Huge changes in store as Lions launch bid to tour new countries

This could be massive!

The iconic representative team - which combines the best players from Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales - currently tour South Africa, Australia and New Zealand on a rotating basis every four years.

New Zealand are next in line, after last summer's tour of Australia, and will keep their place on the schedule.

But the Lions have now launched their “Beyond29 project”, with a look at bringing tours of France, Japan, and the Americas to the rotation.

During the last tour, Lions chief executive Ben Calveley implied that there was a chance that the Lions schedule could change.

He said: “I would absolutely envisage returning to Australia. Just to be very clear, I know there’s been loads of speculation about whether that would be the case or not, but we’ve had a wonderful tour here, and it is 100 per cent our ambition to return and we would want the next one to be bigger and better than this one.

“Who knows what the calendar looks like in the future, but if you follow the current… If nothing changes in terms of calendar configurations and so forth, then that would be the expectation, yes.”

Were a new country, or countries, brought in to the rotation, it would be the first addition since Australia in 1989.

One-off games had been played against the Wallabies, but never a full blown tour, and there has also been one-off fixtures with France and Fiji during the Lions' 138-year history.

A game against Los Pumas in Dublin opened the 2025 tour, while the Lions also had standalone tours to Argentina in 1910, 1927 and 1936.