All “Go” for England 2025
The pools and now the fixtures and venues for England 2025 - the next World Cup - have been announced.
Published by John Birch, October 22, 2024
6 minute read
After the live TV draw for the pools last week, details of fixtures and venues were announced today.
Thursday's draw saw the eight European teams evenly spread across the four groups.
Pool A: England, Australia, United States, Samoa
Pool B: Canada, Scotland, Wales, Fiji
Pool C: New Zealand, Ireland, Japan, Spain
Pool D: France, Italy, South Africa, Brazil
After the previous weekend's results in WXV the USA had dropped into the third "pot" of qualifiers, switching places with Italy, which contributed to making Pool A many people's "Group of Death", but also means that the competition itself will open with a cracker of a match between two previous winners, and a repeat of the 1994 final when England v USA open the competition at 7.30pm at Sunderland's Stadium of Light on Friday 22nd August.
The following day will see four more games, including the first of six "double-headers". All of Brazil's games will be double-headers, which could be because the competition's outsiders risk being rather less of a draw than most of the other teams. In addition all of the games in Pool B (including Scotland and Wales) - bar one - are also double headers.
There are also no classification games scheduled, other than a third-place match before the final, something that began in the last edition when quarter-finals first reappeared.
Today, the well-established world rankings systems, plus WXV, means that the extra cost for matches that are normally of little spectator interest justifies their exclusion.
For most of the teams this hardly matters as they play so often these days, but perhaps only Brazil will truly miss a chance to have played against some of the lower ranked teams (not least because they were not at WXV).
Teams will move around the country throughout the three-week pool period. The venues for the pools are in Sunderland, Northampton, Exeter, Salford, York and Brighton.
Three of the grounds (Northampton, Exeter and Salford) are rugby grounds the rest primarily used for football. In addition Bristol will host four knock-out games, and Twickenham the final.
Of the stadia used for the pools, Sunderland (used only for the opening game) which seats 49,000, and Brighton (which will host England and New Zealand's final pool games) which has a capacity of 31,800, are by some measure the largest grounds.
Northampton (15,148) will host six games, including England v Samoa, and two Ireland, South Africa and Brazil's games.
Exeter is marginally smaller (15,000) and will see five games including two double-headers with the big draws being New Zealand, France (twice), Wales and Scotland.
Salford's 11,404 seat stadium will host two double-headers which will include Scotland and Wales on both occasions, plus Australia one weekend and Canada the next.
But York (8,510) is maybe the place to be.
It will uniquely host games from all four pools and see six games overall including a game every Saturday and Sunday throughout the pool stages. In York, spectators will also see Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, USA and Spain (twice), among others.
The amount of travelling teams will have does vary quite a lot.
After their opening game in Sunderland the USA take a short 77 mile hop down the A1 to York where they will stay for the next fortnight.
New Zealand, on the other hand, will be seeing over six times as much of the English countryside as they go from an opening game in Northampton to Exeter for week two and then Brighton for week three - a total of 510 miles. And that is just for the pool stages.
After that (assuming they make the quarter-finals) it'll be back to Exeter again (205 miles) followed by a short 75-mile hop to Bristol for the semis. Then onto London.
Is this a cunning plan to exhaust the reigning champions? Probably not because England will not be idle clocking up 346 miles in the pool stages before another 170 miles to their quarter-final.
USA are maybe just lucky.
Ireland (131 miles), France (188 miles), Scotland and Wales (236 miles each) will also have their feet up in the hotel while the Ferns are on the bus, all helped by having back-to-back games at the same venue.
A well worked schedule will see most teams with only 300-400 miles on the motorways, but Italy (463 miles) and Japan (493 miles) will be rivalling New Zealand for their tourism opportunities!
After the pools, the top two teams from Pools C and D travel to Exeter to playoff for their quarters, while the top teams from Pools A and B go to Bristol where the winners will then stay for one semi-final, with the winners from Exeter travelling up to meet them at the same venue.
It is a schedule that sees England and New Zealand firmly apart until the final.
Full fixture details are available on the World Cup website.