Where Are the Stories From the Women's Game?
by Matthew Dehaty
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We wrote a piece a while back asking where all the rugby lifestyle brands were, and pointed out that most brand narratives in this sport aren't inclusive of the full shape of who actually plays it. Women's rugby was the example we used. Then we went on to publish a run of posts that, fairly pointed out, didn't do much about that gap ourselves. This is a start at fixing that.
The numbers changed fast
The 2025 Women's Rugby World Cup, hosted in England, sold roughly 444,000 tickets across the tournament, more than three times the total from the previous edition in New Zealand. The final between England and Canada at Twickenham's Allianz Stadium drew 81,885 fans, a new world record attendance for a women's rugby match, and the second-highest attendance for any Rugby World Cup final, men's or women's. The opening match alone, England against the USA in Sunderland, pulled in 42,723 fans, a record for a Women's Rugby World Cup fixture that lasted about a week before the tournament broke it again.
Broadcast numbers moved just as fast. The BBC reported a peak audience of 3.3 million for England's semi-final win over France, and viewing hours across the tournament were up 336% compared to the previous World Cup. Just over half the crowd at the final was female, and roughly half the people who attended matches across the tournament were watching women's rugby live for the first time.
That's not a niche growing slowly. That's a sport crossing a threshold in real time.
The gap between the crowd and the culture
Here's the part that doesn't add up. Attendance, viewership and commercial interest in the women's game have all moved in the same direction: up, fast, and by a wide margin. But almost none of the brand energy we wrote about in that earlier piece, the heritage revivalists, the club creatives, the streetwear collabs, has followed. Search for a rugby jersey with real design thought behind it and you'll find a dozen archive pieces built around men's kits, from the 1997 Lions to Palace x Ralph Lauren. Search for the equivalent built around the women's game and the shelf is close to empty.
That's not because the material isn't there. It's because almost nobody has gone looking for it yet.
A personal footnote
We've touched this before without meaning to. In Dave Pennock's story, one of the small details he mentioned almost in passing was helping coach the university women's team at Dundee, and the fact that it was a women's team jumper he borrowed and started wearing to matches, the green sweater that first got him thinking about clothing and identity. That detail sat in the story for a reason, even if we didn't build the piece around it. Some of the most interesting threads running through rugby culture have been sitting in the women's game the whole time, mostly undocumented, because nobody thought to write them down.
Where this goes next
We're not going to pretend one post closes a gap we spent a whole earlier piece pointing out. But the growth curve on the women's game right now is the strongest argument there's ever been for treating it as a first-class subject rather than a footnote to the men's story, and we'd rather be early to that than late. If you've got a story, a jersey, a club history, or a photo from the women's game that deserves telling properly, we want to hear about it.