Rugby Union has only been a professional sport since 1995. As a result, the professional landscape is disparate compared to North America’s highly structured leagues.
Each country has its own way of contracting rugby players, and talent remains difficult to unearth and verify in the far-flung Pacific Islands and emerging leagues in South America.
As professional rugby competitions develop globally, players, agents and clubs have more opportunities than ever. However, opaque pathways and the lack of standardized procedure around contracts, scouting and player-club communication means that opportunities often fall by the wayside. Players with the quality to go professional can get left behind.
P2P Sport is the latest platform to address those issues, bringing transparency and autonomy to the world of professional and grassroots rugby. The career management, recruitment, marketing and networking forum is the brainchild of Hugh McMeniman, who made 22 appearances for Australia’s national rugby team. As his playing career wound down, McMeniman began looking at ways to facilitate player pathways and scouting and improve clarity around contracting.
Through conversations with fellow players, as well as coaches and technical staff around the world, he created P2P Sport, a peer-to-peer phone app that allows players, technical staff, clubs, agencies and media members to create profiles and interact in search of opportunities. In some respects, P2P Sport is a LinkedIn for the rugby community, according to Stephen Meehan, Canada’s director of men’s rugby and national team head coach.
Soft-launched in Japan in March 2024, P2P Sport is currently operational across most of rugby’s major markets, including Major League Rugby in the U.S., Super Rugby Pacific, all three professional divisions in Japan, the United Rugby Championship and Prem Rugby.
The app allows players — professional, amateur and youth — to build one of three tiers of profiles: free, pro and elite. Coaches and technical staff can build similar profiles, as can clubs.
The free version allows players to discover clubs that are on the platform, build a limited profile and get notifications when clubs view their information. The pro version, which costs an annual fee of $1 for verification, lets players communicate directly with clubs via in-app messaging and calls. The elite version, which is being trialed in Japan and will be launched in other markets soon, costs $10 and gives players direct access to the app’s job portal and sponsorship deals with advertisers. P2P Sport has almost 3,500 organic downloads with over 2,000 pro members, according to McMeniman.
Player empowerment
William Tupou is a multipositional professional rugby player and one of several current players who is a shareholder of P2P Sport. He has been without an agent for seven years and has used P2P Sport to directly negotiate his last several contracts, including a one-year deal with Toyota Verblitz in Japan that he signed earlier this month.
“Being a professional player, I’ve lived through a lot of [contract] struggles, and I’ve seen mates go through it as well,” Tupou told Sports Business Journal.
According to Tupou and former USA Eagles player Todd Clever, players are often left out of conversations with clubs, or don’t even know who their agent is negotiating with. Clever said he had a good agent, but would only hear from him six months before his contract was ending.
P2P Sport allows for direct player-to-club conversations. “It’s pretty cool to talk to GMs face to face. You get real answers. You understand the market better and can be realistic about numbers,” said Tupou, who also believes such communication helps players build a new skill set and market themselves.
Joshua Fuimaono, P2P Sport’s business development manager and a former player himself, said P2P is not trying to eliminate agents or “change the model of how people do things.” Rather, it is “trying to speed up the process” by giving players a seat at the table and providing them with transparency.
While McMeniman and Fuimaono have received pushback from some agents, Anthony Eddy, a former coach turned agent, said P2P “absolutely” helps him do his job more effectively. While he spends much of his time scouting and recruiting players “through his connections and word of mouth,” Eddy, who founded the agency Symmetry Sports roughly four years ago, uses P2P to “guide players through their careers.”
Since being introduced to the platform 18 months ago, Eddy has been using it to find players who don’t have representation and to spotlight the players and coaches he already represents, thus finding them better opportunities.
“The thing I like about P2P is that it’s potentially a one-stop shop,” Eddy said. “It covers most aspects for a club actively recruiting, for a player or coach wanting to establish and market their own brand, and for an agent who wants their clients to get exposure. Not everybody has contacts everywhere.”
National rugby unions are also using P2P to scout for eligible international players and broaden their pathway systems. “We set up a call with all the universities across Canada to do an onboarding session for them to use P2P,” said Keegan Brantner, Rugby Canada National Team Pathway Program manager.
Ideally, P2P will allow Canadian universities to recruit better from abroad, elevating the caliber of athletes in Canadian rugby and increasing the chance that, over time, these players will qualify to play for Canada’s national team.
In Scotland, performance adviser David Nucifora said the platform simplifies scouting, talent identification and communication with prospective players. Scottish Rugby is encouraging its coaches to build profiles on the app so that they can scout players across the country more easily, especially in talent-rich zones like the Highlands, which are some of the least accessible parts of the country.
McMeniman and Fuimaono already have their sights set on other sports, like rugby league and basketball.
Vitas Carosella is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
