England Rugby's Digital Transformation

For 150 years, England Rugby has shaped one of the most storied institutions in British sport — Twickenham, the England teams, thousands of grassroots clubs. Now, the RFU is taking on a bigger challenge than any opponent on the pitch: opening the game up and making it matter to more people than ever before.

The plan is called More Than a Game. Over the next five years, England Rugby will grow the sport by 50,000 newly registered players, win two Rugby World Cups, attract 500,000 more fans, and channel £500 million of investment into the game. To deliver it, the RFU named Capgemini as its official digital transformation partner — with Acquia Cloud Platform sitting at the foundation of the digital experience that brings the strategy to life.

In this conversation, Jonathan Conn, Digital Technology Director at England Rugby, and Graham Taylor, Head of Applied Innovation at Capgemini UK, explain how the partnership works in practice. They cover the stability needed to scale through Six Nations and Rugby World Cup peaks, the move from B2B to B2C engagement, building personalization at scale across players, coaches, clubs, volunteers, and fans, and the hard part of turning AI into infrastructure instead of a stack of stalled pilots.

The technology serves the mission. Not the other way around.