Spot the difference? contact event frequency during > 30,000 women’s and men’s rugby union player matches across top domestic and international competitions
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Date
2025
Authors
Roe, Gregory
Sawczuck, Tom
Collins, Neil
Tooby, James
Owen, Cameron
Starling, Lindsay
Falvey, Éanna
Hendricks, Sharief
Tucker, Ross
Stokes, Keith
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
John Wiley and Sons Inc
Published Version
Abstract
This study aimed to quantify the frequency of individual and team contact events during rugby union match play in top domestic and international men’s and women’s competitions. Analyst-coded player individual and team contact event types (tackles, carries, attacking rucks and defensive rucks, lineouts, scrums and mauls) from the 2022/2023 rugby union season were analysed from top domestic and international competitions across the world using generalised linear mixed models. For both women’s and men’s rugby, competitions generally had similar numbers of contact events per playing position. Where differences were observed, most ranged between 0.5 and six per contact event per full game equivalent (FGE). Similar trends were observed when comparing women’s to men’s rugby. However, within-game accumulation of these different contact events for certain positional groups may have a significant impact (e.g., a front five player called up from a Farah Palmer Cup team to play in WXV1 could be involved in as much as 6 more attacking rucks, 3 more tackles and 5 more mauls per game on average). Furthermore, the small differences between competitions per FGE may accrue across matches and thus result in far greater exposures across a season (e.g., a front five player in Premiership Rugby may make 48 more tackles over 20 matches than in Top 14 on average). Although a high proportion of contact events per FGE were similar between competitions and sexes per playing position, differences that were observed may have important implications for players transitioning between competitions and the long-term exposure of players to higher-risk contact events.
Description
Keywords
Collision sport , Game demands , Injury prevention , Performance analysis
Citation
Roe, G., Sawczuck, T., Collins, N., Tooby, J., Owen, C., Starling, L., Falvey, É., Hendricks, S., Tucker, R., Stokes, K. and Jones, B. (2025) 'Spot the difference? contact event frequency during > 30,000 women’s and men’s rugby union player matches across top domestic and international competitions', European Journal of Sport Science, 25(5), 12307 (9pp). https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsc.12307