Organisers of the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England have revealed plans to utilise London’s Olympic Stadium as part of a hosting strategy that they hope will generate a £100 million profit from the tournament.

While Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium is set to be used for the World Cup, England 2015 on Monday stated that it is keen to include the country’s leading football venues along with the Olympic Stadium. The sale of 2.9 million tickets is set to go a long way towards achieving the tournament’s profit targets, and Reuters reports that this could see English club rugby grounds sidelined in favour of larger football venues. Premiership clubs Gloucester and Leicester are the only rugby teams to have so far expressed an interest in hosting World Cup games.

England 2015’s chief operating officer, Ross Young, said: “There is some doubt about who will be the landlords of the (Olympic) Stadium but we have engaged with the Olympic Park legacy company and are talking about the venue for the tournament. You would be mad not to include it as part of your thinking. Our ticketing strategy means we will also need to use football grounds and there are some great venues out there, from the big 60,000, 70,000 capacities to the 35,000 to 40,000-capacity ones and it's picking them in conjunction with the match schedule and getting a strategy that enable us to sell the 2.9 million tickets we are looking to move.

” It was announced this month that key London 2012 official Debbie Jevans would turn her attention to the delivery of the 2015 World Cup as the new chief executive officer of the organising body for the tournament. Jevans, currently director of sport at the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), will succeed Paul Vaughan in October after England Rugby 2015 announced that he had stepped down as chief executive by mutual consent. England 2015 chairman Andy Cosslett stated the move was part of efforts to tap into the expertise gained from the hosting of London 2012, as well as opening up rugby to potential new audiences.

“The board felt that Debbie, with her exposure and being one of the architects of the Olympics, with unparalleled exposure to what that took and what was involved, brought us a new dimension,” said Cosslett. “We want this event to touch more people outside the immediate rugby world and family. The legacy benefit of the Rugby World Cup is our ability to increase participation and just get people who don't follow the game to rethink what they think about the game of rugby. To do that, you can't think down traditional lines.”

By Matt Cutler

Source: www.sportbusiness.com