Touch and Walking Rugby in England: Formats and How to Join

Walk past a rugby club in Surrey on a Wednesday evening in June and the first team pitch will be roped off and empty, the posts padded and unused, and the whole of the training pitch beside it covered in cones marking out four small rectangles. Forty or fifty people, from about eighteen to about sixty, in shorts and trainers. Nobody hits anybody. Somebody shouts "touch" and the game reorganises itself in a second and a half.

That is the summer game in England now, and it is not a curiosity at the edge of the sport. Non-contact rugby is the reason a large number of English clubs stay open through the closed season, the reason a proportion of their bar takings survive the summer, and increasingly the reason a lapsed player comes back at all. Two formats carry most of it. Touch, which is fast, competitive and has its own international governing body. And walking rugby, which is slow by design and has almost none of the infrastructure touch has built.

They get lumped together as "non-contact rugby" and they are not really the same activity. What follows separates them properly, sets out the laws each one runs on, and explains how you get into either from a standing start in England.

What counts as touch, and who actually writes the laws

There is a genuine muddle here that nobody at a club will explain to you, so it is worth getting straight before you turn up.

The version played at English rugby clubs on summer evenings is often a loose, locally agreed game: touch, pass immediately, three or four touches then hand over, and whatever the person organising it decided last year. It borrows from rugby union, it is refereed generously, and it exists to keep union players ticking over.

Touch as a codified sport is a different thing. It has its own laws, published by the Federation of International Touch, its own World Cup, and in England its own national governing body, the England Touch Association. The ETA runs affiliated clubs, regional competition and the National Touch Series, and the players in it are not necessarily rugby players at all. Some have never played a contact game in their lives.

The RFU's involvement sits across both. For most of the 2010s the union's summer non-contact programme ran under the O2 Touch banner, a sponsorship that put branded sessions into hundreds of clubs and gave the format a name people still search for. That sponsorship has since ended and the sessions continue under club branding or under the ETA's, which is why you can search for O2 Touch near you, find nothing, and have a session running a mile away under another name.

Practically: if a session is described as "club touch" or "social touch", expect house rules. If it is described as an ETA-affiliated club, a regional league or the National Touch Series, expect the FIT playing rules, played hard, by people who are quick.

Six players, six touches, and the rollball that runs the game

• 6Players on the field, per side
• 6Touches before a change of possession
• 5Retreat at a rollball, metres
• 1Points for a touchdown

The core figures from the FIT playing rules, which govern affiliated competition in England. Social club touch frequently varies all of them.

Six on, unlimited off. Squads run to fourteen and substitution is rolling, through a designated interchange area, with no permission needed and no cap on how often a player comes on and off. That single rule is why touch works across a wide range of fitness: a player who can give ninety seconds of genuine sprinting can play a full game in ninety-second bursts.

A touch is any contact between a defender and the ball carrier, or between a defender and the ball. Minimal is the word the rules use and minimal is what it means — a hand on a hip. Shoving a ball carrier is not a firmer touch, it is an offence.

The moment a touch is made, the carrier stops, places the ball on the ground between their feet, and steps over it. That is the rollball, and it is the engine of the whole game. Behind them a team-mate — the dummy half, or acting half — lifts the ball and the attack starts again. Defenders have to retreat five metres from the mark and cannot come forward until the dummy half touches the ball.

The dummy half cannot score, and cannot be touched in possession without conceding the ball. Get touched as dummy half and the ball changes hands on the spot. It is the most punished mistake in the game and the reason experienced players get the ball away inside a step.

Six touches, then the ball goes over. No kicking in open play at all — not a grubber, not a chip, nothing. The ball is only ever moved by hand, backwards, and the entire tactical shape of the sport follows from that one constraint.

Why the six-touch count feels familiar

Anyone who watches Super League will recognise the architecture immediately, and that is not a coincidence. The rollball, the dummy half, the six-count and the retreating defensive line are all recognisably borrowed from the thirteen-a-side code rather than from union. If you want the contact version of that structure, the six-tackle rule in rugby league is where it comes from, and the differences between the two codes' laws are set out separately in the league and union rules comparison.

What touch does not borrow is the play-the-ball's foot strike, the markers, or any contest at all. Nobody competes for the ball at a rollball. The defence retreats, the attack restarts, and the game moves.

The pitch, the score zone and why a touchdown is worth one

Touch is played on a rectangle considerably smaller than a rugby pitch. Under the FIT rules the field of play runs seventy metres between the try lines and fifty metres wide, with a score zone seven metres deep beyond each try line. A full-size union pitch will comfortably take a touch field marked out across it, which is exactly how most English clubs generate three or four pitches from one second-team ground.

Scoring is where the arithmetic differs most from union, and it changes how the game feels. A touchdown is one point. Not five, not five plus a conversion — one. There are no goals, no posts in play, no kicking tee, and no kick-off from halfway, because kicking does not exist. Play restarts with a tap.

The consequence is that no single score is decisive. A four-point margin in touch is four separate breakdowns of a defensive line, which is a lot of work, and the scoreline reads more like a set of tennis than a rugby result. Games finishing 8-6 are ordinary.

	Touch	Walking rugby	Contact XV
Players on the field	6	Usually 7 or 8	15
Pitch	70m x 50m plus score zones	Cut down, often a quarter of a pitch	Up to 100m x 70m
Restart after a touch or tackle	Rollball, defenders back 5m	Touch, defenders retreat a set distance	Ruck, offside line at the hindmost foot
Kicking	None	None	Central to the game
Value of a score	1 point	Set locally, commonly 1	5 points plus conversion
Match length	Commonly two halves of 20 minutes	Short periods, often 10 to 15 minutes	Two halves of 40 minutes

The pitch dimensions in that table are the ones the international rules specify. Walking rugby has no equivalent published standard, which is a genuine difference between the two formats rather than a gap in the table.

