Organisers insist project that would have brought London Irish to Gillette Stadium is postponed, rather than abandoned
A plan to start a professional rugby league in the US has been postponed. Photograph: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images
Plans to hold a high-profile summer fixture as the curtain-raiser to a US professional rugby union league have collapsed.
As the Guardian reported on Monday, the former dual-code international Henry Paul had been engaged to coach a US Barbarians-style XVcomprised of former college American football players and foreign veterans. A showcase match against the Aviva Premiership side London Irish, on 10 August at Gillette Stadium near Boston, was envisaged as the prelude to a six-team East Coast league, starting as early as 2014.
However, the organiser, a Minnesota-based company called RugbyLaw, said it had decided late on Tuesday that there was insufficient time to market and host the game properly. The company said that it had the financing and agreements in place to stage the one-off match but concluded that it was unlikely to generate a large crowd, enough media attention or the sense of occasion needed to persuade investors to sink money into an expensive full-time league.
The organisers had hoped for a 30,000 crowd but the lack of time to sell tickets and the absence of a detailed marketing strategy to attract fans and sponsors made that goal unrealistic. The on-field idea – that physically-skilled athletes unwanted by American football could become credible rugby players in the space of a summer – was itself hugely ambitious, though intriguing.
Michael Clements, of RugbyLaw, insisted that the "Independence Cup" fixture was not canceled but merely postponed until 2014, when his organisation would try again.
He told the Guardian: "We're not ready. We want to grab all the revenue sources we can. Maybe we were too ambitious."
RugbyLaw's thesis is that a US professional rugby union league will only work if the standard of play is very high from the start, rather than set up to develop slowly in a similar way to Major League Soccer. In a statement, the organisation said: "RugbyLaw believes it is crucial that the first elite professional rugby union XV game in the United States must be of the same quality that is expected on the pitch in Toulouse, Stade de France or Twickenham: history must be made.
"If a new professional sport is to be successful in the United States, there is no appetite for a developmental or semi-pro approach, and those contributing the capital to such an effort must be satisfied that reasonable returns will be realized. The abbreviated time frame we have to 10 August is not sufficient to assemble all the moving parts."
Rugby authorities in the US and England had been tracking the scheme closely. This is far from the first attempt to start a high-profile professional rugby union tournament in North America, amid growing interest in the sport. The USA Eagles face Ireland in a friendly at BBVA Compass Stadium in Houston on Saturday. An attendance in excess of 20,000 is expected, which would break last year's US rugby record, of 17,241, for a match against Italy at the same venue. Sevens is also gaining traction ahead of its inclusion in the 2016 Olympic Games.
Brett Gosper, the head of the International Rugby Board, told reporters last April that he had been in discussions with USA Rugby, the US governing body, about the feasibility of launching a professional league in order to drive popularity, with a view to North America one day hosting the World Cup.
However, as numerous sports – including cricket – have discovered, the US is a potentially bountiful market that is notoriously difficult to crack.
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