Former Springboks wing Bryan Habana insists that rugby union needs to introduce a global calendar if it is to the develop as a sport.<\/p>\n
Currently, rugby goes all year round with the northern hemisphere season running from August to July \u2013 if you include the start of the Top 14 \u2013 while the south play between February and November.<\/p>\n
South Africa<\/a> are almost aligned with both, with their franchises competing in the United Rugby Championship and the Springboks still involved with the Rugby Championship<\/a>.<\/p>\n There was recently talk of potentially moving the southern hemisphere tournament from its current slot of August to late-September\/early-October to overlap with the Six Nations<\/a>.<\/p>\n That was rejected for now, but Habana<\/a> has suggested it is stopping rugby from aligning the two hemispheres and therefore preventing the sport\u2019s growth.<\/p>\n Getting the north and south on the same page<\/p>\n \u201cTo survive as a business, I think the legacy infrastructure of rugby needs to think differently. Rugby is a global sport in a way, in that it\u2019s played in quite a few countries, but rugby is the only global sport where the global calendar doesn\u2019t start and stop at the same time,\u201d he told the Business of Sport<\/a> podcast.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause we have this ideology that rugby is a winter sport, rugby must remain a winter sport, but unfortunately rugby in the southern and northern hemisphere are at different times.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re stuck that rugby\u2019s a winter sport because that\u2019s how it always was, but if we really want to be progressive, and World Rugby has been trying, to their credit, to get a global calendar, but you can\u2019t get a global calendar if it doesn\u2019t start and stop at the same time.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact that the Rugby Championship is played at a different time to the Six Nations, you can\u2019t create an international window because at some point your international players are playing international rugby at different times of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n