United Rugby Championship
The United Rugby Championship is an annual rugby union competition involving professional teams from Ireland, Italy, Scotland, South Africa, and Wales. For sponsorship reasons the league is known as the Vodacom United Rugby Championship in South Africa, and the BKT United Rugby Championship in the competition's other territories, the split branding mirroring the format previously adopted in Super Rugby. The Championship represents the highest level of domestic club or franchise rugby in each of its constituent countries.
The Championship is one of the three major professional leagues in Europe, the most successful teams from which go forward to compete in the highest-level continental club competitions, the European Rugby Champions Cup and Challenge Cup. Since 2022–23 South African teams have been eligible to qualify for European competitions.
Name
The tournament has had a number of names as it has grown, both organisationally and because of sponsors. The current name for the tournament was adopted in 2021, when the league expanded to include four South African teams previously from the SANZAR Super Rugby competition and both sets of naming rights, BKT and Vodacom, were added in the 2022–23 season.The genesis of the League can be traced to 1999 when two Scottish districts joined the professional Welsh Premier Division, creating the Welsh–Scottish League, which does not form part of the continuity of the competition known as URC, but is the acknowledged precursor to it. When the Welsh-Scottish league was disbanded to create a similar competition with the provincial clubs from Ireland three years later, the new competition became known as the Celtic League The league was sponsored by Irish cider makers Magners from the 2006–07 season until 2010–11, and was referred to as the Magners League. At the start of the 2010–11 season, the league expanded from 10 to 12 teams, by adding two Italian teams, the first step outside the Celtic nations who had formed the league.
Following the end of Magners' sponsorship, the league adopted a Pro12 branding to acknowledge the move beyond the Celtic nations, with RaboDirect coming on board as naming sponsor of the Rabobank Pro12 from 2011–12 through to 2013–14. A further expansion to 14 teams took place from the 2017–18 season, with two South African teams not competing in the Super rugby competition joining the Championship until the 2019–20 season. The sponsorship deal with Guinness began at the beginning of the 2014–15 season as the Guinness Pro14, and concluded after the Guinness Pro14 Rainbow Cup in July 2021. Following the arrival of the four South African Super Rugby franchises a further rebranding to the United Rugby Championship occurred, while the league formed a new partnership with Roc Nation. BKT and Vodacom secured naming rights the following season.
Trophy
The URC trophy is named 'The Array', and was made in collaboration between British silversmiths Thomas Lyte, and design agency, Matter, in 2022. While the trophy's official name is 'The Array', it is also affectionately nicknamed 'the Beast' as it weighs around, making it the heaviest trophy in club rugby. It stands 68 cm tall.Tournament format
Current format
As of the introduction of the United Rugby Championship in 2021–22, the championship season has broadly had a consistent format. It takes place between September and May, with teams split into four regional pools: The Irish Shield pool, the Welsh Shield pool, the South African Shield pool and the Scottish and Italian Shield pool for the purpose of fixture setting.Teams play each of the other teams in their pool twice and each team from the other pools once. This ensures that Irish, South African and Welsh teams each play six derby matches. For Italy and Scotland, their respective clubs play their own nations' sides only twice. All teams are sorted in a single league table. Championship points are awarded using the bonus points system; 4 points for a win and 2 for a draw. Bonus points can be earned so long as teams either score four or more tries in a game or lose by seven points or fewer – should a team do both, two bonus points are gained.
This creates an 18-match regular season before the play-offs, essentially a full single round robin with three additional 'derby ties'.
The play-offs are made up of a seeded three round single-elimination tournament for the top eight teams. Teams are seeded 1–8 and the highest-seeded teams receive home advantage in every tie, including in the final. Prior to 2022, in common with the English Gallagher Premiership competition, the finals had been held in pre-arranged venues, although unlike the Premiership -where the final was fixed at Twickenham, the event still travelled between hosts.
As for European qualification, As of 2022 the South African teams are eligible for European competition. As of 2023, the top eight teams qualify for the Champions Cup, with the remaining teams qualifying for the Challenge Cup, subject to lower ranked URC teams claiming qualification for the Champions Cup by winning a European trophy.
With three fewer regular season fixtures than in the Pro14, but with an extra round of playoffs, the season is truncated slightly to 21 match weeks and thus can still be scheduled to the same time period as previous models of the competition. Clashes between league matches and international weekends in November and during the Six Nations Championship have been reduced.
Due to the travelling distance between Europe and South Africa, home South African games are always played on a Saturday, allowing visiting teams to have a seven-day turnaround between fixtures, including five "clean days" that do not involve any travel. Should the draw see European teams play both South African teams away, the schedule will see the away team play the two matches back-to-back across two weeks, acting as a "mini-tour" and reducing air travel and freight.
