The Fates of Nations: How Professionalism Affects International Rugby

The Fantasy Ruckers is generally focused on Major League Rugby, but given that it's the offseason, I wanted to take a look at the international game. The Nations Championship and the Nations Cup provided an excellent showcase of the game at its best, with close, competitive matches. In particular, I enjoyed watching two nations that I usually don't see too much of, Zimbabwe and Hong Kong. The Sables brought a real flair to their rugby and clearly outperformed the expectations of them heading into the competition.

Hong Kong, meanwhile, managed to hold their own despite clearly being at a physical disadvantage at times. That physical disadvantage isn't too surprising, given how a quick glance at the team's roster shows that they almost all play in the Hong Kong Premiership, a semi-pro domestic league, rather than one of the fully professional leagues overseas. That got me thinking, though, about how much professionalism actually impacts the modern game. Does having fully professional players instead of semi-professional or amateur players make a big difference?

That idle thought while I was watching became a few weeks of manually copying data out of team sheets and messing around with spreadsheets. What follows is by no means a rigorous or complete analysis, but for what's basically some napkin math it tells a surprisingly clear story.

Gathering the Data

If you don't care about the details of the classifications, feel free to skip to the next section.

For each country I took a list of players who were listed in a match-day 23 during the Nations Cup or Nations Championship and noted the league where they played in the current season. I focused on players actually selected because some teams like to list a whole ton of players in their squads, even if a huge chunk won't actually play, and some teams weirdly don't list players who do actually end up playing. For the lower ranked teams included that didn't play in those competitions, I went with lineups from the most recent competition they played.

For the leagues, I divided them into five categories. The top category is fully professional leagues that have at least one fully professional league that feeds into them. That includes the PREM and the Top 14, which sit atop the CHAMP and Pro D2 respectively. It also includes the teams in multi-national leagues that draw from lower fully professional leagues, namely the South African teams in the URC that draw from Currie Cup and the New Zealand teams in Super Rugby that draw from the NPC. I've classified the international sevens circuit (SVNS and SVNS 2) in Category 1 as well, although that's a grand total of just three players in the whole dataset, all of whom playing for Uruguay, making it hard to judge whether this is an accurate judgement. 

After that, I lumped all of the other fully professional leagues in together, including top-level competitions in Tier 2 countries like MLR and Super Rugby Americas and second-level competitions in Tier 1 countries like the Currie Cup and the NPC. Some might object to my placing the best league in the world, the French Pro D2, in this category, but the goal here is to capture solely the effects of professionalism and its strength and depth in a country. I wanted to avoid making value judgements about the leagues themselves.

Category 4 was semi-professional, which was perhaps the category most difficult to verify. For this, I included lower level Tier 1 competitions like the Fédéral Nationale 1 in France, leagues that pay only a few players like the Division de Honore in Spain and also corporate leagues that facilitate jobs for players rather than paying them directly, like the Hong Kong Premiership. Finding clear information about which leagues are semi-professional is surprisingly hard, so I'm not 100% confident in that list. 

Category 5 leagues are fully amateur. It also includes all collegiate/university level players, regardless of the quality of the university system they play in. 

Click the arrows to see the full list in each category (only relevant leagues were included)

The Results

Here's how the teams break down in terms of the professionalism of their rosters. Note that I've included down to Switzerland at 28th in the World Rugby Rankings as they are the highest ranked almost fully amateur team. I gathered data for some teams ranked lower, but that data got really hard to collect. Finding Kenyan national team lineups and reliable information about the level of professionalism in the German Bundesliga is difficult, and ultimately not particularly worthwhile for this analysis.

The table pretty clearly shows the drop-off between tiers. Tier 1 is composed of teams that can field entirely professional squads playing for or against Category 1 teams. The difference between Italy at the bottom of Tier 1 and Georgia at the Tier 2 is that Italy draws 95% of its squad from the top leagues, while Georgia draws less than 30% from those sources.

Tier 2 itself is split in two halves. The top teams like Georgia, the USA, Portugal, and Chile are fully professionalized, while Spain and Uruguay are over 60% professional. Samoa and Tonga are odd ones in the middle, featuring large contingents of both professionals in top leagues and amateurs.

