Following the announcement that the 2030 Men’s and Women’s Rugby League World Cups will adopt a Magic Round format across cities in the Pacific and United States, the International Rugby League (IRL) Board has also approved changes to international eligibility criteria, extending heritage representation to include great-grandparents.
Players will be eligible to represent their nation of heritage if either they, a parent, a grandparent or a great grandparent were born there.
The update to the eligibility rules followed a detailed submission from Cook Islands given their small population of less than 20,000 and the movement of Cook Islanders to larger countries for work, study or other purposes.
IRL Chair Troy Grant said: “We have made a number of other decisions at Board level with the absolute intent of just growing the player pool across Wheelchair and Women’s formats to help the game continue to grow.
“The IRL Board had a lengthy discussion in regards to the application from Cook Islands and the Board has resolved to change eligibility for all three forms of the game for every nation to great grandparent.
“We did a lot of analysis and looked at a lot of data to help inform the Board to be able to make this decision, and every nation has the ability to go to great grandparent as part of the heritage eligibility for their player pools going forward.”
