This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Professional club rugby union is set to begin in the US in April 2016, with a competition sanctioned by USA Rugby and World Rugby. The league, announced in New York on Monday, will be contested by six city based men’s teams, employing mostly US-qualified players.

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“Rugby is a natural fit for our country,” said Douglas Schoninger, a New York-based businessman with a background in stadium financing and chief executive of the Professional Rugby Organization (Pro Rugby). “Participation and interest in the sport is at an all-time high and the demand for a professional competition is clear.”

In Pro Rugby’s first iteration, to be played between April and July and accommodating the USA’s June Tests, teams will play 10 regular-season games each.

A Pro Rugby statement released on Monday said the six teams would be drawn from “major metropolitan areas in the north-east, the Rocky Mountains and California”.

The statement added: “Venues and coaches will be announced starting this week with playing rosters to follow”. Canada is scheduled to join in 2017. Broadcast plans and sponsors also remain to be announced.

Attempts to bring professional rugby to the US – and thereby raise the fortunes of a national team that lost all its games in the recent World Cup in England – have been made before.

Most recently, the Minnesota-based National Rugby Football League attempted to turn college and NFL football players into rugby players. That project has not reached the field of play: a planned exhibition game involving Leicester was cancelled after USA Rugby and World Rugby withheld sanction.

On Monday the chairman of USA Rugby, Bob Latham, said: “As the fastest growing team sport in the USA, it is the time to have a sanctioned professional competition … to inspire Americans to fall in love with rugby, and to show the rugby world what American players can do.”

Brett Gosper, chief executive of World Rugby, added: “We welcome North American teams into the international rugby family.”

Internationally, the new Americas Six Nations tournament, involving the USA, Canada, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile, is likely to be played in February and March.

The Pacific and American Premierships, run by top amateur clubs on either coast, currently provide the highest-quality US domestic rugby, the former from January to May, the latter from September to November and March to April.

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Steve Lewis, formerly head coach of Old Blue of New York, has been named director of rugby operations at Pro Rugby. Each Pro Rugby team is expected to be centrally owned and managed and to have a centrally contracted squad, with quotas for overseas players and US Eagles internationals.



Schoninger said: “With the completion of the record-breaking 2015 Rugby World Cup in England, and the reintroduction of the sport into the 2016 Rio Olympics, now is the time to launch.”

On Friday, in a letter to American fans posted to Pro Rugby’s Facebook page, Schoninger described the ethos of his organisation.

“We intend to be collaborative,” he wrote, “and will include you, the rugby community, right from the start. As we all know, rugby is unique in sports, and particularly in American sports. We appreciate both the game and its core values and are mindful of our custodial responsibility in growing our game together.”

