The tenth edition of the Women\u2019s Rugby World Cup launches this week with the inaugural match between England and the USA in Sunderland on Friday. Women\u2019s rugby has been enjoying an enormous increase in popularity in recent years, and the numbers attached to this World Cup are testament to this development. The Sporting News investigates how different the 2025 Women\u2019s Rugby World Cup in England will be to the previous event in New Zealand in 2022.<\/p>\n
Has the tournament physically increased?<\/p>\n
The 2025 Rugby World Cup has reflected the rapid global expansion of the game, with 16 teams up from 12 teams participating. This manifests in the four pools for the group stages having four teams rather than three in each, and means that there will be a total of a huge 32 games across the next six weeks.<\/p>\n
Brazil\u2019s qualification for this year\u2019s World Cup also marks the participation of a South American delegation in the tournament for the first time in history.<\/p>\n
These increases, alongside the massive growth in audience over the last three years, have also had tangible impacts on the physical arrangements for the competition.<\/p>\n
There are eight locations across England for the competition, up from just three during the World Cup in New Zealand in 2022 – which means that the capacity for in-person viewership for the competition has also nearly tripled from 180,000 to 470,000.<\/p>\n
The players will be feeling the impacts of these improvements, as they now have over thirty designated team spaces and facilities – a huge change from the shared facilities of the previous World Cup.<\/p>\n
How will the Rugby Women\u2019s World Cup 2025 experience change for fans? <\/p>\n
The biggest change for fan experience for the Women\u2019s Rugby World Cup 2025 is precisely that – size. The number of media officially covering the event has increased five-fold from the 2021 competition to 500 certified media. This, in combination with the stellar broadcast deals that the competition has in place – with the likes of BBC, Paramount and ESPN included – means that the tournament will be the most easily accessible yet.<\/p>\n
As well as coverage of the actual games, the Women\u2019s RWC 2025 also has a staggering 24 official partners – making their sponsorship package the most comprehensive of any men\u2019s or women\u2019s World Cup ever.<\/p>\n
In addition, there will be fan activation zones in seven locations, with the largest being Battersea Power Station in London, meaning that the visibility and public knowledge of the home tournament will far exceed previous levels.<\/p>\n
Due to the increased number of host cities, 95% of the population are within 2 hours of a stadium hosting the World Cup, which also means that it will be far easier for fans to engage with the competition.<\/p>\n
What records will the Women\u2019s Rugby World Cup 2025 break?<\/p>\n
With the first match being only a few days away, the count down for the home Women\u2019s Rugby World Cup is well and truly on. And it\u2019s set to blow all previous renditions out of the water, with 375,000 tickets already sold – that\u2019s 80% of all tickets available, and a whopping three times more than what was sold in New Zealand three years ago.<\/p>\n
The last time that England hosted the Women\u2019s Rugby World Cup back in 2010, the final was played in the Twickenham Stoop stadium in front of 13,000 spectators. 15 years later, the final has officially sold out the 82,000 capacity Allianz Stadium – meaning that it is set to be the biggest women\u2019s rugby fixture in history, blowing the previous record of 66,000 in Paris in 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If that’s not proof of how exciting the next six weeks are sure to be, I don’t know what is.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rugby news and related content<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The tenth edition of the Women\u2019s Rugby World Cup launches this week with the inaugural match between England…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-80137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}