Summer touch leagues at English clubs, and how to enter a team

Club touch leagues in England run to a pattern. They start shortly after the union season ends, usually April or May, and run to the middle of August, when pre-season pulls the players back. One night a week, three or four pitches, a fixture list drawn up by whoever volunteered, and games short enough that four rounds fit into an evening.

Entry is done by team, not by player. A club opens entries in the spring, sets a fee per team for the season, and the captain pays it. That fee covers pitch hire, floodlighting where the season stretches into darker August evenings, referees where the league appoints them, and usually a contribution to the club. Individual players who do not have a team turn up on the first night and get distributed among the sides that are short.

Two things surprise people arriving from the contact game. The first is how many of the players are not rugby players. Netballers, hockey players, sprinters who never fancied being tackled, and a fair number of people whose only previous team sport was at school. The second is that the standard at the top of a decent club league is genuinely high, because the ETA-affiliated players are usually in it too, and they will run through a defensive line with the ball for forty seconds without anybody laying a hand on them.

If you want the organised version rather than the social one, the route is a club affiliated to the England Touch Association, which will play regional fixtures and can enter the National Touch Series. That is where the England squads are picked from, across a range of divisions — men's, women's, mixed and age-banded.

How an evening is actually structured

Bigger club leagues split into divisions after the first few weeks, once the organiser has seen who can play, and run promotion and relegation between them across the summer. That is worth knowing before you enter, because a side of six competent union backs will be put in the top division and beaten by a team of touch specialists half their size, and a side of complete beginners will be looked after in the bottom one.

Fixtures are short. Two halves of ten or twelve minutes is common in a club league, which means a team plays two or three games in an evening rather than one, and the interchange rule stops that being punishing. There is very little dead time. No conversions, no lineouts, no scrums, no waiting for a physio, and a restart that takes about four seconds.

The other feature of the evening is that it finishes. A summer league starting at half past six is done by nine, and the clubhouse is open, which is a substantial part of why clubs bother to run it at all.

Walking rugby: one foot down, and everything that follows from it

1. 1ArrivalPlayers sign in, often paying a small session fee at the door rather than taking out a membership.
2. 2Warm-upMobility work and passing at walking pace, longer than a contact warm-up because the group is older.
3. 3Rules reminderThe coach restates the local variations, because they differ between clubs and new players are common.
4. 4GameShort periods on a cut-down pitch, touches instead of tackles, one foot on the ground at all times.
5. 5RotationConstant substitution so nobody is on for long, with sides rebalanced between periods.
6. 6AfterwardsThe clubhouse. For a large share of the players this is not a secondary part of the evening.

The common shape of a club session in England. There is no single national ruleset, so any given club will differ in the detail.

The defining rule is the one in the name. At least one foot must be in contact with the ground at all times, which is the technical definition of walking and the thing that separates it from a slow jog. Break into a run and the referee stops you, usually with a turnover.

Everything else follows from that. There is no contact, so touches replace tackles. There is no kicking in most versions. The pitch is cut right down, because walking pace over seventy metres is a long time and a wide pitch cannot be defended by walkers. Periods are short. Sides are commonly seven or eight, though clubs run whatever number turned up.

What there is not is a national ruleset. The RFU promotes the format and clubs run it inside the RugbySafe framework, but walking rugby in England has grown club by club rather than out of a published law book, and the variations are real. Some clubs use a two-hand touch, some one. Some allow a limited step after the touch, some demand an immediate stop. Some play it in a rugby league shape with a set number of touches, some do not count at all.

That is worth saying plainly rather than smoothing over. Turn up at a second club expecting the rules of your first and you will get one wrong inside five minutes.

Why the format found its audience among players in their fifties and sixties

Walking football arrived first in England and demonstrated the appetite. The idea started at a football club community trust in Derbyshire early in the 2010s, spread through leisure centres, and was then given an enormous national push when a bank used it in a television advertisement. Within a few years there were leagues.

Rugby clubs watched that happen and recognised a problem of their own. A union club carries a large population of former players who stopped in their thirties or forties, drifted from playing to watching to not coming at all, and then stopped renewing. Contact rugby offers them nothing. Veterans rugby offers them contact, which is the thing their knees and their families have already ruled out.

Walking rugby put a ball back in those hands. The typical session is heavy on players in their fifties and sixties, and the reasons they give are consistent: the social side, a form of exercise that does not involve running, and a way of being at the club on a weekday evening that is not just standing behind the bar.

There is a second group that gets less attention and matters as much. Players coming back from serious injury use walking rugby as a rehabilitation step, because it reintroduces the movement patterns and the decision-making of the game without any collision risk. A player twelve weeks out of a knee reconstruction cannot train with a squad. They can play walking rugby.

The third group is the one nobody predicted: people who have never played rugby at all. A format with no tackling and no running removes both barriers at once, and clubs report that a meaningful share of walking rugby players are complete beginners. Some go on to referee, coach or volunteer, which is a supply of people the community game badly needs — the route into rugby refereeing in England starts more often at a social session than at a match.

Mixed teams, the three-male rule, and what social formats actually open up

Mixed touch is the format that has done most for participation, and it works because the rules force it to. