Beer-Guzzling Rugby Fans Are About to Invade Japan’s Bars

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- As fans prepare to descend on Japan for the Rugby World Cup, there’s one question organizers are asking: Will there be enough beer?

Watching rugby and drinking beer go hand in hand. While the Japanese like beer—they drank 53.5 liters per person in 2018—the British, Australians, and Irish, some of the sport’s biggest aficionados, typically consume about double that amount, according to Euromonitor. About a third of ticket sales have gone to overseas fans, mostly from those three countries.

Foreigners are expected to drink about four times as much as Japanese spectators, according to the organizing committee. That has brewers, distributors, and bars in Japan taking steps to avert a shortage, as the six-week competition gets under way on Sept. 20 for the first time in Asia.

“Japanese drinkers usually slow down after two to three pints, but the foreign fans, they can drink for three hours at the same pace, sometimes even up to four or five hours,” says Tsuyoshi Ohta, president of pub chain Hub Co. Ohta, who anticipates a 40% to 50% jump in monthly sales, plans to stock as much as seven times the usual supply of Kirin Ichiban Shibori lager and Heineken at some of Hub’s more than 100 locations. “There won’t be another chance like this in my lifetime.”

The shares of Hub jumped as much as 8.3% on Wednesday, the most since January, on heavy volume.

There’s a reason to be vigilant. At a Japan versus Australia rugby match in 2017, held near Tokyo, the stadium ran out of beer halfway through the game. And at the 2015 cup, hosted by England, 1.9 million liters of beer—enough to fill four-fifths of an Olympic-sized swimming pool—was consumed in stadiums and official viewing parties.

Ryusuke Hasegawa, who manages two Brian Brew pubs in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo—where the Australian and English teams will play games on Sept. 21 and 22—plans to carry 5 to 10 times the usual amount of beer, and he’s asked his suppliers to have trucks full of extra kegs waiting nearby. A former rugby player, he knows that beer is an integral part of the sport, specially when it comes to the quadrennial tournament. “As for how much the fans will drink,” he says, “I can only imagine.”

To prepare restaurants, World Cup organizers have held seminars using a 40-plus-page presentation to give them an idea of how much beer will be consumed and what to expect. Drunken revelers may take off their clothes, one slide warned, telling people that they should try to explain local customs instead of calling the police. “Rugby fans will drink every city dry!” another slide read.

Simon Benham, an IT salesman from the U.K., is making his way across Japan to catch four of England’s games, and beer is part of the itinerary. “I can definitely see people drinking 8 to 10 pints,” he says. “Rugby inherently has quite a heavy drinking culture.”

The Rugby World Cup organizing committee expects the games to draw 400,000 foreign visitors, generating $1 billion in direct economic impact for Japan, aiding the nation’s goal of drawing 40 million annual visitors by 2020. The archipelago has been courting tourists to help support the economy, and is closing in on its goal of drawing 40 million annual visitors by 2020. Every major sports event, including next year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics, is a chance to expose consumers from abroad to local brands.

Nicholas van Santen, a spokesman for the organizing committee, says there will be enough beer at the stadiums. The organizers are responsible for stocking the venues, and Kokubu Group Corp., the food and ­beverage wholesaler contracted by the organizers, is in charge of getting the Heineken beer there on time. Kirin Holdings Co. has a partnership with Heineken NV to brew the official, and only, beer available at stadiums and dedicated fan zones. A Heineken spokesman says the brewer has worked with rugby organizers and Kirin to develop elaborate plans—everything from trucks to boats—to supply each stadium and is confident the games won’t run dry.

Other big brewers in Japan, such as Asahi Group Holdings Ltd. and Sapporo Holdings Ltd., say they plan to boost production as well. Hasegawa, the pub manager in Sapporo, says he has one last thing to do before the onslaught of rugby fans: He’s canceling his monthly all-you-can-drink deal. 

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Rebecca Penty at rpenty@bloomberg.net, James Ellis

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