The 2024–25 United Rugby Championship will be the 24rd season of the professional rugby union competition known as the United Rugby Championship, and the fourth season under that name. It will begin on 20 September 2024 and will end on 14 June 2025.

Format

The season consists of 21 rounds: 18 rounds of regular season play, followed by three rounds of play-offs.

There are four regional pools: The Irish Shield pool (featuring the four Irish teams), the Welsh Shield pool (featuring the four Welsh teams), the South African Shield pool (featuring the four South African teams) and the Scottish/Italian 'Azzurri/Blue' Shield pool (featuring the two Italian and two Scottish sides). The pools serve two functions; they guarantee a full slate of derby matches for each team, and they award a minor Regional Shield trophy to the top team in each pool, which thereby functions as a national championship in three of the four pools, and a cross-border regional championship in the Scottish–Italian pool. The winner of each Shield will be determined solely from the games played amongst the teams within their regional pool, mirroring the format of the old Interprovincial Championship in Ireland.

Teams play six matches against their regional pool rivals home and away. The remaining twelve matches are made up by a single round robin, consisting of an even number of six home and six away matches against all the sides from the other pools.

For the Championship itself, there is one main league table. The top eight sides in the table will qualify for the quarter-finals, followed by semi-finals and a grand final, with teams seeded 1 to 4 with home advantage for the lowest seeded side. The Regional Shield pools have no direct link to the play-offs and by extension the Championship itself, and it is technically possible to win a Regional Shield but not contest the play-offs, as the Welsh sides showed in 2022 and 2023.

Teams

United Rugby Championship

Locations

Regional Shield competitions

Regional shield standing will be based entirely on performances against other teams within the same conference. Therefore, only six games for each team will count towards the regional shields.

URC league standings

European qualification

Priority order for European Champions Cup qualification is:

• 2024–25 United Rugby Championship champions
• the European Rugby Champions Cup champions (if a URC team but not already qualified as above)
• the EPCR Challenge Cup champions (if a URC team but not already qualified as above)
• the next highest-ranked teams during regular season play not already qualified as above, until eight overall qualifiers have been selected.

Matches

The following are the match results for the 2024–25 United Rugby Championship regular season:

Colours: Green: home team win; Yellow: draw; Red: away team win; Blue: upcoming matches

Regular season

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

Round 5

Round 6

Round 7

Round 8

Round 9

Round 10

Round 11

Round 12

Round 13

Round 14

Round 15

Round 16

Round 17

Round 18

Knockout stage

Bracket

The play-off draw is seeded based on final positions in the regular season league table.

The higher-ranked teams have home advantage in the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final.

Quarter-finals

Semi-finals

Final

References

External links

• Official website