ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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Rugby Europe is the European continental association for Rugby Union. It is one of the six continental associations of the Rugby World Federation World Rugby and comprises a total of 49 national associations of individual countries.

Rugby Europe was founded in 1934 at the instigation of France as the Fédération Internationale de Rugby Amateur (FIRA) after being excluded from the Five Nations tournament. Since 1999, the name FIRA has not been considered as an abbreviation or dissolved. Instead, he received the addition AER (French Association Européenne de Rugby or English Association of European Rugby). The restrictive name component Amateur was no longer true since the accession of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland at the latest, because in these countries Rugby Union was already professionally operated – at least in the upper classes and the national teams. In 2014, the name was completely changed and modernized, since then the association operates under the name “Rugby Europe”.

Development

Prehistory
From 1910 onwards, France was allowed to participate in the regular game traffic of the four British parts of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland: the previous annual Home Championship (or the Four Nations Tournament) was extended to the Five Nations Tournament, which was considered an unofficial European rugby championship.

According to the British, who had founded the International Rugby Football Board in 1886/90 to unify and monitor the rules, the French Federation was not consistent enough in compliance with all amateur regulations. On several warnings, France did not respond to their satisfaction, and so they excluded it from the tournament from 1932.

Careful not to lose touch with the international level and maintain a corresponding international game traffic, France looked for new partners. After playing against Germany at least once a year since 1927, it found open ears here with the proposal to establish an international association.

The FIRA until the Second World War
After a preparatory meeting on 4. On September 2, 1933 in Turin, the founding meetings took place in Paris on January 2, 1934 and in Hanover on March 24 of the year.
Founding members were Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Catalonia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania and Spain. On 10 June, the founding was officially published in the Official Journal of the French Republic.

Initially, the international game traffic between the members actually increased. There were even approaches to a championship: several tournaments were held – in May 1936 an Olympic four-nation tournament in Berlin, in October 1937 a world exhibition tournament in Paris and in May 1938 still a three-nation tournament in Bucharest. The strongest force on the mainland was France, followed by a clear distance from Germany