The Runners-Up of Major League Rugby’s inaugural season will not play professional rugby in 2025. The American Raptors were a founding member of Major League Rugby and competed between 2018-2019 as the Glendale Raptors, and in the truncated 2020 season as the Colorado Raptors, before withdrawing from the league. The Raptors finished 1st in the 2018 regular season with a 7-1-0 record, before falling to the Seattle Seawolves in the Final by a score of 19-23. The following season, the Raptors finished outside the playoffs with a 7-7-2 record, and they held a 2-3-0 record in 2020 before the season was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Raptors held an all-time record in MLR of 16-11-2 across three seasons of competition, and are the only team in MLR history to have withdrawn from the league and continued to play elsewhere. So why did they withdraw from Major League Rugby? And what has changed between 2020 and 2024.
The Raptors in MLR
The Glendale Raptors were founded as an amateur side in 2006, winning back-to-back Pacific Rugby Premiership titles in 2015 & 2016, before professionalizing as a founding member of MLR in 2017, owned by the City of Glendale, known as ‘Rugbytown USA’, and playing out of Infinity Park. As mentioned, the Raptors had a strong inaugural season, winning 7 of their 8 games and advancing to the MLR Final before falling 19-23 to the Seattle Seawolves in San Diego. The Raptors won another 7 games the following year, but with an expanded format this was only good enough for 6th, and they missed the playoffs by 11pts. Rebranded as the Colorado Raptors, they looked to be a middling team again in 2020, with a 2-3 record through the first 5 rounds of the season before it was cancelled due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
At the beginning of April 2020, during what would have been Round 10 of the 2020 regular season, the Raptors announced their withdrawal from Major League Rugby. The team claimed that MLR was getting further away from it’s mission of developing American rugby players, and that the Raptors’ “greater responsibility lies in the development of American players…”. The team felt that with MLR’s expansion (that included the Canada-based Toronto Arrows) and corresponding increase in foreign players (unclear if this includes Canadians, still deemed domestic players by the league as of 2024), there would be fewer spots in matchday rosters for American talent, and they would better be able to develop American players outside of the MLR structure.
The obvious counter-argument to this is that you need Americans to play rugby in the first place in order to develop them, and bringing in talented international players raises the quality of the league and thus the profile of the sport in the USA, encouraging more fans to pick up rugby and allowing that development in the first place. Rugby in the USA is still very much a fringe sport even in 2024, but it’s come a long way since 2018.
The Raptors outside of MLR
Following their withdrawal from Major League Rugby the Raptors rebranded as the Colorado XOs, focused on converting athletes of other sports to rugby players. In particular, football and wrestling have significant transferrable skills to the game of rugby. The XOs played a 10-game season through 2021 against a mix of club teams and fledgling MLR academy sides and had some success, finishing with an even 5-5 record with six players then picking up contracts with MLR sides including most notably, 2x Major League Rugby Champion Kaleb Geiger, who won the Shield with New York in 2022 and the New England Free Jacks in 2024.
The XOs lasted only from 2020-2021, before the team realised that it would always play a level below MLR as long as it was not playing in a professional league of their own. In September 2021, the XOs would rebrand once more, returning to the Raptors name with a completely different colour palate as the American Raptors that we’re familiar with today. At the time, Glendale City Manager Linda Cassaday stated that “The Raptors name has long been a symbol of rugby in Glendale”. The new-look Raptors played another exhibition season in 2022, the ‘Challenge Cup of the Americas’ featuring the reigning Súper Liga Americana de Rugby (SLAR) Champions Peñarol and Jaguares XV, as well as the UBC Old Boy Ravens Canadian club side.
In December 2022, SLAR rebranded to ‘Super Rugby Americas’ (SRA – no relation to Super Rugby) and announced that the Raptors would be competing in the predominantly South American competition from 2023. Ahead of their inaugural SRA season, the Raptors entered into a partnership with the Colombian Rugby Federation (Federación Colombiana de Rugby – FCR) and Los Cafeteros Pro, a Colombian professional team that competed in SLAR, but was not going to compete in SRA. The agreement was made so that Colombian players could still play high level rugby with the Raptors. It’s worth remembering that the Raptors withdrew from MLR in 2020 over concerns of increasing foreign players taking spots from domestic talent, only to enter into a partnership allowing 5 foreign players to play with the Raptors, who had 11 South American players on their 2023 roster.
Extreme travel distances coupled with facing essentially National Team development sides meant that the Raptors’ time in SRA would be tough. They finished 6th of 7 in 2023 with 16pts and a 2-10 record and the worst points differential in the league (-176), and finished 6th of 7 again in 2024 with 17pts and an even worse points differential (-221) despite picking up an extra win (3-9), after changing head coaches part-way through the season.
The Present Day
A combined Super Rugby Americas record of 5-19 and score differential of -397 cannot have made for good reading for the City of Glendale. On October 22nd, Maggy Wolanske published an article for Denver7 announcing that the raptors would not be playing professional rugby in 2025. Wolanske writes that “Glendale City Manager Chuck Line confirmed the city is shifting its focus from professional rugby to youth rugby, meaning it will not support the American Raptors.” Ironically, it seems that the reason the team withdrew from MLR may just have been the reason why professional rugby ended, at least for next year.
The article states that the City of Glendale confirmed to Denver7 that “it is more expensive to fund the American Raptors compared to youth rugby programs” which should come as no surprise when considering that the next closest SRA team to the Raptors was over 5,000 miles away in Paraguay. Line also said that the Raptors did not set the city back financially, however. He also stated that the City of Glendale is hopeful the Raptors can return in 2026 “along with several other North American teams competing in Super Rugby Americas.”
This last line is interesting, which other North American teams could be on the slate to compete in SRA in 2026? There have been murmurs that the Vancouver Highlanders might be interested (although that’s even further away than Colorado), or perhaps a team in Mexico may decide SRA is a better fit than MLR? We will have to wait and see, just as we’ll have to see if the Raptors will make another return to professional rugby in 2026. Another question to consider for now though: Although Glendale hosts a number of rugby events outside of the Raptors, including the famous RugbyTown Sevens competition, it last hosted an international match in July 2022 (USA 29-31 Chile), and without a professional team, can you really call yourselves ‘RugbyTown USA’?