London Sevens

A butcher from Melrose invented the modern sevens format; his fundraising fixture in 1883 changed rugby forever.

Ned Haig, a butcher from Melrose, devised a shortened form of rugby as a fundraiser for his local club. The first Melrose Sevens tournament took place on 28 April 1883 at The Greenyards, with seven players per side and seven-minute halves. Melrose themselves won the inaugural occasion, and the format spread rapidly through the Scottish Borders and beyond.

Hong Kong, 1976: the sevens format filled stadiums and rewrote the rulebook for what a rugby spectacle could be.

The inaugural Hong Kong Sevens in 1976 proved that the abbreviated format could fill stadiums and captivate international audiences. It became the blueprint for a global sevens circuit, demonstrating that the sport's pace and open play translated into a genuinely different spectator experience from the fifteen-a-side game. Cantabrians won the first tournament, beating a combined Wallaroos and Tonga side in the final.

Ten tournaments, one season, one winner; sevens finally had a story worth following.

The International Rugby Board launched the IRB World Sevens Series in the 1999-2000 season, linking tournaments across the globe into a single points-based competition. The inaugural series featured ten rounds, with New Zealand winning the overall title. It gave sevens a competitive structure and a narrative arc that ran across an entire season, rather than treating each tournament as a standalone occasion.

Twickenham arrived as the season's closing chapter, and New Zealand wrote the opening line.

Twickenham hosted its first London Sevens in the 2000-01 season, adding England's rugby headquarters to the World Series calendar. The tournament quickly established itself as the traditional season finale, the weekend where the overall series standings were settled. New Zealand won the inaugural London edition, setting a tone of dominance that would define the tournament's early years.

Fifty thousand fans in fancy dress; somewhere along the way, sport became the supporting act.

Through the 2000s, the London Sevens developed a reputation quite unlike any other occasion on the rugby calendar. Fans arrived in elaborate fancy dress, the South Stand became a wall of noise, and the atmosphere sat somewhere between a sporting experience and a music festival. The tournament attracted crowds of over 50,000 across the weekend, making it one of the best-attended stops on the entire circuit.

One IOC vote in October 2009 turned a circuit fixture into an Olympic stepping stone.

In October 2009, the International Olympic Committee voted to include rugby sevens in the 2016 Rio Olympics. The decision transformed the sport overnight. National federations invested heavily in sevens programmes, player quality rose sharply, and the World Series circuit gained a new significance as the primary pathway to Olympic qualification. For the London Sevens, it meant the stakes at Twickenham were suddenly higher than ever.

Fiji's first Olympic medal in any sport came via a rugby pitch, and the world has been watching sevens differently ever since.

Fiji won the men's gold medal at the Rio 2016 Olympics, the country's first ever Olympic medal in any sport. The victory was celebrated with a national holiday and cemented sevens as a genuinely global game. The Olympic spotlight brought millions of new viewers to the format, and the London Sevens benefited directly from the surge in interest and the calibre of athletes now committed to the abbreviated game.

Cancelled for the first time in its history, the London Sevens proved its worth by simply disappearing.

The 2019-20 World Series was curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the London Sevens was cancelled for the first time in its history. The 2020-21 season was also heavily disrupted. When the tournament returned to Twickenham, the reception from fans confirmed what many had suspected: the London Sevens had become an irreplaceable fixture in the sporting calendar, not just a rugby fixture but a social occasion that people genuinely missed.

Argentina gate-crashed a winners' list long monopolised by the southern hemisphere's old guard.

Argentina won the 2023 London Sevens, adding their name to a winners' list previously dominated by New Zealand (five titles), Fiji, South Africa, and Samoa. The tournament also saw the series rebranded as SVNS from the 2023-24 season, with a new format featuring a Grand Final showcase. While the circuit's structure continues to evolve, the London leg remains one of the most coveted weekends on the calendar.