What the Rugby League World Cup can learn from football’s Nations Leagues

A new structure could offer a better balance between global inclusion and competitive fixtures, writes JAMES NALTON

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The final between Australia and New Zealand on Sunday is likely to be another.

Other games have been more predictable, very one-sided, and as a result, far less appealing to viewers.

It raises the question of how, or if, rugby league can alter the format of future editions of its World Cup to make for more competitive games while also facilitating wider global involvement.

Involvement that, in turn, helps these nations develop the sport back home and make for more competitive tournaments in the future.

It also raises the issue of competition formats more generally, as sports try to strike a balance between wider participation and entertaining match-ups.

Walkovers can sometimes be entertaining, in that they are a demonstration of one team’s attacking prowess. It allows their players to go through their repertoire of skills even if the defensive resistance of the other might be questionable.

But seeing scorelines like England 82, France 0, or New Zealand 78, Fiji 0, as occurred at this World Cup, it is natural to think that these are not competitive matches at the highest level of a sport.

This is not limited to rugby league. It happens in other sports when they try to test the limits of their strength in depth. 

At the expanded 2026 Fifa World Cup, there were several one-sided games, including Portugal 5, Uzbekistan 0; Belgium 5, New Zealand 1; and Canada 6, Qatar 0.

The trade-off is that there is wider participation and potentially more interest and funding for the sport to help it grow and improve on the back of that.

The Fifa World Cup expanding to 48 teams was questioned, but overall the inclusion of more nations from around the world added more “world” to match the tournament’s description, and in a game with the global depth of men’s football, it worked in that sense.

Expanding a tournament proper, or its “finals” stage, can also be seen as effectively bringing more of some form of qualifying to the main event.

The group stages of these tournaments could themselves be seen as qualifying rounds. They’re a league stage in a tournament that builds up to a knockout competition. In the Fifa World Cup, they are a next step from the regional qualifying rounds to a bigger stage where teams from different confederations play each other for a chance to progress.

In rugby league, such open seeding on a large scale would make for even more one-sided matches, so there is a case for more of a Nations League-style tier of groups at the tournament itself. 

It would effectively be bringing more of qualifying to the main tournament, but formatting it in a way that the top seeds don’t enter until later.

It’s similar to the setup in the Concacaf Nations League, which covers North and Central America and the Caribbean. That region features numerous small nations at the lower end of Fifa’s rankings, along with some such as Canada, Mexico, and the United States, who can be approaching or within the top 20.

To make this work in the Nations League, the top four seeds get a bye to the knockouts, and the rest battle it out with each other for a chance to face one of these teams, or get promoted to have the chance to do so next time.

With Australia and New Zealand apparently ahead of the rest by a reasonable distance after defeating Samoa and Tonga respectively in the semi-finals, something similar might work in rugby league. They can’t do much worse than the group format at this World Cup, so it offers a chance to try something new.

There are tiers below that very top level that have the potential to produce close, competitive games.

Lebanon’s golden-point victory against France at the end of the group stage, for example, was arguably the most entertaining game at the 2026 Rugby League World Cup, which, for all its organisational issues, has seen several such games.

Tonga against Samoa on the same day was another, despite both teams already being qualified for the semi-finals, finishing 20-18 in Tonga’s favour.

There is a fine line between seeking a natural competitive balance and artificially engineering a tournament so it is less a World Cup, more a series of unnaturally staged games that organisers think might be competitive.

It still needs to be, at some point, an open, global tournament where the best qualifiers from around the world can face the teams from other areas, but more of this could be brought to the tournament proper with increased intercontinental “qualifying” matches.

There will naturally be one-sided results in a sport like rugby, as also seen at the various levels of most forms of football, including in those next tiers, but for the Rugby League World Cup, working out the best of the rest might be better off done as part of the main event.

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