On Friday 14 February this year, five young women in their mid-twenties decided to spend their Valentine’s Day evening together in West London.

They took a train out to Twickenham from the centre of town and had a few pints in a pub on the high street before wandering down the A316 to The Stoop.

There they scanned their tickets, bought some chips and another drink, and sat in the stands with 6,775 other people, mainly women.

All but one of those five were there to watch their first-ever game of women’s rugby. The other was watching their first-ever game of rugby, period.

At the end of the match, all five left as newly loyal and engaged fans of women’s rugby in what is arguably the biggest year in the history of the women’s game. All five paid for tickets, watched 46 of the best female rugby players in the world play in PWR and in turn helped to grow the sport.

And all were there for one reason and one reason alone. Because of our sport’s first superstar since Jonah Lomu.

The first rugby player to break beyond the glass ceiling and transcend into wider culture and become an icon and role model to millions worldwide.

Because of someone so relevant she can bring Rugby World and Marie Claire UK together in collaboration.

Because of Ilona Maher.

---

Related: All you need to know about the 2025 Women’s World Cup

---

How Ilona Maher rose to fame

Now before we get going, I appreciate that ‘Ilona Maher’ may not be much more than just a name to some rugby fans.

Despite her meteoric rise since last summer’s Olympic Games, in some rugby circles her impact is yet to break through – something I found when soft-pitching this collaboration to some fans of the game.

So let me offer you a potted history of Maher and just exactly why what she has done is so significant for the sport. At last year’s Paris Games, Maher arrived a stalwart of the rugby sevens scene known for her powerful ball-carrying.

She also, through her own efforts, had built a reasonable online following of 600k fans through relatable, funny videos on her Tiktok and Instagram pages.

On the pitch, Maher helped take USA to a surprise sevens bronze medal when beating pre-tournament favourites Australia in the third-place play-off.

Ilona Maher. Changing the game forever — and stealing our hearts along the way. 🥹❤️

Relive her unforgettable #Paris2024 energy in the latest drop from our original series.

Wait. For. It.🤞🏽

➡️ https://t.co/47EuDou3cv pic.twitter.com/kwkpshamat

— The Olympic Games (@Olympics) July 30, 2025

Off it, Maher captured the zeitgeist.

Creating content around the Olympic village, the 28-year-old quickly became one of the stars of the Games and an overnight online sensation.

She grew to an online platform of almost 9 million people globally as she collaborated with the likes of Simone Biles, Tom Brady and Coco Gauff, amassing more than 200m views on TikTok and more than half a billion views on Instagram.

From there the ball kept rolling with appearances on Seth Meyers’s late-night talk show and as a contestant on ABC and Disney+’s biggest weekly broadcast Dancing With The Stars, where she finished runner-up.

In the meantime, she was named in Time magazine’s Next 100 emerging leaders, was voted USA Today’s Woman of the Year and featured on the covers of Sports Illustrated and People magazine.

She then signed a contract with Bristol Bears Women in the PWR in a bid to convert to 15s with one eye on the Women’s World Cup.

Demand for tickets was so high for her Bristol debut in January against Gloucester-Hartpury that they had to move the match from Shaftesbury Park to Ashton Gate, with the 9,240 attendance setting a new record for a regular-season game.

Read more: All the fixtures for the 2025 Women’s World Cup

Harlequins and Trailfinders also went on to set attendance records when hosting Maher and Bristol this season. Her announcement video had over 15m views and the social reach of Bristol Bears Women became the highest in the league, even surpassing some clubs in the men’s game.

PWR reported that YouTube subscribers had doubled and there had been a 68.5% increase in total social followers, with a record 11 million people reached in that three-month time frame.

Maher was also named the eighth most marketable athlete in the world in SportsPro’s industry-leading 50 Most Marketable list ahead of Lewis Hamilton, Cristiano Ronaldo and Jude Bellingham as she signed major brand deals with the likes of Adidas and Maybelline.

And she was the reason that Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai attended her first game of rugby. Not bad, aye?

“When I hear about these people who have never been to a rugby game before coming to watch me and my team I think yes! This is why I have been doing what I have been doing,” Maher tells Rugby World and Marie Claire.

“It’s why I’ve been posting these videos and why I put myself out there. To try to get more eyes on the game of rugby. It shows to me that it is working, it matters and has led to something.

“I think the women’s game can be used to go after a different audience. In men’s rugby it’s a lot of male fans. People who have been going to games for the last 20 years and are season-ticket holders and love their team and will support them through thick and thin.

“We don’t always see those fans at the women’s game. But what I’ve been seeing is how many young fans we have coming to the stadium. Women in their twenties. Families. Thirty- or 40-year-old women.

