Arabian Gulf Rugby Football Union


The Arabian Gulf Rugby Football Union was the governing body for rugby union that represented the Gulf Cooperation Council states. As well as organising local and regional competitions in UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman, the AGRFU administered representative Arabian Gulf rugby teams and hosted the annual Dubai round of the Sevens World Series and 2009 Rugby World Cup Sevens in Dubai.

History

Rugby in the Arabian Peninsula was first played in the 1940s by the British military and expatriate oil workers in Kuwait. By 1974, rugby clubs had also been established in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain. The AGRFU was founded in that year, under the umbrella of the English RFU along with a referees association. To begin with, many matches were played on sand but today almost all are played on grass pitches.
The AGRFU, in its own right, became a member of the International Rugby Board in 1990. Through its regional development program, the AGRFU also helped facilitate the entry of Lebanon and Jordan into international rugby.
World Rugby's governance restructuring project for the West Asia region resulted in the AGRFU being broken up into separate unions for each member country. The UAE Rugby Federation was the first to be formed in 2009 and the UAE national team inherited the former Arabian Gulf team's world ranking. Other national unions for Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were subsequently created.