Before hosting France in Tokyo on Saturday, Japan played a “home” match… in Australia. That anomaly, emblematic of a lopsided calendar, is only the visible part of a wider problem. Add up the kilometres covered by the twelve nations involved this summer and a dizzying gap emerges: the northern hemisphere teams and Fiji cross the planet while the major southern hosts barely leave their own country.

Japan’s match in Newcastle, the symptom

The tournament’s principle is that every nation both hosts and travels. Except that some teams cannot host a match at all. That is the case for Fiji, which forces their opponents into strange detours. And it is also what sent Japan to play their second “home” fixture, against Ireland, in Newcastle, Australia, before flying back to Tokyo to face France.

The reason lies in Ireland’s total mileage. Setting off from Dublin, Ireland travelled to Sydney, then Newcastle, then Auckland before returning home: a journey of 37,657 kilometres. Had that same match been played in Tokyo, the Irish itinerary would have climbed above 52,000 kilometres, 14,410 more. So to stop Ireland travelling far more than anyone else, it was Japan who got on the plane.

Two very different costs

We reconstructed the full itinerary of all twelve sides across the three July rounds, then calculated the distances as the crow flies. Above all, we separated two things: the journey to and from the region (reaching the competition zone and going home) and the travel within the competition (the trips between matches). Two very different realities.

Nation To and from region Within competition Total Max time difference
England 19,871 20,128 39,999 4 h
France 28,777 9,665 38,442 10 h
Italy 23,195 14,532 37,727 10 h
Ireland 35,399 2,258 37,657 11 h
Fiji 32,115 497 32,611 11 h
Wales 9,640 20,342 29,982 4 h
Scotland 11,293 18,329 29,623 4 h
Japan 0 15,458 15,458 1 h
Australia 3,291 4,338 7,629 2 h
Argentina 1,598 997 2,596 0 h
New Zealand 761 796 1,557 0 h
South Africa 498 583 1,081 0 h

Championnat des Nations, été 2026

Les trajets des 12 sélections — de 1 081 à 40 000 km

  1. Angleterre 39 999 km 1 at home Londres → Johannesburg → Liverpool → Santiago del Estero → Londres
  2. France 38 442 km 0 at home Paris → Christchurch → Brisbane → Tokyo → Paris
  3. Italie 37 727 km 0 at home Rome → Tokyo → Wellington → Perth → Rome
  4. Irlande 37 657 km 0 at home Dublin → Sydney → Newcastle → Auckland → Dublin
  5. Fidji 32 611 km 0 at home Suva → Cardiff → Liverpool → Édimbourg → Suva
  6. Galles 29 982 km 1 at home Cardiff → San Juan → Durban → Cardiff
  7. Écosse 29 623 km 1 at home Édimbourg → Córdoba → Pretoria → Édimbourg
  8. Japon 15 458 km 2 at home Tokyo → Newcastle → Tokyo
  9. Australie 7 629 km 3 at home Sydney → Brisbane → Perth → Sydney
  10. Argentine 2 596 km 3 at home Buenos Aires → Córdoba → San Juan → Santiago del Estero → Buenos Aires
  11. Nouvelle-Zélande 1 557 km 3 at home Auckland → Christchurch → Wellington → Auckland
  12. Afrique du Sud 1 081 km 3 at home Johannesburg → Pretoria → Durban → Johannesburg

Getting there: the price of geography

This is the cost you simply bear, and it is all but incompressible. Ireland (35,399 km), Fiji (32,115 km), France (28,777 km) and Italy (23,195 km) pay a very heavy price for the mere fact of reaching the other side of the world. That journey is far from trivial in performance terms: arriving after such a distance already means underlying fatigue and a period of acclimatising to heat and humidity before preparation for the first match has even begun. Conversely, the major southern hosts pay almost nothing: they are already at home. Fiji’s case is the most unfair: forced to play all three of their “home” fixtures in Europe, they bear a northern nation’s travel without ever playing in front of their own crowd.

