It is fair to say that rugby is somewhat emerging from the existential crisis triggered by the pandemic as participation numbers - especially for women - steadily grow in the UK. 

However, the Sports England Active Lives Adult Survey found that participation in Rugby Union in 2025 was still 12% below the 2015-16 baseline of 259,600 active players. This deficit is being challenged particularly in the younger population by parental concerns over the safety of the sport; The Drake Foundation has found that 65% of parents want tackling banned at U-14 level and 66% want scrums banned in all youth rugby. 

What if there is a solution to these concerns, not in changing rules and removing core facets of the sport, but instead in changing how we the game?

The Idea:

Well, on a gorgeous summer morning in July, I sped through the open gates of Kingham Hill School in Chipping Norton (best known for being the location of Jeremy Clarkson’s wildly popular Diddly Squat Farm shop) as I set out to find the solution to rugby’s woes. 

The school itself, while incredibly welcoming and packed with excellent facilities, was only the staging ground for what I was searching for. 

Le Plaisir du Mouvement means ‘The Pleasure of Movement’ in English and is the title coined by the godfather of Toulousain rugby, Pierre Villepreux, for his rugby philosophy. 

April 14, 1985. View of Pierre Villepreux and Jean-Claude Skrela coaches of the Stade Toulouse

Over his coaching career with Toulouse and France (among other club and international stints), the Frenchman crafted his ideal of how rugby should be played. Unsurprisingly, this stands in direct opposition to how we in England coach and play the sport.

To best describe Villepreux’s methodology, I will use a story that Richard Dixon, one of the main English coaches who has been involved with LPM in England, recounted to me. 

The Story:

According to Dixon, Villepreux was once acting as a consultant coach for the Oxford University men’s team in the late 1980s, and after watching them train for around an hour, he stopped the session and asked the entire squad to join him in their changing room. 

Once the Oxonians had all sat down, Villepreux asked them a simple question. 

‘How would you leave this room?’ 

As you can imagine, this may have confused some of the more scientific minds amongst the players and maybe sparked an idea for a poem amongst those who were ‘reading English’ at the university. 

Finally, one of the players responded and said, ‘Well, I would leave through the door.’ 

‘Exactly,’ said Villepreux (probably with a good deal of Francophone flourish). ‘Then why do you keep trying to run through walls?’ 

‘Go Forward. Support.’

Richard Dixon and Pierre Villepreux outside the Toulouse stadium.

Those are the two key tenets of LPM and Villepreux’s philosophy, and if I were to be pedantic, I would say it’s ‘Go Forward [Into Space] and Support’. 

The Benefits:

Le Plaisir du Mouvement is a camp that teaches coaches and players alike to play attacking, evasive rugby.

During my time visiting the camp, I did not see a single youth player run headlong into a defender because that is what he felt he needed to do or was directed to do by a coach. 

LPM Animateurs coaching the girl’s session during Day 3 of the UK camp.

Even when visiting Whitney Rugby Club and watching the French animateurs (the LPM’s term for coaches) take the men’s team through a session of LPM rugby, I only witnessed a couple of direct collisions between players and to be honest I suspect that both ballcarriers had a certain penchant for impact.

As positive as this all seemed, watching the training sessions on the pitches at Kingham Hill School, I was concerned that the welcoming camp environment was the only place where this playstyle could really flourish. 

But, crucially, the feedback from coaches, who ranged from local youth volunteers to the academy level, was that the LPM style of play was more accessible for young players and allowed their young charges to express themselves in a safer environment. 

The Takeaways:

The same story was repeated back to me from coaches across the country as they espoused how their player retention rates had increased each year that they had implemented the philosophy. 

One of the stories that seemingly all the coaches recited to me was how smaller players felt empowered by being told that they could run into space instead of directly at another child three times as large as them. 

As well as that, playing a high-tempo, evasive game means that young players are forced to improve their handling skills no matter what position they play, as the onus is placed on them to make decisions instead of parroting a gameplan repeated to them by their coaches. This leads to a more expansive game that is decided by skill and intelligence just as much as it is decided by size. 

The attention to detail within the coaching class that I observed was also immense. There were 5-minute-long discussions on how the coaches rolled the ball to their players when they were starting a minigame in training. 

They discussed when and when not to stop play even if a mistake occurs, and how valuable it was to let an attacking team retain the ball even if they knocked it on. 

Total commitment was created from the French coaches who had drank from the tap of Villepreux’s coaching, right down to me, who lapped up the LPM philosophies that the Animateurs were espousing. 

Considering the success of Toulouse and French rugby in the past half-decade, a good deal of which was moulded by Villepreux’s guiding hand during his time as a rugby educator, this philosophy could be the remedy that will spur grassroots rugby in England to surpass its peak after the 2015 World Cup.