World Rugby launches Nations Cup to give 24 unions a competitive global calendar

World Rugby has launched the Nations Cup, a new 12-team tournament running in tandem with the Nations Championship to create what CEO Alan Gilpin calls “a connected global calendar where every match has meaning.”

The competition features two pools of six unions. Pool A — Americas and Pacific — comprises Canada, Chile, Samoa, Tonga, Uruguay and the USA. Pool B — Europe, Asia and Africa — includes Georgia, Hong Kong China, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Zimbabwe. Each union will face every other team in its pool across a full round-robin format spanning both Test windows, with the top-ranked side in each pool crowned the inaugural Nations Cup winners at the end of November.

The points system mirrors the Six Nations and Rugby Championship: four points for a win, a bonus point for scoring four or more tries, and a losing bonus point for a defeat by seven points or fewer.

Gilpin told RugbyPass the project has been a decade in the making. Conversations between World Rugby, the Six Nations, SANZAAR and wider unions began in 2016, with more detailed strategic work following in 2018. An attempt to launch the competition before the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan fell through, and the COVID-19 pandemic further delayed progress. World Rugby revived the initiative in 2022, and the tournament is now set to begin in 2026 with what Gilpin described as unilateral agreement from all parties.

“It was in 2016 that World Rugby, the Six Nations, SANZAAR and wider unions started a conversation, asking how do we make ‘friendlies’ more competitive and meaningful to give the fans what they want,” Gilpin said. “World Rugby rekindled the conversation in 2022 and here we are in 2026 with unilateral agreement, ready to go.”

Gilpin acknowledged that any new tournament takes time to establish itself but expressed confidence that the concept would resonate once the matches begin. He pointed to the opening weekend’s fixture list as evidence of the competition’s immediate appeal, and drew a parallel with WXV — World Rugby’s women’s competition — as a model for how a new tournament can find its footing.

“Ten years from now, hopefully we’ll all acknowledge that in this moment, we moved the global game forward competitively,” he said. “Like WXV, this is what we’ve always wanted; a connected global calendar where every match has meaning and competitiveness is accelerated.”

The Nations Cup represents the most significant structural change to the international rugby calendar since the introduction of the Summer Tests and Autumn Series in 2004, extending meaningful competition beyond the traditional tier-one nations for the first time.