RWC 2027 Draw to be Held Today in Sydney

The draw for the 2027 Rugby World Cup (RWC) is being held today in Sydney.

The tournament, which is being hosted in Australia, and which will run from 1 October to 12 November 2027, has been expanded to 24 teams. This is the first time that the tournament has been expanded since it went from 16 teams in the 1995 World Cup to 20 in the 1999 tournament.

This expanded format means there will be six pools of four teams. The top two teams in each pool will advance, alongside the four best third-placed sides, creating a new Round of 16. Despite extra knockout fixtures, teams will still play a maximum of seven matches, with tournament organisers cutting the pool stage from four matches per side to three to protect player welfare.

A total of 52 games will be played across seven host cities, making it the largest World Cup in the sport’s history. Australia is pre-assigned to Pool A as host nation, while final seedings were based on the World Rugby rankings at the end of November. Teams are seeded from one to 24 based on their world ranking at the end of November and are then placed in four bands of six teams. Each pool will have one team from each of the four bands.

The new format shortens the overall event to 43 days and removes bye weekends, creating what World Rugby Chair Brett Robinson described as a more condensed and dramatic spectacle. A global presale for tickets opens on 18 February 2026 for fans who register by the previous day.

The seeding bands for the draw are as follows:

Band 1: South Africa, New Zealand, England, Ireland, France, Argentina

Band 2: Australia, Fiji, Scotland, Italy, Wales, Japan

Band 3: Georgia, Uruguay, Spain, United States, Chile, Tonga

Band 4: Samoa, Portugal, Romania, Hong Kong, Zimbabwe, Canada

The seeding bands are simply ranking buckets that make the draw fair.

When they do the draw, each pool must contain exactly one team from each band. That way you cannot get three or four top tier sides lumped together in the same pool, and you also avoid a pool made up only of lower ranked teams. Australia as host is placed in Pool A, but still treated according to its band for who can be drawn with it. Once the draw is done, the bands have done their job and the tournament then runs on normal pool and knockout results.