MARK KEOHANE | Global rugby needs to fix calendar for the sake of players

Wilco Louw, the most destructive scrumming tighthead prop in world rugby, is a headline act. He shortens careers by choice and by trade — but the relentless playing schedule and demands on South African players is threatening to shorten his career.

Louw is the clearest example of why the global game has to stop talking about player welfare and start fixing the calendar. It has to be one global season and one proper off-season for players, especially those who play for the Springboks and Argentina.

The sport’s leaders will again gather in London in late February to combine watching the Six Nations with week-long meetings, but talk of a global season can’t be another of those meetings that ends with a press release and optimism that the custodians of the sport will revisit the situation a year down the line.

There has to be action and change.

Louw, since October 5 2024, has played rugby every single month for club or country. There has been no pause and it has been one engagement after another. On Saturday Louw will play his 45^th match in the past 16 months, having started 33 or those matches. The attrition rate on his body and mind needs no description. This is not player welfare but an abuse of player quality.

In the 2024/25 season, Louw played 32 matches and started 26. His campaign began on October 5 2024 for the Bulls in the United Rugby Championship (URC) and rolled into the Test season, and back into the URC season. He finished his Springbok commitments against Wales in Cardiff at the end of November 2025 and a week later was playing for the Bulls against Bordeaux in Pretoria.

The message to the players is akin to slavery. Only the fittest get picked and only the fittest survive, however brief the experience

Nothing stopped, nothing slowed and the only change was the colour of the jersey he was wearing. The cycle has simply continued and Louw has played 12 matches in the past three months of a “new” season.

These are just the matches, They don’t tell the story of four training sessions a week, half the time spent away from home in hotels and a third of the time spent in another country. This does not tell the story of the endless plane trips, many of them undertaken in economy class because of economics and financial constraints.

Louw is not the exception, but in the top bracket of the norm of the many players who are picked for club and country in the same season. For these players it is URC, Investec Champions Cup, Nations Cup, Rugby Championship, URC playoffs, Springboks on tour up north in November, back to the new season of URC and Investec Champions Cup. It is a playing schedule that is on repeat.

World Rugby talks about player welfare and player load management while allowing a structure that makes it impossible.

The sport pretends all players are equal under the calendar, but they are not. South African and Argentine players are punished more than any others. They are the only two nations competing in the Rugby Championship while their core Test players are embedded in northern hemisphere club competitions such as the URC, Top 14, English Prem and Investec Champions Cup.

The message to the players is akin to slavery. Only the fittest get picked and only the fittest survive, however brief the experience.

You cannot have a southern hemisphere Test window bolted onto a northern hemisphere club season and expect players to cope. You cannot demand Test intensity from players who have not had an off-season in more than a year. You cannot keep selling toughness while ignoring physics

The current schedule shortens professional careers for the very best, which is why players choose club over country and only make themselves available for Test rugby in the 12 months preceding a World Cup.

One global season is essential, where once it was the talk of supposed rugby radicals. You cannot have a southern hemisphere Test window bolted onto a northern hemisphere club season and expect players to cope. You cannot demand Test intensity from players who have not had an off-season in more than a year. You cannot keep selling toughness while ignoring physics.

There is only so much in the tank, which takes me to the Shark Tank in Durban in the URC this weekend. Close to 20 Springboks will be in action when the Sharks host the Stormers in the second of their coastal derbies. It will be intense, as it always is — but it will also be one final push for those players before a fortnight break while the rugby landscape is dominated by the start of the Six Nations.

In Johannesburg the Lions host neighbours the Bulls. The collisions will be brutal and the Highveld air will taunt the players lungs, but for the likes of Louw the final whistle will have as much lure to it as the opening whistle. He finally gets to rest his mind, body and soul — if only for a fortnight. But it is a fortnight more than he has had in the last 16 months.

We expect so much from our world champion Springboks but when you watch this weekend, think of what Louw has endured in the last 16 months, anchoring the scrum, absorbing the hits and being asked to deliver, week in and week out. It is not sustainable and it should never have been asked of him.

There has to be a global season, to protect the best players and the integrity of Test rugby, which is supposed to be about the best playing the best and not the best of whoever is left over.