Rugby Union in Spain
Rugby union isa sport that is particularly popular in the north-east of the country and in university circlesin Spain and has been played since the early 1920s. The best clubs play in the División de Honor for the championship, and a professional league was held for the first time in 2009, the Superibérica . The responsible national association is the Federación Española de Rugby (FER), which comprises 299 registered clubs with 34,232 players (as of 2017). This makes rugby the fifth most important team sport in Spain after football , basketball , handball and volleyball .
history
The first documented rugby match on Spanish soil took place in A Coruña on March 2, 1911 , the crews of two British ships from Gloucester and Liverpool met and the victory went 5-0 to the team from Gloucester. The first known meeting with Spanish participation took place on May 25, 1911. Club Deportivo Español met French Patrie in Barcelona , the game ended with a 7-0 win for the guests. In 1921 the veterinarian Baldiri Aleu Torras founded the country's first rugby club, Unió Esportiva Santboiana, together with a few friends in his hometown of Sant Boi de Llobregat . He had already got to know the sport during his studies in Toulouse . Clubs quickly began to emerge across the country, mostly founded by students returning from France in particular , but also from the United Kingdom . In 1923 the Spanish umbrella organization Federación Española de Rugby (FER) was founded, and in 1924 , rugby sections were also created for the country's two most important sports clubs, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona . In 1926 the first Spanish championship was held in cup mode, the winner was FC Barcelona. On May 20, 1929, the national team played their first international match in Barcelona, which the Spaniards were able to win 9-0 against Italy . In 1934 the Spanish and Catalan rugby federations, which were still separate until 1939, were founding members of the FIRA .
The Spanish Civil War and the post-war years hit the young sport hard, no nationwide competition was held between 1936 and 1940, and the national team did not even play an official international match until 1951. The first league championship was held in 1953, and FC Barcelona also won the title. From then on , a pronounced rugby culture developed in Spain, especially in the strongholds of the Basque Country , Catalonia and various university cities such as Madrid , Seville and Valencia . Another special case is the city of Valladolid . Here the French-born teacher Jorge Vernés brought the sport to the El Salvador school in 1960 . Today the two first division clubs CR El Salvador and VRAC enjoy a large following, the city derby is considered the most important in Spain.
When professional structures in European rugby increasingly began to form in the 1990s, the sport, which in Spain largely retained its amateur character, increasingly lost ground in an international comparison. For this reason, too, the media presence in one's own country is low in relation to sports that are comparable in popularity, such as volleyball , futsal , water polo or hockey . The Spanish clubs reacted to the decreasing competitiveness by planning a professional league, the Superibérica de Rugby (SIR), which started in spring 2009 and is not under the control of the Spanish association.
Competitions
Men
society
The highest Spanish competition for club teams is the División de Honor . The league currently consists of ten teams that play the champions in a round trip. There are four points for a win and two points for a draw. If a game is lost with a difference of seven or less points or if a team achieves at least four attempts , there is a bonus point. The last two climb into the two-tier División de Honor B from. The first championship was won by FC Barcelona , the record winner is the university sports club CD Arquitectura from Madrid, with a total of nine titles. There is also the Copa del Rey , which was held in cup mode and was the only national championship until 1953. The record winner is FC Barcelona with 16 successes. Both competitions are organized by the Federación Española de Rugby (FER).
In 2009 the first professional league in Spain started. The Superibérica begins after the División de Honor. Six teams took part in the first championship. There are no promoters or relegators. The teams are franchises run by existing rugby clubs, but they also recruit players from other clubs in their region.
The reigning Spanish champions are occasionally invited to the currently second most important European competition, the European Challenge Cup , but there is no fixed place. In the 2009/10 season it was not the champions CRC Madrid , but a league selection managed by the association called Olympus Rugby XV Madrid .
National team
Until the late 1970s, Spain was able to establish itself as fourth force at national team level in European amateur rugby , behind France , Italy and Romania , and third places at the European rugby championships in 1954, 1973, 1974 and 1978. The greatest success, however, is participation in the Rugby Union World Cup in 1999 , which was eliminated in the preliminary round. Spain is currently represented in Division 1 of the European Nations Cup , currently the second highest continental competition after the Six Nations , where, however, up to third place in 2000, no significant successes were achieved.
Women
society
The Spanish women's championship is called Liga Nacional Femenina and has been played since 2008/09, until then only the Copa de la Reina de Rugby existed in cup mode . The regional championships serve as qualifying tournaments. Eight teams finally qualify for the main phase, consisting of two groups of four teams each. These contest a round-robin tournament , with the two best in each group qualifying for the semi-finals for the championship, which is then played out in playoff mode. The most successful clubs so far are Getxo Artea RT and INEF Barcelona .
