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Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 draw seedings confirmed
The seedings and bands for Thursday’s Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 draw have been confirmed following the final round of WXV.
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Six teams booked their tickets to England as WXV 2024 concluded. Champions Australia, Scotland, Italy and Wales all qualified from the second level, while WXV 3 winners Spain and runners-up Samoa claimed the remaining two places.
It means we now know the full 16-team line-up for the expanded tournament in England ahead of the official draw, which will take place on the BBC’s The One Show and be streamed live and for free globally (including in the UK) via RugbyPass TV from 19:00 (GMT+1) on Thursday.
England will enter the draw as number one seeds having successfully defended their WXV 1 title with a narrow 21-12 defeat of Canada at BC Place and taken their World Rugby Women’s Rankings rating to a record 97.56.
Canada, who sit second in the rankings, are the number two seeds, while reigning world champions New Zealand are third and France fourth.
Australia climbed to fifth in Monday’s rankings on the back of their WXV 2 triumph and will head into the draw in band two alongside WXV 1 runners-up Ireland, Scotland and Italy.
USA dropped out of the top eight due to their defeat to Ireland on Friday and will be joined in band three by Wales, Japan and South Africa.
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WXV 3 winners Spain remain 13th in the rankings and will therefore be in band four alongside Samoa (15th), Fiji (17th) and Brazil (42nd).
Women’s RWC 2014 winner Maggie Alphonsi will join BBC Sport presenter Gabby Logan to conduct Thursday’s draw.
One team from each band will be drawn in each pool, meaning England cannot play Canada, New Zealand or France until at least the quarter-finals.
Next year’s tournament is scheduled to get underway in Sunderland on August 22nd, 2025, and England are guaranteed compete in the opening match.
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The Women’s RWC 2025 final and bronze final will be played at Twickenham on September 27th. More than 60,000 tickets were sold for those matches during the initial window last month.
The full World Cup match schedule is due to be released on October 22nd.
WRWC 2025 Draw Bands (ranking in brackets)
Band 1: England (1), Canada (2), New Zealand (3), France (4)
Band 2: Australia (5), Ireland (6), Scotland (7), Italy (8)
Band 3: USA (9), Wales (10), Japan (11), South Africa (12)
Band 4: Spain (13), Samoa (15), Fiji (17), Brazil (42)
"Can anyone stop england" headlines lol! Unbackable favs going into the comp just like they were last time before they crapped their pants and choked
Do you want them to have to play with 13 this time to doubly ensure they don't win.
I personally think it is not right that the 16th ranked team in the world, the Netherlands, is excluded at the expense of Brazil, the 42nd ranked team.
Dream draw for England would be Italy, Wales and Brazil. I think they would like to avoid Fiji, Samoa, USA and South Africa because they are the more physical teams and the risk of injury greater. Nowhere can I read how the QFs will be decided. On seeding the top 8 down to points difference if needed or a straight drawing of which pools will be matched together at the outset so that seeds 1 to 4 will be seeded to reach semis if they can, so that it would be 1 v 4 and 2 v 3. That could result in England v France and Canada v New Zealand humdingers.
How the QFs will be decided will be confirmed when the match schedule is released next Tuesday but I'd imagine it would be something similar to the below:
QF1: Pool A winner v Pool B runner-up
QF2: Pool A runner-up v Pool B winner
QF3: Pool C winner v Pool D runner-up
QF4: Pool C runner-up v Pool D winner
Then the semi-finals being QF 1 v QF3 & QF 2 v QF 4 (or something similar).
The draw has some quite interesting possibilities.
I doubt England or Canada will be losing any sleep over any potential draw, but the Band 2 teams may now feel they have a chance against NZ or France, but will look nervously over their shoulders at the USA and Wales.
There's a high potential for at least one upset in each Group - most probably in the fight for second place.
And I think the chance of a Group of Death is quite high. Given that any of the Band 2 teams is a potential handful for NZ or France, there's a 50% chance that one of them gets USA or Wales, and a 16.5% chance that they get one each. In a group like that, you could see the Band 2 team beat the Band 1 team only to lose to the Band 3 team, meaning that the group could be decided on bonus points.
This how the draw should be done.
Draw bands if the men's final used rankings from 300 days before:
Band 1: Ireland (1), France (2), New Zealand (3), South Africa (4)
Band 2: England (5), Australia (6), Scotland (7), Argentina (8)
Band 3: Wales (9), Japan(10), Samoa (11), Italy (12)
Example random Draw
Pool 1: Ireland, Australia, Samoa
Pool 2: France, Scotland, Wales
Pool 3: South Africa, England, Japan
Pool 4: New Zealand, Argentina, Italy
Sample QFs based on rank:
QF1: Ireland V Scotland
QF2: France V Australia
QF3: South Africa V Argentina
QF4: New Zealand V England
Sample SFs based on rank:
SF1: Ireland V NZ
SF2: France V SA
Like in 2023, Ireland have to play Scotland 6-7 days before NZ. But unlike in 2023, NZ have a major hurdle in England and if they prevail they will bring injuries, suspensions etc into the Ireland game and perhaps crucially like Ireland they will have only one training session to prepare.
Similarly Erasmus must focus on Argentina a week before France who now have a knock out game in the bag. The exploitation of crumbs of French weaknesses masterfully exploited in the 2023 QF will not be possible with the one training session available.
This is not to imply that the result would be any different, it just shows how much fairer it is to use rankings closer to the tournament as in the women's draw for 2025.