There are the images. Paradoxical ones. The Durban sun, the exoticism of a globalised game, but stadiums that struggle to fill up. And then there are the figures, unforgiving, which the spectacle can no longer mask. Since the South African franchises joined the European competitions, every intercontinental trip has become a climate anomaly…

Twenty thousand kilometres there and back to play a pool match. The order of magnitude, documented by several press investigations including one by La Montagne, is dizzying. Behind that distance lies a brutal reality. Around 5 to 5.5 tonnes of CO₂ emitted per passenger. For a player, that is the equivalent of two to three years of a carbon budget compatible with current climate targets.

Rugby, long seen as a sport rooted in its own territories, is discovering the paradoxes of an accelerated globalisation.

The invisible weight of travel

In sport’s environmental accounts, one item dwarfs all the others. Transport. According to the analyses relayed by Sami.eco and several recent reports, it is the leading source of emissions in the major competitions. Rugby is no exception to the rule.

A professional squad is not just twenty-three players. It is an extended staff, conditioning coaches, doctors, equipment. Fifty to sixty people boarding long-haul flights. The end result is a climate bill that regularly goes beyond two hundred and fifty tonnes of CO₂ for a single trip.

Multiplied across a season, that figure changes scale. We are no longer talking about a one-off excess but about a structurally emitting model.

The contrast is all the more striking because, at the same time, the institutional rhetoric claims to be virtuous. The Fédération française de rugby recently set out, drawing on the work of the Shift Project, ways of cutting emissions. Less flying, recycled equipment, streamlined travel. A necessary trajectory, but one hard to reconcile with round trips between Europe and southern Africa.

A deceptive economic equation

On top of the ecological argument comes a financial reality. A Europe-South Africa flight for a professional squad represents between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand euros, including tickets, logistics and accommodation. An outlay accepted in the name of the competitions’ appeal, but one that raises questions at a time when many clubs are keeping a close eye on their budgets.

European rugby has gambled on opening up. More markets, more visibility, more potential revenue. But at what real price. Because the carbon cost appears on no balance sheet.

That dissonance is feeding a growing unease. In the stands as among some of the game’s own protagonists, the question is no longer marginal. It is becoming central.

The silence of those involved

We approached the South African federation, EPCR, and several South African franchises involved in the European competitions. None of them responded to our requests. An unofficial source close to the matter did nonetheless tell us: “It is true that this climate side of things was pushed aside from the very start, it was never really put on the table.“

That silence says a great deal about the embarrassment of the moment. Because acknowledging the problem already means admitting that the current model is hard to sustain.

Those who defend the expansion put forward sporting arguments. Greater intensity, a diversity of styles, international exposure. Real benefits, but ones that struggle to offset the environmental footprint.

A sport at a crossroads

Rugby likes to tell the world that it carries values. Solidarity, respect, responsibility. In an era of climate breakdown, those words take on a new meaning.

Can we carry on staging so-called European competitions involving massive intercontinental journeys? Can we promote ecological commitments while multiplying long-haul flights? Can we, finally, ignore the impact of a single match equivalent to several years of individual emissions?

In an opinion piece published on Dicodusport, the former international Julien Pierre widens the lens further. For him, sport can no longer make do with marginal adjustments in the face of climate breakdown.

The recent postponements caused by extreme weather conditions are already no longer exceptions but the first signs of a lasting shift. They generate pointless journeys, additional costs and considerable energy waste

Julien Pierre, former France international

In plain terms, behind these episodes it is the whole organisation of professional sport that looks weakened. Julien Pierre is calling for a change of logic, a shift from late reaction to “structured anticipation“, in which climate becomes a central parameter of calendars and decisions. Not the other way round.

“Adapt kick-off times“, “rethink infrastructure“, “coordinate the stakeholders“, so many concrete levers for building a more “resilient” sport. But his assessment chimes with a more uncomfortable truth. If sport has to adapt to the climate, it must also stop making the crisis worse. And in that context, European rugby’s intercontinental round trips look like a choice, but one that is now hard to defend.

The question therefore goes beyond rugby. It touches on the way professional sport fits into its own era.

Alternatives do exist. Reorganising formats, grouping stages geographically, limiting long-distance travel… Options raised in several reports, but still marginal when it comes to decisions.

In the meantime, every Champions Cup weekend (and URC weekend for that matter, where the “South African” franchises have also been brought in) throws up the same absurdity. That of a sport chasing its own expansion, even if it leaves behind a carbon trail that is ever harder to justify.

The verdict, clear-eyed and unforgiving: the oval ball keeps travelling and the planet takes the hit.

The gulf between rhetoric and reality

Since the 2023 World Cup, staged in France, rugby has discovered an environmental conscience. The organisers made much of their determination to reduce the event’s carbon footprint by working on mobility, existing infrastructure and public awareness. A virtuous shop window, widely praised.

But that resolve runs once again into a major contradiction. On one side, public commitments to the ecological transition. On the other, a competition architecture that multiplies the most polluting journeys.

The Shift Project report devoted to rugby points to precisely this inconsistency. Reducing the use of aircraft is identified as a priority lever. Yet in the case of the South African franchises, flying is not an option. It is an obligation.

That total dependence makes any decarbonisation strategy partial, if not illusory.

Sporting fatigue on top of the climate cost

Beyond the environment, these trips also raise questions in sporting terms. Long-haul journeys mean jet lag, fatigue, express adaptation. Factors that directly influence performance.

Some coaching staffs talk internally about degraded preparation conditions, notably at UBB and Stade Toulousain, who are targeting the European summits and for whom every point picked up away from home is precious. Less training time, disrupted recovery, complex squad management. Modern rugby, already burdened with saturated calendars, finds itself lumbered with yet another constraint.

So the ecological cost comes hand in hand with a physiological cost. A double penalty rarely highlighted in official statements.

Gradual normalisation?

The most striking thing is perhaps the speed with which these journeys have become commonplace. What still looked like an exception a few years ago has become routine.

Clubs get organised, players adapt, broadcasters sell the fixture. The spectacular takes precedence over reflection, even as the stadiums of the European competitions ring relatively hollow.

“In that normalisation, the risk is clear. The risk of a collective blindness, in which habit erases the question of meaning“, is what you hear from the Ligue de rugby de La Réunion, itself constrained by travel problems.

In the end, the question would remain a fairly simple one. Is it worth crossing half the planet to sustain a competition that claims to be European?

Rugby is not the only sport confronted with this drift, unlike football, which stages its World Cups in the middle of the desert, or across two continents at once, but it offers a textbook case, almost a caricature, of what globalisation applied without safeguards produces.


These contradictions will become more and more visible. And less and less acceptable in the future...

The pitch itself stays the same. Eighty or ninety minutes, one ball, two teams. But all around it, a backdrop that is changing. And with it, the responsibility of those who organise the game…