Jamaica at the Rugby League World Cup

About Jamaica in rugby league

Nicknamed the Reggae Warriors, Jamaica's national rugby league team grew out of the Jamaica Rugby League Association, founded in July 2004, and a small domestic competition that launched the following year with four teams. The national side first took the field in 2006 against a touring West Yorkshire Police team, and recorded its first proper international win in October 2010 against Canada. Jamaica qualified for its first ever World Cup by beating the United States 16-10 in a qualifying playoff, reaching the 2021/2022 tournament with a squad built mainly around British-Jamaican professional and semi-professional players from England's lower rugby league divisions alongside a smaller group of amateur players based in Jamaica itself. The Reggae Warriors' World Cup debut brought heavy defeats — 48-2 to Ireland and 74-12 to Lebanon — but did produce the team's first ever World Cup try, scored against New Zealand. Jamaica had shown before the tournament that closer results were possible: a 2016 tour of Europe produced a comfortable 68-16 win over Ireland and a 16-16 draw with Wales. Jamaica have also built a long-running regional rivalry with Canada, meeting ten times by 2024, and entered qualifying for the 2026 World Cup with a fixture against France in October 2025 — part of an ongoing push to turn the Reggae Warriors from a one-off World Cup story into a regular fixture on the international rugby league calendar. The domestic game inside Jamaica has grown steadily alongside the national team's rise: the four-team Jamaica Rugby League National Club Championship launched in 2005 had expanded to roughly 20 senior sides contesting community, collegiate and parish-level championships by 2013, alongside youth programmes introduced at high schools and primary schools, and the 2011 launch of Hurricanes Rugby League specifically to develop junior players toward professional and semi-professional careers in the sport.

Sources

• Jamaica national rugby league team — Wikipedia