URC Regional Shields
On 24 September 2021, URC confirmed that the top side in each regional pool after the end of the 18-game regular season would be awarded a subsidiary trophy, a regional Shield. In Ireland, Wales and South Africa, this shield functions as an informal national championship title for the main professional sides, while in Scotland and Italy's shared pool, it will be a joint regional trophy. The concept is comparable to the Divisional Championships in the NFL which are also loosely geographically based. For the 2021–2022 and 2022–2023 seasons, the winners of each Shield were decided on the basis of all 18 regular season games played, and also guaranteed qualification for the European Rugby Champions Cup, regardless of their overall league position. However, since the start of the 2023–2024 season, this was no longer the case and the top eight teams in the league would qualify for Europe regardless of Shield position. In addition, the winners of the each Shield would be determined by the games played amongst the teams within their regional group, reaffirming its status as a specifically national and separate championship. In Scotland, the 'national' trophy is considered to be the 1872 Cup played exclusively between the two Scottish clubs, usually as a double header over the Christmas and New Year periods.Derby games have become a tradition in all five member nations over this holiday period, with most home teams achieving bumper crowds for the matches. In Wales, a tradition has also arisen for a double-header Judgment Day event, involving all four Welsh clubs in two Welsh derbies back-to-back at the Principality Stadium. In Ireland and Scotland, certain derby games have been moved very successfully to the larger national stadia, or in the case of Connacht and Munster, to much larger local GAA grounds.
Format history
The league has used a play-off structure for most of its history, from its beginnings in 2001 until to 2003, and again every year since the 2009–10 season to determine the champions, similar to that used in the English Premiership. For the first two seasons there were two groups and a knockout to determine a winner. Starting from the 2003–04 season until the 2008–09 season, the champions were determined from league performance, with all the teams in one league table. From 2009, the single league table was retained, but play-offs were reintroduced to crown a champion. From the 2017–18 season, when the competition expanded to fourteen teams, the regular season employed a conference structure rather than a single round robin league, with 'derby games' between teams from the same nation being protected, and an expanded playoff structure. This allowed the expanded competition to control the calendar, and control the number of games per team.League points are awarded using the bonus points system. Until and including the 2008–09 season, the champions were decided solely on the basis of who finished top of the league table, but since the 2009–10 season, the league champion has been decided by a play-off series, in line with other rugby club competitions such as Super Rugby, Top 14, and the English Premiership: at the conclusion of the regular season, the top four placed teams enter the semi-final stage, with the winner of the first vs fourth and second vs third play-offs entering the final.
Two Italian teams – the former National Championship of Excellence team Benetton Treviso, and a new team, Aironi – joined the league starting with the 2010–11 season. Aironi was replaced by Zebre from the 2012–13 season. Through the 2012–13 season, the Welsh, Irish, Scottish and Italian rugby unions used the league as the sole determinant for Heineken Cup qualification, and from 2013–14 they use it as the sole means of qualification for the successor to the Heineken Cup, the European Rugby Champions Cup.
Two South African teams – Southern Kings and Cheetahs joined the competition in 2017 to create Pro14, while the four remaining professional franchises stayed in Super Rugby. The competition adopted a modified two-conference format rather than a full round-robin single table, with extra fixtures to maintain national derby matches. As weaker provinces, both South African teams struggled in the three years in which they took part, and were ineligible for European competition. The terminal financial difficulties at Southern Kings, and the COVID-19 pandemic effectively ended their participation in 2020, and there was no South African participation in the 2020 season, although the competition retained the Pro14 name.
Despite the difficulties, however, the competition proved attractive to the South African Rugby Football Union, due to shared time zones and reduced travelling, and the four major Super Rugby franchises – Stormers, Sharks, Bulls and Lions joined the renamed United Rugby Championship the following year, firstly through the transitional Pro14 Rainbow Cup, held in a split tournament format across Europe and South Africa, and then the United Rugby Championship, this time eligible for European competition. Ironically, Cheetahs, no longer in the URC, were invited to join the second-tier European competition, the EPCR Challenge Cup, as well, along with Georgian side, Black Lion from the Rugby Europe Super Cup. South African team, Stormers, won the first edition of URC in an all South African final, before being runner-up in the second season to Irish side, Munster.
| Period | Sponsor | Name | Teams | Countries |
| no sponsor | Celtic League | 15 | Ireland, Scotland, Wales | |
| 2002–2003 | no sponsor | Celtic League | 16 | Ireland, Scotland, Wales |
| 2003–2004 | no sponsor | Celtic League | 12 | Ireland, Scotland, Wales |
| 2004–2006 | no sponsor | Celtic League | 11 | Ireland, Scotland, Wales |
| 2006–2007 | Magners | Magners League | 11 | Ireland, Scotland, Wales |
| 2007–2010 | Magners | Magners League | 10 | Ireland, Scotland, Wales |
| 2010–2011 | Magners | Magners League | 12 | Ireland, Italy, Scotland, Wales |
| 2011–2014 | RaboDirect | RaboDirect Pro12 | 12 | Ireland, Italy, Scotland, Wales |
| 2014–2017 | Guinness | Guinness Pro12 | 12 | Ireland, Italy, Scotland, Wales |
| 2017–2020 | Guinness | Guinness PRO14 | 14 | Ireland, Italy, Scotland, South Africa, Wales |
| 2020–2021 | Guinness | Guinness PRO14 | 12 | Ireland, Italy, Scotland, Wales |
| 2021 | Guinness | Guinness PRO14 Rainbow Cup | 16 | Ireland, Italy, Scotland, South Africa, Wales |
| 2021–2022 | Vodacom no sponsor | United Rugby Championship | 16 | Ireland, Italy, Scotland, South Africa, Wales |
| 2022– | Vodacom BKT | Vodacom United Rugby Championship BKT United Rugby Championship | 16 | Ireland, Italy, Scotland, South Africa, Wales |