The International Rugby Board (IRB) created the European Challenge Cup (ECC) in 1996 in the same push to professionalize rugby that created the English Premiership, the Top 14, the Pro 12, and the Heineken Cup in Europe, as well as the Super 15 in the Southern hemisphere.

Why Another Competition?

The idea behind the ECC was to create a competition for the clubs in the English, French, and Celtic leagues that did not qualify for the Heineken Cup, one that allows them to play against each other (i.e.

for elite English clubs to play elite French and Celtic clubs and vice versa) as well as elite clubs from emerging rugby nations in Europe like Italy, Romania, Spain, Portugal, and in the future, Russia and Germany.

As with the Heineken Cup, the ECC runs concurrent with the regular seasons of the European professional leagues, starting pool play in November and running until the end of the knockout stages in May. Since the league schedules start in September, professional rugby players in Europe are playing one match every weekend for nine months (counting the international tours in June, it’s 10 months for a few elite players), which might help explain why careers of elite rugby players are getting shorter.

Who Competes

The basic rule is: any English, French, or Celtic club that is not selected for the Heineken Cup is automatically selected for the ECC. This rule was codified in 2009 to stipulate that the ECC will have at least eight clubs from France, six from England, one from Ireland, and one from Wales.

In addition to that minimum number of 16, the ECC includes at least four Italian clubs, as well as at least one each from Romania and either Spain or Portugal. With the future additions of one Russian club and one German club, this formula will doubtless change.

In addition, clubs can play their way out of the ECC in both directions: while winning the ECC is no guarantee that a club will be promoted to the Heineken Cup (especially if they already play there), it certainly doesn’t hurt. In addition, continued poor play, especially by English or French clubs, can force relegation from both the ECC and the Premiership or Top 14. Some marginal English and French clubs have spent the last two decades bouncing in and out of elite competition, making ECC membership more fluid than the Heineken Cup.

Cup Format

Once selected for the competition, the ECC clubs are grouped into five pools. Each pool has four clubs, ensuring that each club will play the other clubs in its pool twice – once at home, and once away. Each club will complete this six-match pool play schedule in two-week groupings: the first two matches in mid-November, the third and fourth matches in mid-December, and the final two matches in mid-January.

There’s then a three-month gap in Cup play (partly so that the Cup doesn’t interfere with the Six Nations tournament), and eight clubs compete in the knockout stages. Each club that finishes first in the five pools qualifies, along with the three clubs that finished second in their Heineken Cup pools but did not qualify for the Heineken Cup playoffs.

The four ECC first-place clubs with the best records receive seedings 1, 2, 3, and 4, and each hosts a quarter-final match. Seed 1 hosts seed 8 (the ECC first-place club with the worst record of the five pool winners), seed 2 hosts seed 7, seed 3 hosts seed 6, and seed 4 hosts seed 5; as a result, there is only one match where two ECC clubs play each other in the quarter-finals (1 v. 8), while the other three quarter-finals match an ECC club against a Heineken Cup club.

All four quarter-finals winners advance to the semi-finals, where a drawing determines who plays whom and where. Unlike the Heineken Cup, which plays its semi-finals matches at neutral sites, the ECC allows the semi-finals matches to be played at whichever two clubs receive the home draw. The finals, however, are played at a neutral site, usually somewhere designed specifically for rugby like Twickenham.

Who Does Well in the ECC

Generally speaking, English and French clubs dominate the ECC, with only the odd Welsh club occasionally spicing things up. These results are partly due to there only being four elite Irish clubs, of whom Connacht is routinely the weakest, and only two Scottish clubs, and partly due to the generally sad state of European professional rugby outside the Home Nations.

The late 1990s belonged to France, with all eight clubs in the championship matches from 1997 to 2000 being French, including four different winners (Bourgoin, Colomiers, Montferrand, and Pau).

The Harlequins’ victory in 2001 over French club Narbonne ushered in nearly a decade of English dominance, with every champion save one (French club Clermont Auvergne) being English from 2001 to 2009, including one more win by the Harlequins and two by the Sale Sharks. Other English clubs to win the ECC in this period included London Wasps, Gloucester, Bath, and the Northampton Saints.

The change of the decade have seen the ECC open up a bit, with Welsh club Cardiff Blues winning in 2010, the Harlequins coming back to win their third Cup in 2011, and Biarritz winning another all-French final against Toulon in 2012.

Other than the Quins and the Sharks, no club has been able to repeat as ECC champions. Six different English clubs and five different French clubs have won the Cup in addition to the Cardiff Blues, with two additional English clubs (London Irish and Worcester Warriors), four French clubs (Castres, Toulon, Narbonne, and Stade Francais), and Pontypridd from Wales making the finals.

The lesson here might well be that, even as the ECC widens participation in the competition, the top of the table will look solidly English and French for a while to come.