English Rugby delivered a brilliant product this season. Now it has to protect it.

22 June 2026

Northampton Saints are the champions of England. They beat Exeter Chiefs 26-17 in front of a sold-out Allianz Stadium, live and free-to-air on ITV, and in doing so closed out a season that has been a genuine pleasure to follow.
I support the Saints, and watching them this season has been thrilling. They scored tries, loads of them: 104 in eighteen regular-season league games. Their wing Tommy Freeman broke the club’s single-season try record, previously held by Chris Ashton, and then they scored another seven in the play-off semi-final against Leicester. As a fan, it was a feast.
But I watched plenty of other matches too, and for me, the more interesting story is the state of the league itself and the national game, for both men and women. English club rugby has become brilliant entertainment, and that is worth examining, whatever team you follow.

The Numbers Don't Lie

For years, the criticism of Northern Hemisphere rugby was that it was attritional. Win the ball up front, kick for territory, grind out a penalty. Watch the Premiership this season, and that caricature falls apart. The battle up front is as fierce as it has ever been, and the forward contest is still part of the spectacle, as it always was. What has changed is how teams handle the ball in hand. They run it. There is still plenty of kicking, but the instinct now is to attack, and the result is front-foot fifteen-man rugby.
The numbers back it up. The regular season produced 732 tries, an average of 8.6 a game, an all-time Premiership record, and remember this is a ten-team league. To put that in context, in 2009-10, the league average was around 3.2 tries a match. The rugby being played now is unrecognisable from that, and it is superb.
Strangely, it happened almost by accident. The league shrank after the financial strain of COVID; clubs went under, and the survivors picked up the best talent. Fin Smith, Curtis Langdon and Tom Pearson all joined the Saints. Recent rule changes tilted the game towards attack, and the leading sides built their identities around scoring.
This season, Northampton tore up the record books, becoming the first team ever to score more than 100 tries in an eighteen-round regular season. Bath, in second, were not far behind on 98, and Saracens scored 92, with their winger Noah Caluori the season’s leading try scorer on 18. Saracens missed the play-offs in fifth, so it is not all about attack.
Exeter proved that too. They have a fine defence, finished third, and were only fifth for tries on 72, the fewest of the play-off sides. They got there on a powerful pack and a hard defence rather than a hail of tries, which makes them the most dangerous kind of opponent on a one-off final day. Northampton scored at will all season, but eighty minutes against a side built on forward grunt and a mean defence is exactly the test that can choke off the supply. So it proved. Exeter shut the Saints down for long spells, forced the errors, and pushed the champions closer than the scoreline suggests.

The Play-Offs Can Be Cruel, But They Are The Best Format

Here is the part that fascinates me. The Saints won the league with 14 wins, 1 draw, and 3 defeats, their first place sealed before the regular season ended, and for that, they won precisely nothing. No trophy, no title, no medal. Finishing first qualifies you for a home semi-final and the right to keep playing. England’s champions are decided not by a season but by two matches: a semi and a final.
It is brutal and magnificent. The regular season earns you a league position and home advantage for the top two, but the prize is a knockout. You can be the best side in the country for nine months and walk away with nothing, while a side that finishes third or fourth can get hot for two games and lift the trophy. Exeter won their semi-final away at the Rec, proving that a home draw guarantees nothing. As a supporter, it is exhausting. You spend a whole campaign in first place and still cannot exhale, because none of it counts until the last fortnight. I am only half joking when I say it is tough to go again as a fan.
The drama it generates is undeniable, and the format deserves to be embraced by more sports. The EFL already stages “the richest game in world football,” the Championship play-off final, and has just voted to expand its play-offs from four teams to six, with the top two seeds getting a bye to the semis and the rest fighting through single-leg eliminators. None of this is new to American sport, where the play-offs are the whole point and the regular season is a long audition for them. Even Major League Soccer crowns its champion through a knockout, the MLS Cup, and hands the team that topped the table a separate prize, the Supporters’ Shield, much as our league leaders get a home semi-final and nothing for the cabinet. The format works, so why not a County Championship play-off series in cricket? Jeopardy powers the story. It keeps people watching when the league title is settled, and, let us be honest, there is an element of exquisite torture for the fan.
A development that complicates all of this arrived alongside the final. Prem Rugby is reported to be planning to move the semi-finals to neutral venues from 2029-30, both played in one city across a single weekend, in the manner of the European finals. Liverpool and Brighton are among the early candidates. The logic is commercial. Franklin’s Gardens and the Rec both sold out this season, but hold only around 15,000, and bigger stadiums mean bigger gates. It pulls in two directions at once. Stripping home advantage raises the jeopardy, the very thing that makes these knockouts so good, given that only about one play-off tie in six has ever been won by the away side. But it thins the reward for topping the table still further. Finish first, and you already win nothing but a home tie. Take the home tie away, and the eighteen-round league all but stops counting. I do not know which way I land on it. The drama says yes; the fan who watched the Saints lead from the front all season says something is being quietly given away.

