Abstract
By 1970, Rugby union football had been spread throughout the world and several international rugby institutions were established. At this time, International Rugby Board(IRB) rapidly move towards ‘opening’ and unification of different international rugby institutions. The focus of this paper is the Rugby World Cup(RWC), which has been held every four years since 1987, and illustrates the changes that occurred during the unification period.
The author shall describe how IRB used RWC as the sole controller to reorganize and integrate the rugby institutions at global level. This analysis stems from the careful reading of the memorandums of meetings on the RWC during the unification period.
The following facts became clear as a result of this study. Firstly, with commercialization of rugby beginning in the 1970s, the IRB developed policies regarding such things as the global promotion and development of rugby, which led to the tense relation between IRB and other global institution such as Federation International De Rugby Amateur over the control of the global governing rights for rugby. Secondly, while the IRB strengthened its efforts to exclude〈non-rugby〉elements, the RWC became a means to subsume unions that were not members of the IRB. Lastly, the development of RWC was accompanied by the establishment of the IRB as a ‘global’ decision-making body for rugby and its increased corporatization. The re-organized IRB began to control the rugby code on global scale through its international promotion and development of rugby, as well its increasing commercialization of rugby.
