Red Roses must tap into Ilona Maher effect ahead of Rugby World Cup

Quiz question: how many members of the England women’s rugby team could you name? If the answer is none, the Red Roses’ clash with world champions New Zealand at the newly-named Allianz Stadium on Saturday could hardly be more timely.

The visibility of the Red Roses has grown incrementally in recent seasons. This weekend’s encounter will be broadcast in a prime-time slot on BBC One and attract a crowd of more than 40,000 – the third bumper attendance in 18 months for a women’s Test at the home of English rugby.

But new research published by the Women’s Sport Trust has found that 63 per cent of rugby union fans are still not able to name a player in the England women’s team. That figure will no doubt fall if players engage in self-promotion, a tactic which has become paramount to expanding the women’s game.

The Black Ferns’ group hug with King Charles during the team’s visit to Buckingham Palace earlier this week was a heartwarming reminder of how female players can use their authentic selves to attract more eyeballs to their sport.

Across the Atlantic, United States rugby sevens star Ilona Maher, who won bronze at the Paris Olympics, has shown the extraordinary power that social media can yield in not only growing a personal brand but attracting new eyeballs to a sport.

Maher is the most followed rugby player in the world on Instagram, her 3.8 million followers eclipsing the likes of Antoine Dupont (1 million) and Siya Kolisi (1.3 million) as well as the official accounts of World Rugby (1.8 million) and England Rugby (1.4 million), and a host of other sports stars, including Emma Raducanu (2.6 million).

Her girl-next-door videos have had a transformational impact. The US businesswoman Michele Kang invested $4 million (£3 million) into the US women’s sevens programme and Maher’s ballooning profile has led to her taking part in the TV show Dancing With The Stars.

It is little wonder Maher has become a point of discussion around the dinner table for the Red Roses, many of whom are trying to ramp up their own social media followings ahead of next year’s Rugby World Cup and tap into the Ilona Maher effect.

“It’s hard not to chat about someone that’s literally got four million followers and is a female rugby player,” says England winger Jess Breach. “Insights from her [Maher] would probably be quite good. Maybe we could knuckle her down and be like, ‘How did you do this? Has it been good for the team?’ It’s definitely been spoken about, but in a positive way, which it should be.

“She’s done it in the most natural and organic way to herself. I think that’s why she’s got such traction, people get to know her as the individual and then the team. She’s not fake behind the camera or anything like that. That’s what people have liked about it.”

With her 55,000 Instagram followers, Ellie Kildunne has the largest social media footprint among the Red Roses. By some yardstick of comparison, that is a third of the Lionesses’ third-choice goalkeeper, Khiara Keating.

Kildunne worked with the RFU, Women’s Sport Trust and O2 to design a “wearable report”, a five-piece collection of T-shirts that bear a number of eye-catching statistics about the gender-awareness gap in rugby.

Awareness of the women’s team is now just 15 per cent less than the men, down from 25 per cent last year, but Breach, an avid TikTok user who this week launched a podcast with Kildunne called ‘Rugby Rodeo’, recognises there is a long way to go to increase fan engagement and close that gap.

“Maybe as players, we wouldn’t think that not that many people would be able to name us,” says Breach. “I just think we have to keep doing more to promote ourselves and the team, to showcase what we’re about and how fantastic we are as individuals and as a team and as a union.”

Even if the Red Roses might be completely alien to a growing minority of rugby traditionalists, their success on the pitch has already started to drive up ticket prices. Adult tickets for Saturday’s match start at £25, a £5 increase from the fixture against Ireland during this year’s Women’s Six Nations, after RFU chief executive Bill Sweeney said tickets to watch a team that has won six consecutive Women’s Six Nations titles were on the cheap side.

The mini price hike has not stopped fans from voting with their feet to watch England run out at Twickenham for the penultimate time before next year’s home World Cup, tickets for which will go on sale next week. Dress rehearsals do not come bigger than this.

British sportswomen with big Instagram following