The bottom half of Tier 2 is comprised of two sorts of teams. Belgium, Canada, Zimbabwe, and Namibia all have a core 30%-ish of professional players, topped up with a handful of semi-pro players, while 60%-ish of their squads are amateur. Meanwhile Romania and Hong Kong have few fully professional players but also few amateurs, drawing their squads almost entirely from domestic semi-professional competitions. The Netherlands is somewhere between these two models.

How This Correlates with World Rugby Rankings

As a sanity check, I tried weighting the various categories to produce a single "professionalism score", which I chose to represent as a percentage. Category 1 players were given 100%, Category 2 players 75%, Category 3 players 30%, and Category 4 players 10%. I then plotted this professionalism score against the World Rugby rankings, and I was genuinely surprised at how well they lined up. Note that I included the 29th to 37th ranked teams in this graph as well.

Once again, the differences between the tiers show up really clearly. There is a gulf of empty space between Tier 1 and Tier 2 in terms of professional environments, and a smaller but still notable gap between the top and bottom halves of Tier 2. From this data, it would be reasonable to say that Tier 2 runs from Georgia to Samoa, with Romania to Poland being Tier 3. For the sake of clarity in this article, that's how I'm going to refer to them.

The grey trend line on the chart shows the best fit for the top 28 teams, representing a decent measure for whether teams are over- or underperforming their professional environments. Clearly, as can be seen by Brazil, Paraguay, and Tonga, it's possible to dramatically underperform. Simply having a better professional environment available for your players is not, on its own, sufficient to raise the level of the national team.

While a professional environment clearly isn't everything, this data does make pretty clear is that it is a necessary part of having a better national team. The blue trend line represents the clear ceiling that teams face. Obviously, in Tier 1, almost none of the teams are being held back by the level of their professional environments, and all could theoretically reach at or near the top. There are obviously other factors that would explain the differences in performance at that level.

However, for lower ranked teams the ceiling definitely appears to be real. It is notable that Brazil and Paraguay are the only two teams to be underperforming to such a degree that they are bumped down into a different tier. Aside from those two teams, every single team with a Tier 2 professionalism score outranks every single team with a Tier 3 professionalism score. The same is true between Tier 1 and Tier 2.

World Rugby Rank Compared to Expected and Possible Rank

The table above charts what ranking each team would be at if they were to jump up to that blue line but everyone else stayed the same, essentially maxing out the potential of their professional environments. Again, there are clear lines between the tiers. Tier 1 teams can essentially all get to the top of the rankings, with really only Japan limited by their environment. Tier 2 teams, meanwhile, all cap out at about 13-14th in the world. Georgia could potentially break into the top 10 with their current talent, but they are the exception. Tier 3 teams, meanwhile, seem to be limited to 20th in the world or below.

Over- and Underperformance Compared to World Rugby Ranking Points

By this measure, the major overperformers are Ireland, South Africa, and New Zealand at the top (which isn't surprising, it would be weird if the best teams in the world weren't overperforming), followed by Scotland, most of Tier 2 (particularly Portugal), as well as Romania, Belgium, and Hong Kong in Tier 3. So far, basically as expected.

What's more interesting are the teams that are underperforming. France is a team that people feel good about right now, but these numbers say they could be doing better. Teams like Italy, Japan, and Fiji likewise have a lot of headroom to grow, despite being plucky underdogs. England is less surprisingly underperforming, ditto Wales. Outside Tier 1, the clearest underperformers are Samoa and Tonga, both of which have access to a professional environment in Moana Pacifica but nevertheless lag behind the rest of Tier 2. That hints at the deeper, longer running issues at play in those nations. Zimbabwe is another surprise underperformer; despite low expectations heading into the Nations Cup, the data suggests they should be more clearly in contention with the rest of Tier 3.

However, there is also an obvious caveat: this is what teams can achieve with their current level of professionalism. And that brings us on to the first deep dive into a specific country.

The Fate of a Nation: Canada

Canada is a fascinating case study here, specifically because of the change in MLR foreign player rules that meant Canadian players no longer counted as domestic. This slashed the number of Canadians in the league from 47 down to just 10. That led to a significant drop in the professionalism of the national team, although not necessarily as large a one as you would have thought since the 10 who retained their spots are, naturally, the ones who are key parts of the national setup.

