As Major League Rugby commissioner Dean Howes put it, the trophy the Seattle Seawolves lifted on Saturday night “looks and feels like rugby”.

The America’s Championship Shield is 3ft tall, weighs 80lbs and is made of carbon and titanium steel. It would indeed look at home on a (reinforced) shelf next to the Shute, from Australia, the Ranfurly, from New Zealand, or even the Bouclier de Brennus, the whopping great slab of ash given each year to the heavyweight champions of France.

Much of the rugby in MLR’s first season looked a lot like the game they play elsewhere in the union world: fast, physical and thrilling. MLR is not the finished product, far from it, but that was half the point. With seven teams mixing pro and semi-pro on and off the field, in a short schedule and with no relegation to hamstring talent with fear, teams played fast and loose. The hits were hard but defences were not, in general, organised to the point of suffocation.

Appropriately enough, given the league’s western base, it felt like rugby from a new frontier. Gold rush rugby, maybe, given the world game’s continuing obsession with the US market. Either way, it all felt distinctly American and much the better for it.

Seattle won the championship game in San Diego 23-19, coming from behind to beat the Glendale Raptors, the Denver-area team who led the way all season, losing only once in league play and beating the Seawolves twice. The two teams with the best defences in the league – Seattle are nicknamed the “Seawall” – still shared six tries in the final, the decisive score coming from No8 Riekert Hattingh with 20 minutes to go.

MLR championship game highlights.

“Overall I think it’s gone very well,” said Howes, down the phone from Salt Lake City before the championship game, making sure to thank owners, players and broadcast partners CBS, ESPN and AT&T. “That doesn’t mean we were perfect or that we haven’t learned a lot.”

On the field, Glendale and Seattle were the pacesetters with the San Diego Legion, the only team to beat the Raptors before the final, not too far behind. The Utah Warriors played well and like those above them – Seattle sold out a small stadium – attracted promising crowds. Austin Elite and NOLA Gold looked good in patches.

The America’s Championship Shield. Photograph: MLR

Only the Houston SaberCats, by far the most visible team in preseason, could be said to have disappointed. Still, they have that off-field drive and with it an agreement to build themselves a home: a groundbreaking ceremony is set for 24 July.

The season began at the end of April. Year two, Howes said, is planned to start on or around 26 January 2019, the weekend before the Super Bowl. That means more games and, if all goes according to plan, more teams.

A January kick-off will mean Rugby United New York and likely the Ontario Arrows, from Toronto, will start on the road in warmer climes. In one such sunnier spot, the newly announced LA Coast team is driven by a transplanted Scot, Stuart Proctor, who with Northern Irishman Patrick McCullagh wants to build an East-West rivalry with New York and its Irish owner, James Kennedy. Washington DC, run by two Americans with Irish names, Chris Dunlavey and Paul Sheehy, has announced for 2020. Dallas, with Mavericks NBA manager Donnie Nelson said to be attached, hopes to join then too. Boston is still much discussed.

Sources expressed concern that such expansion will place pressure on the American talent pool: specifically on specialised positions such as prop, hooker and lock. Others said the college game could provide resources not yet tapped.

“That’s why we’re a single-entity league,” Howes said, referring to the centralised structure used by Major League Soccer, to some extent a model for MLR.

“We can control who gets the elite players and make sure that stays balanced. We are financially at the level that we have pulled our teams for the most part from local areas. As we grow, we’re going to have to move some of those players around a little bit, but we’ll still have those great pockets of players that we can tap into. So I don’t think 10 teams or even 12 teams will dilute the player pool.”

Such sentiments are shared in Los Angeles and Washington, where owners aim to draw on southern California and the mid-Atlantic, the former area stronger in terms of senior club sides and top colleges but both long-established rugby hotspots. New York has demonstrated the strength of its catchment area already, beating Ontario and a Boston team in warm-ups.

Sources in the US game nonetheless said changes would need to be made to the salary cap, which is very low in world terms, and the five-foreign-player restriction. South Africa, Britain and Ireland and France were repeatedly mentioned as fishing grounds already producing healthy trawls of resumés.

Howes cautioned: “Remember, it’s a single-entity league, so for every owner that wants it to be seven you’ve got somebody who wants it to be five. Someone wants it to be unlimited. The actual number will be decided within our board of governors. There has been no formal road taken to change anything.”

MLR’s contribution to the national team has been happily in evidence this summer. Fielding a fully professional squad, the Eagles won three June Tests including a historic one-point victory over a young Scotland team in Houston. More importantly for MLR, teams managed to patch the gaps left by Eagles picks before the top four welcomed them back for the playoffs. That competition between club and country for player access, familiar elsewhere in the world, will continue.

Shaun Davies, scrum-half for the Glendale Raptors and the USA, clears his lines against Scotland in Houston. Photograph: David Gibson/Fotosport/REX/Shutterstock

That talent is getting stronger, though, and a thought lingers. MLR may soon be more than a mere importer. Standouts like Utah centre (and former Chicago Bear) Paul Lasike and Austin flanker Hanco Germishuys may well become exports, to covetous clubs in Europe, where top Eagles like Samu Manoa (Toulon – or maybe Cardiff) and AJ MacGinty (Sale) are well-paid to play already.

MLR remains unsanctioned by USA Rugby, the national governing body which is preparing to host the men’s and women’s Rugby World Cup Sevens in San Francisco from 20-22 July and says 90,000 tickets have been sold. Things have been a little rocky in Boulder, Colorado: a number of senior figures recently stood down and the union and names attached to it are subjects of a lawsuit filed by Doug Schoninger, the owner of the PRO Rugby competition which completed one season in 2016.

Howes said: “Other than a sanctioning agreement, we will always be separate. There’s a part of this we can control and a part we can’t control, so we need to let USA Rugby work through those issues.”



Ross Young, chief operating officer and interim chief executive of USA Rugby, said: “We’ve been very supportive about working together with MLR. A sanctioning agreement will hopefully be in place next year.”