The Fastest-Growing Part Of The Product

The other reason to be optimistic about English rugby has nothing to do with the men’s game.
Women’s rugby is booming. The PWR, Premiership Women’s Rugby, has had a remarkable season on the back of England winning the 2025 home World Cup. Broadcast audiences are up 275 per cent, every one of the league’s 75 matches has been shown live for the first time, across TNT Sports, the BBC and YouTube, and crowds have climbed steeply, with new fans turning up who had never been to a women’s match before. It is, by a distance, the best women’s club competition in the world, and it is being run with the ambition to stay that way.
The national side is the foundation. The Red Roses won a fifth straight Grand Slam this spring, beating France 43-28 in Bordeaux to extend a winning run that now stretches beyond 35 Tests, and they did it as reigning world champions, the first side ever to follow a World Cup with a Six Nations clean sweep. What makes it remarkable is how. They were missing a string of senior players, several to pregnancy, including the lock Abbie Ward, and others to retirement, and they blooded five debutants and still did not lose.
That part of the story I find genuinely wholesome, and I think it helps explain the growing popularity. These women want to play rugby at the very top and start families, and the RFU and the team culture get behind both rather than forcing a choice. We explored exactly this in our interview with Abbie Ward.
A great many women recognise those twin pulls in their own lives, and seeing a team navigate them openly and keep winning is a powerful thing to watch. It widens the audience well beyond the usual rugby crowd.
The momentum continues to build. 2027 is another year to watch elite women’s sport, with two major events almost back-to-back. The football World Cup is in Brazil across late June and July, and weeks later the first-ever Women’s British and Irish Lions tour begins, a Test series against the Black Ferns in New Zealand. Two high-profile team events in one window is good for women’s sport as a whole, not just for the two codes involved.
The football tells you why it matters. Women’s sport runs on a tournament cycle, and audience interest peaks around the major events. English attendances climbed after the home Euros, then softened across the fallow seasons that followed, with the Women’s Super League yet to match the peak it hit on the back of a major tournament. A summer like 2027 is exactly what reverses that. If the Lionesses do well in Brazil, expect domestic football crowds to rise again the following season, and a successful Lions tour can do the same for rugby. The two events will feed into each other, and into the wider appetite for women’s sport.

The Threat Is Not The Product. It Is Player Welfare.

So the Premiership has the entertainment, it has the drama, and the women’s game is doing a superb job of bringing in new fans, which carries the whole sport’s momentum forward. What rugby has not solved is player welfare. There is too much rugby, and the best players are being asked, expected, to play too often.
The hits are bigger than they have ever been, not helped by the number of substitutions in a game, the seasons are longer, and the players who matter most, the ones who fill stadiums and sell the game to a global audience, are being run into the ground. It is club and country, and then every four years the Lions. Within days of the Premiership final, the international players in it joined up with their national squads for a summer tour. That is not sustainable.
Keith Wood, the former Ireland and Lions hooker, put it plainly on a podcast: after a Lions series, every player who toured is wrecked for months. His own remedy is that Lions tourists should sit out their nation’s next summer tour. Last autumn, both Ireland and Australia fielded players fresh off the 2025 tour. They looked flat and lost to sides they would normally beat. It was not great to watch. Tired players lose and get injured, but the stars are the ones the broadcasters paid for, so they are asked to keep playing.
Wood’s suggestion is a good one, though I would go a step further in one direction and pull back in another. A British and Irish Lion should still play for his club and be available for the Six Nations. One is Europe’s marquee international event and a brilliant competition; the other, the club game, is where you bring in new fans. But they should not play the autumn internationals and the summer tour that follows a Lions tour. The game must give its top players time to rest and mend. The World Cup, the Lions and the Six Nations sit ahead of the summer internationals and tours in what matters.
On the evidence of this season, English club rugby is in excellent health. It has built a product that holds its own in world sport: a men’s league setting that is scoring records, a tense and thrilling play-off format, and a women’s game growing faster than anyone dared hope for a few years ago. The talent is there and growing. The drama is there. The audience is turning up and tuning in. These are pieces that take decades to assemble, and for rugby, they are in place.
What remains to be seen is whether the game is built on sand or stone. The players are the stone. A league this good should not be taken for granted. The structure is solid, but it can be hollowed out quickly if we burn out the best players and force them to spend a year or two in France, thereby relinquishing their availability to England. The job now is to protect what works, respect the attrition these men and women endure at the top of the game, and, above all, acknowledge that the threat is real rather than sweep it under the carpet.
As for the final itself, it settled the season the only way this league allows: over 80 minutes, winner-take-all. It was not a classic. Exeter were excellent at shutting the Saints down, the handling was loose, and the set piece, where I had feared Exeter would dominate, turned out to be an even contest. What decided it was the thing that a long season earns you. The best side found a way. A double sin-binning swung the final quarter, and George Hendy scored twice in the space of a few minutes to take it. Henry Pollock was the game’s dominant player and a deserved player of the match. Tense, absorbing and hard-won, which on the day was better than pretty. The right result for a Saints fan, and the right result for a league they had led from the front all year. A sport worth this much worry is a sport worth protecting.

This is the view from England, where the club game is thriving. Club rugby elsewhere is not so settled. Across the world, this season, the same sport is booming in some countries and fighting for its life in others, and the difference has almost nothing to do with what happens on the pitch. That is for next time.