find itself at the world’s biggest sporting event. “I suppose the key goal is to get as many people playing the game as possible around the world,” says Mike. “Obviously, you can do that organically as it’s happening now, but a quicker and optically better way is to get into a big tournament.

“And the Olympics 2032 is absolutely an ambition,” he says, “because it’s a home Olympics for Australia, and Australia being our biggest member.

“In Australia it’s a huge school sport and part of the school curriculum, so that’s where they develop a lot from. Touch’s spiritual birthplace is Australia, so it just makes sense to target 2032, as a home sport. 

“And with that comes Olympic recognition and, if you’re an Olympic sport, then you get funding from all the NOCs [National Olympic Committees], and that’s the biggest aim, because if you’ve got that funding, then you can really develop your game.” 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Susi Baxter-Seitz

This extract was taken from issue 27 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.