Last October, rugby's governing body approved its first global limits on how much a professional player can be asked to do, and the same day cleared the way for a new competition that adds Tests to the calendar. One decision was made a condition of the other, and the tension between them now sits at the centre of the welfare debate.
The World Rugby player load guidelines set out five protections for elite men and women: no player should feature in more than 30 games in a season or six consecutive match weeks, everyone gets a five-week off-season, a week's rest follows international selection, 12 weeks a year must be contact-free, and club and country must talk. The catch is that they act only as a backstop where no local agreement exists.
The Nations Championship is the biennial competition those guidelines were written for, which sends northern sides south for three Tests on successive July weekends, reverses the direction in November, then gathers all 12 teams in London for a finals weekend.
A Six Nations regular now faces seven Tests across those windows on top of five in the spring, and growth to 24 teams is already being discussed. This is all on top of existing domestic leagues, Lions tours, international tests, and an upcoming Rugby World Cup also expanding to 24 teams.
The 30-game figure rests on a University of Bath study of Premiership players, which found that 31 or more match involvements in a season, however brief, substantially increased injury burden the following year, most sharply among forwards over the age of 26.
Samoa's 2025 campaign showed what an unmanaged schedule does, with two World Cup qualifiers bolted onto the Pacific Nations Cup producing seven consecutive weeks of rugby, and around 15 players were lost, mostly to injury, weeks before the six-week limit was approved.
At the other end of the scale, Maro Itoje was rested from England's July window and returned to Saracens for his first full preseason since 2014.
Itoje's absence was a coach's judgement, not a rule, and Samoa's attrition fell in a gap the rules had not yet closed. The guidelines set a floor beneath which no elite player should fall, but the calendar they arrived with is built to grow. Whether welfare takes priority depends on whether unions treat that floor as the minimum, or the most they need to offer.