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Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 match schedule highlights shift in ambition
One fact laid bare by the release of the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 match schedule on Tuesday was just how much the tournament has grown in scope in a decade and a half.
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When England last hosted the women’s showpiece, in 2010, the entirety of the pool stage was played at Surrey Sports Park, better known as the home of Harlequins’ training facilities, before the action switched to Twickenham Stoop for the semi-finals, bronze final and final.
It was a similar story four years later when the pool matches took place at the FFR headquarters in Marcoussis and the silverware was handed out at Stade Jean Bouin.
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Subsequent World Cups in Ireland, which moved between venues in Dublin and Belfast, and New Zealand, where a world record crowd was set and then broken at Eden Park, helped to prick imaginations and push expectations.
But none of the previous nine women’s World Cups, from the first steps in South Wales in 1991 to the last pulsating final in Auckland, ever touched as much of a country as next year’s showpiece in England promises to.
From the opening match in Sunderland on August 22, 2025, the tournament will take a meandering tour through a further seven host cities en route to the final at Twickenham on September 27.
Some teams, though, will see more of the English countryside from their train and bus windows than their rivals by the time we make it to the business end of the tournament.
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As Scrumqueens first noted, USA are set to spend the shortest time on the motorways during the pool stage, making one 77-mile trip south from the Stadium of Light on opening night to York Community Stadium, where they will play Australia and Samoa.
Defending champions New Zealand, meanwhile, will rack up more than 500 miles of travel as they head from York to Exeter and then onto Brighton for their Pool C finale against Ireland.
Japan, who are scheduled to play in Northampton, Exeter and York will not be far off the Black Ferns in terms of mileage while Italy are set to rack up around 450 miles of travel.
England, whose tour of the country will take them from Sunderland to Brighton via Northampton are set to travel around 350 miles between matches, which puts them towards the top of the middle of the pack.
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Of course, these numbers do not take into account the location of a team’s training base but feel instructive of the change in ambition over the last 14 years.
Back in 2010, the furthest a team would travel was the 30 or so miles between Quins’ training base and the club’s home stadium.
It was a journey that England and New Zealand made along with 13,253 fans for the final on September 5, 2010 as Black Fern resilience and the boot of Kelly Brazier ultimately settled an epic arm wrestle.
Twickenham loomed in the background as Melissa Ruscoe raised the trophy into the sky.
Fifteen years on and if ticket sales continue at the pace they have done in the initial releases, then another record attendance is certain to fall over the road, at the home of English rugby.
Travel distances aside, it's a smart schedule that looks like it will make the most of the potential tensions in the pool games.
The one thing that surprised me is that the organisers haven't followed the lead of RWC 2015 and tried to locate European teams' matches closer to their home support - e.g. by having Wales play their games in Exeter, Scotland in Sunderland or York, or France and Italy in Brighton.
I imagine that reflects the expected nature of the audiences: the aim is probably to attract local crowds more than it is to reach an overseas audience.
It will be interesting to see how the main ticket presale goes. Yesterday's Mastercard presale seemed busy despite the initial snafu that meant the link to the ticket queue was broken. There was a long wait in the queue, at any rate, though there wasn't any sign of the presale tickets selling out.