An ex-England wing says yes
Anthony Watson would have hated it as a player. He said so himself this morning. Hand him an England home fixture, tell him it is moving to a stadium in New York, and the answer back then would have been flat.
He is retired now, and the answer has changed. The former Bath, Leicester and British & Irish Lions back came out in support of World Rugby’s push to stage a Six Nations match in the United States. “When we’re talking about growing the game of rugby, sometimes you’ve got to do things for the greater good,” he said, speaking as an ambassador for the London City 7s.
His caveat matters as much as his backing. Watson does not believe dropping a fixture into New York achieves anything on its own. He wants the sport to work out who it needs on the ground in America before it sells a single ticket there.
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Gilpin opened the door a week ago
World Rugby chief executive Alan Gilpin raised the idea before the Springboks-All Blacks series finale in Baltimore, and he attached money to it. Speaking to The Telegraph, he compared the matchday economics of that sold-out Test to a Six Nations fixture and said the financial return was no longer the barrier.
Gilpin floated Ireland against Italy in New York or Chicago. The numbers behind that pick are not random. New York counts 2.3 million residents claiming Italian ancestry, and Irish Americans make up 5.3 per cent of the city’s population. Chicago holds roughly 570,000 people of Italian descent and 450,000 of Irish heritage.
Ireland and Italy did meet in Chicago back in 2018, a 54-7 Irish win, but that was an autumn international. No union has yet moved a championship match across the Atlantic. Wales played home games at Wembley in 1998 and 1999 while the Millennium Stadium went up, and that was necessity rather than expansion.
Ireland are not interested
The IRFU shut the idea down in a statement. “We believe the Six Nations holds a special place for supporters across all participating unions,” a spokesperson said, adding that the chance for fans in Ireland and Italy to back their teams at home remains central to the competition’s appeal.
World Rugby has reason to keep pushing anyway. The men’s World Cup lands in the United States in 2031 and the women’s in 2033, which gives the governing body five years to build an audience capable of filling those stadiums.
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