Croke Park among venues bidding for Champions Cup finals

The exterior of Croke Park

Croke Park is among 23 bids from ten different countries to host an Investec Champions Cup final in the near future.

This season’s decider will be held in Lyon but the hosts for 2028, 2029 and 2030 are still being parsed by tournament organisers EPCR who will be keen to produce a mix of traditional destinations and new territories.

Bilbao in Spain has held two finals in the last decade while Lisbon, Amsterdam and Munich are other possible stop-offs, with American and even Asian cities believed to be possibilities for much further down the line.

The Champions Cup knockout stages coincide with the GAA’s provincial championships but the last five rugby finals fell between the Leinster football and hurling deciders at Croke Park and the stadium has already held big rugby games in recent years.

One sticking point may be the fact that Dublin hosted the Champions Cup and Challenge Cup finals in 2023 when the Aviva Stadium was the venue and other established ‘rugby cities’ will have their eye on the big day too.

Rome’s Stadio Olimpico is the only Italian venue that satisfies the minimum capacity of 50,000 that is required by EPCR, but is unsuitable for the fact that it hosts two Serie A clubs, one of which requires the venue on the weekend concerned.

More fundamental discussions are also happening behind the scenes. The TV deal covering Ireland and the UK, currently held by Premier Sports, ends after this season and the very format itself is up for debate.

Recent soundings in England and France suggest a growing consensus for a tournament slimmed down from 24 teams to 16, a move that would make the competition more elite while theoretically improving the quality of the Challenge Cup with it.

Some changes are already confirmed for this campaign.

The top three teams from each of the four pools will now qualify automatically, not four as before. The remaining quartet of qualifiers will be those ranked 13th to 16th on match points regardless of where they finish in their six-team pool.

The other tweak is the adoption of the rule used in Top 14, Super Rugby and the English Champ whereby teams need to score three tries or more than their opponent to earn a try-scoring bonus point.