National team
The national women counts, unlike the men, the strongest of the continent. The first official meeting took place on May 2, 1989 against France, the Spanish lost 0:28. Spain's women have qualified four times for the Women's Rugby Union World Cup ; 1991, 1998, 2002 and 2006. The best result was achieved in 1991 when you finished sixth. The Spanish women won the title three times at European Championships , in 1995 and 2003 they defeated the French women's team in the final, and in 2010 they won the title against Italy. Due to the good results, the national team was accepted into the then Five Nations in 2000 as the fifth team . Ireland was added a year later, making it, like the men's tournament, the Six Nations . In a controversial decision, Spain's women's team was excluded from the Six Nations from 2007 and replaced by Italy, the restructuring had no sporting reasons, as the Italians had lost all five official matches against Spain at that time, the organizers only wanted the same teams to compete like in a men's tournament. The best results for the Spanish women in the Five and Six Nations were third places in 2000, 2001 and 2004.
Sevens rugby
7-a-side rugby (Spanish: rugby a siete or seven ) is a variant of rugby union that is played with only seven instead of fifteen players per team. In Spain, this was particularly widespread in amateur tournaments across the country. However, Siebener Rugby received a boost when it was included in the 2016 Olympic Games program . At club level, a national series of tournaments for men and women was launched in 2010, in which the Spanish champions are determined. At the same time, a squad of 16 women and 16 men each, subsidized by the Spanish State Secretariat for Sport, was put together to train together after the championship and prepare for international sevens rugby tournaments for national teams.
National team
Men's
So far, the Spanish men's national team has qualified three times for the 7th Rugby World Cup organized by the International Rugby Board ; 1993 , 1997 and 2001 . The best result was achieved in 1993, when you could finish the tournament in sixth place overall. From the 2012/13 season onwards, the Spanish national team will be one of the core teams that will contest all competitions in the IRB Sevens World Series . At the 7th rugby European championships organized by FIRA-AER , the Spaniards reached fourth place behind Russia, France and Italy in Hanover in 2009 . The placement was repeated in Moscow in 2010 , this time behind Portugal, France and host Russia. In 2011, the European Championship, which was held as a tournament series for the first time, was third overall behind Portugal and England.
Women
As in fifteen rugby, the women's national team is more successful than the men's in rugby seven. Spain's women qualified for the only 7-a-side rugby world championship to date , which took place in Dubai in 2009 . Although Spain won the preliminary group, they had to admit defeat to South Africa in the quarter-finals and finally finished seventh. At the European Championships, the title was won both in 2003, by a 21:12 final victory over France, and in 2010, by a 28:12 victory over the Netherlands. In 2005 and 2009 the Spaniards finished second behind England and in 2007 they secured the bronze medal with a 10-0 win against Wales for third place.
Popularity and coverage
Rugby union is relatively popular in some large cities such as Madrid , Valencia or Seville , especially with former or existing university sports clubs, but it enjoys little media attention compared to many other fringe sports. The Castilian capital Valladolid , with two of the most popular first division clubs in Spain, is considered a stronghold of rugby, as are the regions of Catalonia and the Basque Country . In the latter , the top clubs Biarritz Olympique and Aviron Bayonnais from the French part of the Basque Country occasionally celebrated guest performances at the Estadio Anoeta in Donostia-San Sebastián . In addition, other major events took place on Spanish soil, such as the final of the French Championship 2015/16 at Camp Nou as well as the finals of the two most important European club competitions, the European Rugby Champions Cup and the European Rugby Challenge Cup of the 2017/18 season and May 12th at the Estadio San Mamés .
The coverage of Spanish rugby is poor compared to most other team sports. National team games and one match per game day of the División de Honor are usually broadcast by Teledeporte , a specialty channel of RTVE .
See also
- Superiberica de rugby
- Copa Ibérica de Rugby
- División de Honor de Rugby
- Copa del Rey de Rugby
- Spanish national rugby union team
- Spanish national women's rugby union team
- Estadio Nacional Universidad Complutense
Web links
- Spanish Rugby Federation (Spanish)
- Spain on worldrugby.org (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Licencias y clubes federados en 2017/18. (PDF; 42.6 kB) In: Federación Española de Rugby. March 14, 2018, Retrieved April 8, 2018 (Spanish).
- ↑ El Mundo Deportivo, jueves 2 de marzo 1911. (PDF) In: Mundo Deportivo . March 2, 1911, Retrieved February 21, 2011 (Spanish).
- ↑ El Mundo Deportivo, jueves 25 de mayo 1911. (PDF) In: Mundo Deportivo . May 25, 1911, Retrieved February 21, 2011 (Spanish).
- ^ Rugby: La història de la UE Santboiana. (No longer available online.) In: uesantboiana.com. Archived from the original on January 19, 2012 ; Retrieved February 8, 2010 (Catalan). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Breaking the mold: Spain at RWC 1999. (No longer available online.) In: rugbyworldcup.com. October 25, 2012, archived from the original on September 28, 2013 ; accessed on October 26, 2012 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Sevens changing the face of rugby in Spain. (No longer available online.) In: IRB . May 18, 2010, archived from the original on May 22, 2010 ; accessed on May 20, 2010 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
