In just over a week at the end of 2023, Major League Rugby lost two teams. First the Toronto Arrows, the only Canadian team, and then the New York Ironworkers, 2022 champions, ran out of money and options.
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For Alex Magleby, an American Eagles flanker who became co-founder and CEO of the New England Free Jacks, the reigning MLR champions, losing to Toronto and New York proved “traumatic.”
“Seismic shifts will occur again in the competition,” says Magleby. “They will happen as we learn from the history of other sports leagues. It’s a very risky long-term asset play, right?”
Right. Some may argue that this is World Rugby’s decision to move the Men’s World Cup to the US in 2031. But from Dublin to Dallas, no one ever said establishing a rugby union in a saturated American market would be remotely easy.
In MLR, salaries are low, the facilities are sometimes simple and away games are often very far away. This is frontier rugby. The league has had six seasons, three of which were lost to Covid since 2020. The Seattle Seawolves, champions in 2018 and 2019, are still contenders. But the 2021 (Los Angeles Giltinis) and 2022 (New York) champions have folded; teams in Glendale, Colorado and Austin, Texas are also gone; and a third eastern team, previously based in Atlanta, lost its owner and was moved to LA.
“It’s about the long term,” says Magleby, of the commitment it takes, in his case working with Errik Anderson, a biotech investor, to make an MLR team work. “Feeding fandom is very expensive. Building communities that are truly excited to be part of the experience, the brand, and the game takes time.
“We don’t have the basis of participation to lean on, so we are trying to do something quickly. So that costs money and things change and people’s families and their assets and the way they want to spend those dollars change. So collapses do happen, and hopefully they won’t happen again, but you never know.
“I’m glad the league responded and a lot of those players did [from Toronto and New York] could continue in the competition” with other teams.
“That must have been very difficult. It was unknown to everyone. The league worked very hard to move both entities forward, but they were just exhausted.”
This weekend, twelve teams will begin a 16-game regular season ahead of the playoffs and a championship game in July. There are world-famous names: the great Australian Matt Giteau is still playing, at 41, for the San Diego Legion, and Ma’a Nonu, a great All Black center, is the same age and has the same club. Magleby’s Free Jacks defeated the Legion in last year’s championship match, but begin their title defense on Sunday in Charlotte, North Carolina, against a new opponent: Anthem RC, a fascinating joint project between MLR, USA Rugby and World Rugby.
Investing to develop talent in lower-ranked countries is not a new idea. Details and structures vary, but Super Rugby is home to Fijian Drua and Moana Pasifika, while the Rugby Europe Super Cup has given the likes of Georgia and Portugal a way to develop professional players at home. To its great cost, American rugby knows how effective such work can be: most of the Portuguese team that knocked out the Eagles at the last World Cup and then starred in France played for Lusitanos in the Super Cup.
The Anthem project wasn’t confirmed until late in the day, after MLR announced an 11-team, one-ladder season. Now the league again has twelve teams in the Eastern and Western conferences, the Miami Sharks a second new challenger in the East, while Anthem fields largely American talent from other teams.
Magleby said: “Aside from being a late team, it’s important that the Anthem concept, which brought together USA Rugby, World Rugby and a professional entrepreneurial league and made it work, is a success.
“Only time will tell whether the Eagles team produces the Eagles of the future. We know we’re going to have players on the field who may not have gotten the straight reps in Major League Rugby, and now they’ll get those reps. As long as we are patient with those athletes and give them those opportunities, there is no reason to think year after year that the production of American eligible players will not contribute to a better MLR and therefore could help a better national create development. team. I think the pieces are there for that to happen.
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On Sunday, Anthem’s young Americans will take on the mix of domestic talent and imports from New England, a side led by fly-half Jayson Potroz, last year’s MLR player of the year from Taranaki in New Zealand. Young Free Jacks are among the American talent with Anthem.
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The 2031 World Cup looms. Magleby says: “A World Cup in the United States will be very successful. I think you need a little over 3 million fans to make it financially successful. There is no reason that more than 50% of those people do not come from abroad. The 1994 World Cup is a good case study… Americans know how to organize sporting events and World Rugby is very good at controlling that product.
“So I have every confidence that there will be a very successful World Cup, regardless of what happens in the US over the next seven years. The word here now is: invest significant money into creating that American fandom [and] we are seeing year-on-year growth, doubling the numbers from the previous year, which is very cool.”
Other teams have bigger homes: San Diego shares Snapdragon Stadium, which seats 35,000 people, the Dallas Jackals have Choctaw, a stadium that seats 48,000 people. The Free Jacks can only hold 5,000 people at the Veterans Memorial in Quincy, Massachusetts, but they will once again work as hard as anyone at fan festivals, themed events, youth games and other ways to build a sustainable business.