Rugby Union

The online rugby audience (YouTubers, Redditors etc) are fairly against some of this stuff, but i'd wager if World Rugby got a majority of the Northern Hemisphere unions to agree to this stuff then its probably built on a foundation of study suggesting the casual fan, and fans in growing markets are likely to react positively to it.

• Onside kicks in open play: Super Rugby rapidly enacted this a few weeks out from the start of the season this year - and it has been making a difference. This is removing the so called "Dupont law" which is something he was noticeably early to exploit but many other teams were doing as well. There was a weird quirk of the laws where if you kick the ball down field, all of the players from your own team didn't need to move and would be put on side if the receiving player ran 5 metres. This was one of the major reasons why kick tennis has been so prevalent of late and why it feels like so much of the game is played 10m either side of halfway - because probably 20 or so players were literally just staying there waiting to be put onside not by their kickers & chasers, but the opposition. In Super Rugby this has been noticeably good - there's been more broken play counter attack; although Australasian teams prefer to do that anyway so will be more interesting to see how the north approaches it.
• scrums from free-kicks: Law 20.3 is being adjusted so you can only choose a scrum from a penalty, not also from free-kicks. The Saffa fans are fairly unanimous in their conspiracy thinking that its designed to combat their choosing to scrum in their own 22m for penalties - but its really just to stop 3 scrums happening from a knock-on and wasting 5-6 minutes of game time standing around. In combination with the change above it actually removes the reason SA were opting for a scrum anyway so I don't see this being a major negative (especially as apparently Rassie is such a rugby Genius that he should be able to find a new tactic).
• Crocodile Roll banned: This one seems obvious in terms of safety but is the one I worry will have the worst unintended side effects. This strengthens the jackal and I suspect may lead to even more teams kicking the ball away rather than playing. The easiest way to make the ruck safer is to nerf the jackal so its only attempted when the attacking player is well clear of their support - but so far WR is ignoring the tools at their disposal to get the jackal and all its danger & negative play implications out of the game. (15.2 & 15.3).

The law trials all seem to be fairly positive steps based on the ones that have been used in SR.

• revised on & off field sanctions: look like they will hopefully make things a lot more consistent, and the 20 minute card where the player is gone but eventually gets replaced has worked really well for us.
• 30s (to form) scrum & lineouts: this has been really good, way less pissing about and should help to fatigue teams more which opens things towards the end of the halves.
• shot clock for goal kicks & reduced time for conversions: I would want to reduce this even further to 30s for both, but at least conversions are down to 60s now from 90s. This is such an easy win I don't know why it has to be trialled.
• protection of the 9: I haven't seen this one in action so no opinion.
• playing the ball after the maul stops once: This hasn't been used in SR yet but the refs are a lot stricter on how mauling has been applied and we have seen a slight reduction in maul tries in favour of other forms of scoring so this could be positive.