🌍 The Week in International Sport
Monday April 27th: the Pacific Four, volleyball's popularity and Manon Errard
This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.
In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:
🇳🇿 New Zealand winning a regional title in women’s rugby union
📊 Chart of the week: assessing the global popularity of volleyball
⏪️ Highlight of the week: Manon Errard’s enviable athleticism
💭 A few other interesting things I learned
As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)
🇳🇿 New Zealand win the 2026 Pacific Four Series
2026 began in an unfamiliar way for New Zealanders: for the first time this century, their country didn’t hold either the men’s or the women’s rugby union World Cup on January 1st. Is their influence on the sport waning? It depends on your point of view.
Among the four versions of the game overseen by World Rugby, New Zealand are the top-rated team in only one — women’s rugby sevens — at present. However, they still produce the widest range of talent: France and Australia are the only two other nations to qualify for ratings in all four codes, and just one of their eight teams currently outranks their Kiwi rivals. After winning the Pacific Four at the weekend, things are on the up for New Zealand (7.6) in women’s 15-a-side rugby union, too.
They have a long way to go to catch England (9.0) at the top, but three wins from three this month cemented their position as the second-best team in the sport. Canada (6.8) were the other major contenders in their regional tournament, having beaten New Zealand convincingly in last year’s World Cup semi-final, but the Black Ferns got their revenge in the second round last week. On Saturday, they beat Australia (3.1) by 35 points to finish the job and retain their title in convincing fashion.
📊 Chart of the week: Is volleyball really that popular?
In quieter weeks for the newsletter so far this year, I’ve been trying to come up with a fair way to condense and summarise a nation’s overall performance level across the 30 team ball sports that I’m following for the ‘Rank the Nations’ project.
One question I’m grappling with is how to weight each of those 30 sports against each other; it feels right for me to give a country more credit for an excellent team in a globally popular game than one in a more niche pursuit. How do you create a framework to apply this sort of judgement consistently? I’ve started by comparing interest in each sport according to Google Trends. The data point I’ve been most surprised by in my first set of popularity rankings: volleyball’s presence near the top.
I don’t know if I buy the governing body’s claim that volleyball is ‘the fourth most popular sport in the world’, but something real is being captured here. For instance, in Brazil — a market of more than 200 million people — it’s much more popular than in most English-speaking countries. Per the FIVB, 16% of the country’s TV audience tuned in to watch the 2025 Nations League, and one match in the competition was “the second most-watched sports broadcast of the year outside [soccer]”.
⏪️ Highlight of the week: Manon Errard’s enviable athleticism
Maybe it’s because I’m recovering from a torn Achilles — mixed netball, if you have to know — or maybe the sport just plays well on social media. Either way, I’m captivated by the athleticism of the handball players who keep appearing on my Instagram feed.
One recent highlight really captures the sport’s unique appeal. During a recent European Championship qualifier, France winger Manon Errard was unmarked in the right-hand corner. After one of her teammates finds her with a short bounce-pass, the 21-year-old moves towards the centre of the court to create a better angle for her left-handed shot. Errard then springs off her right foot, hangs in the air and changes her arm slot in one fluid motion before sending the ball past the goalie’s flailing limbs.
You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.
💭 What else I learned last week
For The Guardian, Nick Ames reported on plans to change the qualifying process for men’s soccer’s European Championship. UEFA members are weighing up moving to a structure based on the continent’s Nations League that “would satisfy demand for games between the leading countries”, instituting the ‘Swiss model’ used by the Champions League or retaining the status quo. If either new option is preferred, per Ames, it’s “unlikely to be in place” in time for Euro 2028.
For ESPNCricinfo, Valkerie Baynes interviewed England women’s head coach Charlotte Edwards about her team’s preparation for the T20I cricket World Cup. (England will host the next edition of the tournament in June.) Unlike rivals, they have not played any competitive fixtures in this format since the conclusion of the ODI World Cup in October; instead, Edwards led “a 30-strong party…to Pretoria last month for training and a series of intra-squad T20 practice matches”.
For MLB.com, Mike Petriello looked into whether 2026 might turn out to be Shohei Ohtani’s best-ever MLB season. The two-way star has already had more impact than almost every other baseball player who has ever moved to the USA from Japan; however, he has never simultaneously been at his best as both a hitter and a pitcher. Now 31, he is clearly pacing himself when he can: as Petriello notes, Ohtani’s “once-elite Sprint Speed…is down to just the 32nd percentile”.
The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Monday May 4th.