“That’s where I say again, we’re not the same as men’s rugby, it’s different. We can appeal to different audiences and realise that the guy who has been following the men’s team for decades may not come to our games but there is a mum and her daughter who may want to check something out. Or a girl who wants to see women’s sport. I think there are new people to go after.

“A tangible outcome from all this has to be people in seats. We talk a lot about getting people to play rugby but even more important now is getting people to watch women’s rugby. Getting people to buy a ticket and sit in a seat and watch women’s rugby.”

See more: All you need to know about the 2025 Women’s World Cup

The impact of Ilona Maher

Maher’s impact so far has certainly been tangible.

While most in rugby’s positions of power have long mused over effective ways to take the game to new audiences, particularly in America and with a focus on the women’s game, Maher has actually gone ahead and done it.

She is talking about rugby constantly on her personal platforms and reaching millions around the globe day in, day out.

Most of these people are not traditional rugby fans, they are young women in their teens, twenties and thirties who follow her because she is that ‘funny girl online’ but then are genuinely converting into fans of the sport, as the numbers prove.

“One part of our Bristol Bears Women growth strategy has been around shifting the demographic of our social channels and match-day attendees,” says Daisie Mayes, the Bristol women’s team manager.

“Previously they were high percentage middle-aged males and females or families. We want to find a way of bringing in young women and we weren’t sure how to do it, especially those not interested in rugby.

“We changed the strategy to focus on player personalities to show its cool side but we were just hitting the same people. Ilona joined and then the fire lit. That target of 24-35 and 35-44-year-old women we wanted to get, we’ve now got. That group before Ilona was 9% of our audience in-game and on social media, now it sits at 35% for 24-35-year-olds and our biggest audience segment.

“I watched back our games on TNT and the Gloucester game where we had 9,000 people in Ashton Gate and I was so proud of how diverse that crowd was. Seeing people like me sitting watching a game of women’s rugby. Our record attendance was originally 4,100 against Quins and now it’s 9,240. For me, I saw the dream we had been working towards.”

The importance of Maher

If you are wondering why this is important, you only need to take a quick ‘big picture’ temperature check of where the sport is currently at.

In England, the professional game has been struggling with three top-flight club sides having gone bust in the past five years, while studies have shown that participation, viewership and engagement have all been in varying levels of decline.

Welsh and Scottish rugby is also on a financial knife-edge, while even a rugby stronghold like New Zealand is seeing empty seats for All Blacks Test matches.

World Rugby made a wave of staff redundant this Spring, following on from the RFU doing similar in 2024, while the much-anticipated silver bullet of Six Nations: Full Contact on Netflix was a certified rotten tomato flop.

Meanwhile, Maher has organically grown a personal online platform bigger than Siya Kolisi, Antoine Dupont, Ardie Savea, Maro Itoje, Marcus Smith, Finn Russell and all three Barrett brothers combined in less than a year and is currently considered more popular, marketable and relatable than Virat Kohli, Max Verstappen and Patrick Mahomes.

We ran an issue of Rugby World in collaboration with Marie Claire UK, an iconic women’s fashion and lifestyle brand that has a reach far beyond what we could ever dream of.

If this feels monumental then it’s because it is.

“The 50 Most Marketable list is created with big consulting firm Northstar Solutions, who’ve developed a module to rank athletes based on their marketability,” explains Ed Dixon, deputy editor of SportsPro.

“It’s underpinned by three pillars: brand strength, total addressable market and economics. This is built through 16 quantitative drivers that create these wider marks. We’ve never had a rugby player in the top ten. A few have broken the top 50 but you can count them on one hand.

“For her to go straight into the top ten speaks to where athlete marketability and personality is going. Antoine Dupont is not even in this list. Rugby is crying out for stars, which sometimes feels at odds with the nature of the sport. I think it would be wrong for a sport to look at marketability as an evil because the product of doing it will bring more people to the sport, drive standards and improve the general health of it. It’s not selling out, it’s necessary for the health of a sport.

“Maher is showing other players how it’s done. Maher realises the culture in rugby needs to shift despite her love for it. We keep talking about how to get young people into the game. Those people are online, so we need to shift mindsets. If rugby is serious about growing, Maher is the blueprint.”

Personality is key

The cult of personality is what is driving success in other sports right now.

The WNBA, UFC and Formula One have all transformed over the past decade into the world’s fastest-growing sports that are lucrative billion-pound businesses because of how they have put the personalities of its athletes front and centre.

This, however, often feels at odds with rugby’s stoic facade where the team is championed and individuals and personalities have often been held back or even criticised for not sticking to the status quo.

