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The first rugby match on US soil took place in 1874 when the Crimson of Harvard took on a McGill University XV which had made the near 500km journey south from Montreal. After all that, the game ended in a scoreless draw.
By 1924, however, the Americans had become so good at the sport that they won gold at the Olympics. But interest in rugby never took off in the country, as appetite for contact sport was satisfied by the gridiron.
Today, though — with a professional league called Major League Rugby seeking to compete with America’s big five sports, and the country hosting the men’s and women’s Rugby World Cups in 2031 and 2033 — there are glimmers of growth for the game stateside.
One company that has sensed opportunity is Sportian, the sports and entertainment wing of tech giant Globant, which was formed through a joint venture with La Liga, the Spanish football league.
For a company that started life as the in-house tech department of La Liga in 2014 and has worked mostly with football and basketball clients such as the LA Clippers, taking on a rugby client for the very first time, and a fledgling one at that, represents a striking reinvention.
But, according to Sportian chief executive Alejandro Scannapieco, a former rugby player in Argentina, partnering with Major League Rugby last year on a three-year deal was nothing out of the ordinary.
“One of the things that we like at Sportian is to support early stage organisations in their digital transformation and . . . to connect [them] with their fans to create more engaging experiences,” he explains.
The partnership’s focus has been deploying Sportian’s “over-the-top” (OTT) streaming platform to “professionalise” The Rugby Network, the league’s pre-existing service, says Nic Benson, MLR chief executive. This overhaul was delivered in six weeks in late 2023. It not only improved the product, but also enabled MLR to monetise through its subscription service “TRN+”, and to collect and analyse fan data, in order to tailor the platform to user preferences.
Within four months, the revamped TRN gained more than 65,000 users and generated $10.4mn in fan spending. Last season, more than 267,000 hours of content were watched on the platform, a 38 per cent increase year-on-year, while registered user numbers rose 55 per cent on 2023, reaching 271,000.
The US sports market is projected to grow in value to more than $65bn, in revenue terms, before the end of the decade and Benson acknowledges that it is “by far the most competitive sports landscape on Earth”.
Achieving Sportian’s objective of establishing MLR “as an international benchmark brand” will therefore be an uphill battle — even with an enhanced streaming platform.
Sports business analyst Tim Crow warns that making rugby work in the US “is an incredibly tough proposition” and points to the difficulty of taking market share from rugby’s notional direct competitor, NFL, which generated more than $20bn in revenue in 2023.
Scannapieco accepts that competing with “big monsters” like the NFL is challenging but insists it is a “very interesting” task that Sportian is well positioned to address as a “nimble” company.
Rugby, globally, is facing serious financial headwinds. Several governing bodies continued to post significant losses in 2023 and three teams in England’s top flight have collapsed in the past two years. MLR has been far from immune to such financial problems: three of its teams have withdrawn and two others have been liquidated in the past two years.
Sportian’s data insights and fan engagement may prove crucial if MLR is to grow as a league in a saturated market.
Benson explains that, while MLR and Sportian are still building a “backbone” of TRN user data from which to draw insights, analysis has revealed preferences for multi-platform, on-demand viewing, and increasing demand for collegiate rugby content.
Sportian is hoping that building out that data “backbone” will allow MLR to target merchandise advertising better, and identify where rugby fans overlap with other sports. But it is an approach that Scannapieco admits is “not quite there yet”.
Benson plans to enhance MLR’s “umbrella” strategy via TRN+ subscriptions. This service, costing $6.99 a month or $59.99 a year, provides exclusive access in the US to English domestic rugby matches, including the men’s and women’s premierships, in addition to TRN’s free-to-view MLR and US college rugby content.
By adding more international leagues, Benson hopes to attract more “rugby fans in the US who are fans of foreign leagues, who might not have engaged meaningfully with MLR yet”.
Despite all these challenges to Sportian’s bold ambitions for its MLR partnership, Scannapieco remains confident: “The OTT and the development of the sport is going in the right direction,” he says.
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Publish date : 2024-11-12 11:00:00
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