It’s been seven years in the making, has already been postponed once, and will all be over just five weeks after it starts. Few of us could even begin to comprehend what goes into planning, producing, and hosting a major sports event. And for the man behind this autumn’s Rugby League World Cup, it has thrown up challenges that even he could not have foreseen.
“We’ll soon be on our fourth Prime Minister in the delivery of this tournament,” says chief executive Jon Dutton. “When we did the plan for this in 2015, Brexit wasn’t part of it. We arrived at Buckingham Palace and did the draws on Prince Harry’s last formal engagement. Two months later the pandemic came. We were still pretty convinced we’d stage our tournament, then the postponement came. We’ve now got war in Europe for the first time in our lifetime, and the cost of living crisis. None of those were in the plan, so we have had to be agile. I regard myself as a pretty decent problem-solver and thankfully I like problems and resolving them.”
Dutton is a relentless optimist and master of the understatement. The 49-year old Leigh Centurions season-ticket holder is a rugby league nut. But the truth is that after 27 years working in professional sport, overseeing this event almost broke him.
“The postponement last year was pretty devastating personally,” he admits as we chat at the tournament’s headquarters in central Manchester this week while recording the Love Rugby League podcast.
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The tournament’s plans and six years of work went up in smoke last August when Australia and New Zealand refused to travel citing Covid safety concerns, forcing a rescheduling to 2022.
“I was pretty close to walking away, to be honest. We were ready and could have delivered then,” he says. “We had done so much work and to get to that point after six years of work was truly devastating. There was a point where I thought 'I’ve done everything I can, I can’t do any more so perhaps it is the right time to pass it on to someone else.'”
Dutton went away with his family and, with the advice of his close circle, vowed to crack on. “Once I’d decided it was ridiculous to feel sorry for yourself, I got on with it and enjoyed the challenge of putting it back together.”
Dutton lost 60% of his workforce and had to renegotiate 150 different agreements in a short space of time. There are now less than 60 days before his team delivers 61 games across 21 venues over five weeks, welcoming 32 teams across 20 different nations, the most diverse playing population ever to assemble in rugby league.
The hope is that the tournament captures the public imagination in the same way as the recent Women’s Euros and Commonwealth Games.
“We’ve seen people really get on board and enjoy the Women’s Euros and Commonwealth Games, and we want to be the next cab off the rank. The Commonwealth Games had a big budget, a big team and big challenges. We have the big challenges but without the big budget and without the big team.”
The reality for World Cup organisers though is that they need to sell tickets. £25m of government funding was secured on the promise of selling 750,000 seats. At last count only 250,000 had been snapped up.
“Our next target is to double that number and to double that number really quickly,” Dutton reveals. “We have three targets; the first is to surpass the 2013 World Cup when 476,000 people came along and enjoyed that tournament. The second is to better what the Women’s Euros did, which was about 570,000. And the third is to get to three quarters of a million. The government have been tremendously supportive but are increasing the pressure on us to make sure we are doing all the right things.”
That government support bizarrely extended to sending Nadine Dorries to support an event in June at which the Culture Secretary expressed her love for league by shambolically referencing Jonny Wilkinson’s famous drop goal in the other code. It produced the biggest day of PR the tournament has received to date.
Dutton refused to criticise the gaffe, but does admit the cross-code rivalry has become tiresome.
“The comparison to rugby union infuriates me constantly. Rugby league and rugby union are two different games with wonderful athletes within their own rights. There should never be comparison between the two. That really does frustrate me. Union people might say it is part of the establishment while we are a sport predominantly played and headquartered in the north of England. We just have to work harder than anybody else. I accept that and I would love it to change, but we will only change by being relentless. We need to stop feeling sorry for ourselves, galvanise our frustration and anger about how we think we have been poorly treated in other areas and use it to make a difference.”
🏟️ St. James' Park
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Dutton’s bold boast that he can deliver the biggest, best and most inclusive World Cup ever has been helped by a host of allegiance pledges from top NRL stars to Pacific Island Nations such as Tonga, Samoa and Fiji rather than heavyweights Australia and New Zealand.
“We now start off with five men’s teams who legitimately based on selections could lift the trophy,” he claims. “That is super exciting, maybe a bit daunting from an England perspective.”
Dutton admits the international calendar - or lack of it - has long been “the Achilles heel” of a sport now trying to reinvent itself. Hosts England are attempting to make history with a home World Cup win, but have only played once all year. “Rugby league needs a tournament like this to be the catalyst for international change,” he adds. “More regularity, and a set calendar where you can invest in the long term rather than be hand-to-mouth as the sport internationally unfortunately has been.”
For now, the one challenge is delivering a successful tournament, with a public buy-in that could help England topple the Southern Hemisphere superpowers. So what would represent the perfect tournament for Dutton?
“Perfection doesn’t exist, so we will never get to utopia. But we are relentless with our energy, and who knows, that could just pay off with an incredibly special moment for the sport.”
The tournament includes the men’s, women’s, wheelchair and PDRL events, and begins with England men v Samoa at St James’ Park on October 15.
*18+ | BeGambleAware | Odds Subject to Change