Think of the likes of Danny Cipriani, Quade Cooper and Carlos Spencer, who were often labelled ‘mavericks’ during their career and cast aside for not fitting the classic rugby mould.

I’m not saying this trio could have been rugby’s answer to David Beckham but certain parts of the sport will then be quick to criticise players showing interest in more than just rugby, accusing them of not focusing on the game or performances.

And even the fact I’m struggling to think of genuine ‘personalities’ who broke beyond rugby in the first place goes some way into telling you where the sport has been and is at.

Read more: How the 2021 Women’s Rugby World Cup was won

It all adds up to where we are today, struggling to remain relevant in an ever-competitive sports entertainment market.

But things can change. Think about rugby for a second. A game for all shapes and sizes, filled with incredible quirks and unmatched levels of respect and sportsmanship.

Where front-rowers who can lift as much as bodybuilders share a pitch with 6ft 8in locks, fly-halves who can appear to make time move in slow motion and backs who are as quick as Olympic sprinters.

Maher describes it herself as “30 moving parts moving in unison to create elegant violence”.

Rugby players are real-life superheroes, we just need to show people that.

“The game needs to see the value in showcasing personality.  I think rugby is cool, I think it’s different. I think what is cool about it, especially for women, is that it’s a sport that encourages you to be as tough and physical as possible which in many other sports is policed,” says Maher.

“There are potential superstars who people could connect with. We just need outsiders to see them and connect with them. Especially in America, we love drama. We want to see what our sportspeople do on and off the field. We just need more stars.

“We need to create environments and cultures that encourage female athletes to show who they are and not tell them to tone it down. I’d love to just focus on my sport. I’d love to go on the field, play rugby and make a million dollars, but I’m not going to make a lot of money playing rugby. I don’t think there’s a single women’s rugby player in the world making over £100,000. I’m not going to make enough money to just focus on the field, so how can you expect me to just focus on the field when I cannot support myself and live a comfortable life? So as female athletes we have to do more. Some of my team-mates are nurses, doctors and teachers. My more is making little videos.”

The journey continues

What has made Maher so powerful in all this is that she has continued to cultivate such incredible engagement – the hits keep on coming.

She has not deviated from her authentic, personal self and has remained relatable to young women, sports fans or not, globally.

She has used her platform to champion body positivity and empowerment through her words and actions, challenging stereotypes around beauty and sports while platforming rugby and those who play it, all encapsulated by a personal slogan of ‘Beast, Beauty, Brains’.

The whole time Maher has been transparent that while she may be the face, she wants to bring rugby and her team-mates along for the journey.

At Bristol, Maher promoted the team, the PWR and the game at every opportunity possible. She created content with her team-mates, all of whom saw their own personal platforms grow.

It prompted Bristol Bears to invite PR moguls M&C Saatchi into training to give the squad a masterclass in building personal brands.

Sarah Bern, in particular, was impressed by Maher, telling Rugby World: “I think she’s just a really great female role model. She’s strong and said she believes that she deserves a future because she’s worked incredibly hard for it. And I think that’s probably a thing that a lot of women don’t have, to see someone who’s been so successful. That, for me, is inspiring.”

Club co-captain Abbie Ward agrees. “She’s been very much open about like, yes, it’s this big spotlight on her but she wants to almost deflect that and put spotlights on other people and on the game. You’ve seen that in how she’s tried to bring out other personalities within the team or the league.”

Maher is an undeniable force for good and can be the catalyst for growth in rugby but she cannot do it alone, as she recognises herself.

“I think I feel overwhelmed by the fact that I have become the face of the game and people expect so much out of me to continue growing the game. Can you do this? Can you do this? I want to do it all to help the game but at times I feel like I’m being wrung dry because they want every little thing,” says Maher.

“I understand that but I also put my blood, sweat and tears into building this platform for myself and at times I feel used for it, which is never fun. It’s in a way why I want more stars to come out of rugby, so that we can look to someone else. ‘Okay, someone else has to do this’. I will still do as much as I can but it is not enough. There will come a point where you teeter on the edge of burnout and I don’t want to get to that point.”

Those five new, young rugby fans that spent their Valentine’s Day Friday night together at a Quins v Bristol PWR game went because there was a global superstar on the pitch. If we want them to come back, it’s about time we made a few more.

The Women’s Rugby World Cup starts on Friday 22 August with England’s Red Roses playing Ilona Maher and the USA in Sunderland.

---

Download the digital edition of Rugby World straight to your tablet or subscribe to the print edition to get the magazine delivered to your door.

Follow Rugby World on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X.