South Africa will host Rugby World Cup Sevens 2022 after the World Rugby Council awarded the hosting rights for the premier tournament to South Africa at its Interim Meeting in Tokyo today.
In September 2022 the eighth edition of the showcase event will take place in Cape Town in what will be the first time that Rugby World Cup Sevens has been hosted on the African continent.
The world’s best 24 men’s and 16 women’s rugby sevens teams will take to the field at the Cape Town Stadium in Green Point where they will compete for world champion status over three days of exhilarating action.
The 55,000-capacity stadium is the same venue that has hosted the hugely successful HSBC Cape Town Sevens since 2015, and for the first time this year will host both men’s and women’s teams across three days of competition as part of the new-look HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series.
The 2022 tournament follows an exceptional Rugby World Cup Sevens 2018 in San Francisco which attracted a record attendance for a rugby event in the USA of more than 100,000 fans as well as a huge domestic broadcast audience of more than nine million viewers.
The three-day event, hosted at AT&T Park, generated a US$90.5 million economic contribution to San Francisco (Nielsen Sport) and saw both New Zealand’s men’s and women’s teams retain the title.