This sets up an interesting situation. From 2017-2024, Canada was coached by Kingsley Jones, and it was disastrous for them. This 2025 ranking is representative of where Jones left the team, and as you can see from the tables, it was a massive underperformance. Jones had the talent of a Tier 2 team, and was barely scraping out Tier 3 results. Switching the coaching staff immediately led to improvement, including a win over the USA.

However, the rule changes in MLR have made the Canadian talent pool look much more like a Tier 3 team than a Tier 2 team, which is concerning for the team's future. There's clearly the talent in the country to field a Tier 2 team, so maybe we will see them overperform significantly enough to be in Tier 2 anyway. I'll be watching this going forward, as it will be an interesting test of whether this analysis really holds up.

The obvious solution, though, is simply to rejoin MLR. Reviving the Toronto Arrows or getting a replacement team would instantly give them a professional setting for their players.

The Fate of a Nation: the USA

Sticking in North America for a moment, let's take a look at the United States, although the models could be applicable to any of the Tier 2 nations. The team has had a resurgence under Scott Lawrence, but is now pretty much capped out in terms of the World Rugby Rankings. Realistically, surpassing Georgia to stand at the top of Tier 2 is feasible, but breaking into Tier 1 is not. However, there are some models for how they could break the deadlock.

The Japan Model

The most straightforward method would simply be to raise the level of Major League Rugby until is achieves what Japan League One has achieved, a quality that comes close to that of the top leagues in the world. Straightforward doesn't mean easy, though. JLO's success has been a long time in the making, with the recent professional version of the league rising out of a long-established semi-professional corporate league. They also have a depth that MLR is miles away from, with three levels of competition and 27 total teams. MLR is struggling to even continue existing, with just 6 teams left.

The Fiji Model

The second route, which could absolutely coexist with the first, would be for the USA to get a team in the URC, Super Rugby Pacific, or both. There have been rumors swirling about both of those leagues adding a team in the States, and it would provide a clear pathway for American talent to play against the best. It's a model that has clearly worked for Fiji, who have risen in the rankings since the Fijian Drua joined Super Rugby in 2022.

However, simply getting a team in a higher-level league is not necessarily a guaranteed boost. Samoa and Tonga are the prime examples, with neither side able to take advantage of their access to Moana Pacifica. Lower down the food chain, Brazil and Paraguay are both ranked well below fully amateur or semi-professional sides despite having national rosters built entirely from their professional clubs in Super Rugby Americas.

The Argentina Model

Argentina is unique among Tier 1 teams in that they don't have any teams competing in the top leagues since the fall of Jaguares, with their four professional teams parked in Super Rugby Americas. However, there is simply so much talent coming out of the country that the top leagues are flush with their players. The Argentina can form a national team without even touching their own professional teams, which is frankly astonishing.

Georgia is the next closest to achieving this sort of feat, but also shows how difficult it is. The USA would need to export a lot of players to reach this level, and that would also mean developing them. That would likely mean MLR would need to continue, if only to give American players a stage to prove their value to overseas teams.

The Canada Model

Not ever breaking of the deadlock would necessarily be positive. The Canadians were left without a professional pathway after the partial collapse of MLR, and a full collapse would leave the USA in the same predicament. The Argentina and Japan models depend on there being a robust feeder into the top level, and while the Fiji model could be a way out, even it would have the odds of success increase dramatically from having a professional base of players to draw from.

Likely the best outcome is a combination of all three of the models of success. A healthy MLR feeding into one or two teams in overseas leagues, with a large contingent of players exported wherever they can get high-level experience.

Concluding this Analysis

Obviously, this is not a perfect analysis, but it wasn't meant to be. It's a brief snapshot at a specific moment in time, so it doesn't capture trends or anything like that. However, I do think we can pretty clearly say that professionalism is a required part of being a high-performance team in the modern international environment.

I also think we can say for sure that there are clearly other factors at play, especially at the top and bottom of this range of teams. I'd love to see if there's some sort of metric that reflects why Ireland's four professional regions are able to produce one of the best teams in the world, while Wales' four professional regions can even produce a top 10 team. Future analysis might involve looking at the whole player base of a nation, to see if that can shed some light on national success.