Scottish Rugby aims to gain a foothold in the US’s sporting market after becoming the first elite nation to partner with a team in Major League Rugby.
The partnership with newly formed DC Old Glory in Washington means Scotland will provide financial and sporting support.
Scottish Rugby chief operating officer Dominic McKay, who will take a seat on the board of the franchise, told how his organisation is not there to make a fast buck but to build a brand long-term across the Atlantic.
DC Old Glory will join MLR next year along with teams from Atlanta and New England, making it a 12 team league. Washington is a rugby hotbed with 190 clubs and 7,500 players at school, college and club levels in the area.
The strategic partnership was born out of talks about expanding the PRO14 club tournament to North America.
McKay said: “From a business perspective we have to think globally. We are ways considering ways of grow our brand and North America is the biggest sporting market in the world. Rugby is beginning to take hold in the USA.
“We’d been looking to expand the Pro 14 when this possibility came up, so it’s been a few years in the making. We have been active in North America and played a number of games there, for example last summer in Texas.
“We’re relatively close to North America, so it’s natural for us to develop a relationship there.”
McKay said the Scottish diaspora had helped build bridges in the continent which were evident during last summer’s Scotland tour of the Americas and Glasgow’s games in Canada in 2016. And there is no shortage of expats on the east coast around Washington.
He said: “There are a lot of Scots in that part of America and they are well connected in corporate life as well as sport. Every time we are there, we try to do business and we are blown away by the number of people who are interested. But we don’t see this purely as a short term financial play – it’s a long term brand build.
“Rugby as a sport is growing across the US. When the world sevens was played at the San Francisco Giants stadium last year, there was a crowd of 100,000 and we see the audience growing.
“We’ve taken Scotland to the US a couple of times and Glasgow have been to Canada and it’s been successful from a sporting and a business point of view. When we played in Texas the crowd was 25,000.”
The founders of Old Glory, which takes its name from a symbolic Civil War flag displayed in Washington’s Smithsonian Museum, see Scotland’s involvement as a massive endorsement.
McKay says he hopes to help the franchise develop not just on the pitch but with some of the commercial know-how that comes from years of participation in the lucrative Six Nations and Autumn Tests.
Old Glory chairman Chris Dunlavey said: “From the day we joined forces to explore the feasibility of creating an MLR team in DC, we carefully pursued additional partners who could bring not only capital but also strategic value.
“We could not have imagined this search ending with a better strategic partner than Scottish Rugby.”
Scottish teams will be trying to capitalise on that reaction and the partnership with Old Glory by playing more matches in the States. MLR games have been broadcast by Comcast owned channels and visiting international teams can expect exposure across the States.
McKay said: “There will be more Scottish teams playing in the US in the next few years. There is every possibility that we’ll send one of our teams to Washington as part of development of this relationship.
“Wherever we take the thistle we hope to put value into that country and bring value back home.”