The double penalty of jet lag

Mileage does not tell the whole story, though. Travelling north to south, England cover the most kilometres (close to 40,000, almost a lap of the planet) but face only four hours of time difference: South Africa and Argentina sit on very nearly the same meridian as London. France, Italy, Ireland and Fiji, by contrast, absorb ten to eleven hours of time difference on top of the distance. For those four nations it is a double penalty: to the physical fatigue of the journey is added a body clock knocked out of sync, which takes far longer to absorb.

Be careful, though, not to explain everything by fatigue. The second-biggest traveller in the tournament, France, beat Australia 42-26. Mileage weighs on preparation; it does not decide the result.

Travel within the competition: the price of the calendar

This column is the most revealing, because it is the one the organisers could fix. Here it is Wales (20,342 km), England (20,128 km) and Scotland (18,329 km) who move the most once the tournament is under way. The reason is always the same: a home match wedged between two trips to other continents. England are the caricature of it, with a return to Liverpool between Johannesburg and Santiago del Estero. Japan, for their part, pack their entire mileage (15,458 km) into their detour to Newcastle, right in the middle of their own campaign.

That repeated travel has a concrete cost: every flight eats into recovery and into the preparation week that should be devoted to the next opponent. Ireland (2,258 km) and Fiji (497 km), by contrast, grouped their matches in a single region: once there, they barely move and their preparation is protected. At near-identical totals, two tours therefore take very different tolls.

The major southern hosts do not move

Which leaves the headline finding, unvarnished: South Africa (1,081 km), New Zealand (1,557 km) and Argentina (2,596 km) make nothing but domestic trips, with no time difference at all. Australia, who have to get to Perth, still come in at 7,629 kilometres. The gap with England is a factor of thirty-seven.

The human cost

These kilometres carry a price for bodies first of all. The Nations Championship falls at the end of the season, after ten and a half months of competition for the most heavily used internationals. Asking them to string together three tests on the other side of the world, with ten to eleven hours of time difference for some, means adding a load at the worst possible moment. The double penalty mentioned above is not just a statistic: disrupted sleep, incomplete recovery, greater exposure to injury in weeks that are already loaded. A player welfare issue that these travel figures, for once, make visible.

Behind these national averages there are individual stories. Of the 42 France players taken to the southern hemisphere, seven did not play a single minute across the three matches: Emilien Gailleton, Temo Matiu, Esteban Capilla, Boris Palu, Théo Forner, Mathis Ferté and Auguste Cadot. Victims of competition for places and of the stability the staff favour a year out from the World Cup, they will still have travelled close to 39,000 kilometres to sit on the bench or in the stands. The hard law of elite sport.

The environmental cost

Finally there is the carbon footprint. Between them, the twelve sides covered close to 274,000 kilometres in July alone, nearly seven laps of the planet. For a single France player, the round trip alone accounts for something like 5 to 6 tonnes of CO2, close to three times the annual carbon budget considered sustainable for one person (around two tonnes). Adding up the full delegations, the travel component of the tournament alone runs into thousands of tonnes of CO2. An order of magnitude that raises questions at a time when professional sport is being told to reduce its impact.

A format to reinvent

The Nations Championship therefore stacks up several costs: a geographical inequality that is hard to erase, a calendar inequality that is avoidable, and a human and environmental bill that nobody can ignore. Nothing, for instance, obliges anyone to slot a home match into the middle of a tour on the other side of the world. And the reckoning is not only sporting: stripped of its Tokyo billing, Japan’s relocated match drew only 11,000 spectators to the McDonald Jones Stadium in Newcastle, a ground of nearly 30,000 seats barely a third full. Appealing on paper, a tournament spread across five continents still runs up against this elusive fairness. Food for thought before the next editions.

Method: great-circle distances (as the crow flies) calculated on each team’s actual July itinerary, from their country of departure through to their return. The time difference is the maximum gap, in hours, between the base city and the furthest destination. The carbon footprint is an estimate, based on roughly 0.15 kg of CO2 per passenger-kilometre by air, excluding altitude effects that would push it higher still. Fiji’s case is estimated from Suva: with much of the squad playing in Europe, not everyone in the group will necessarily have travelled from the islands.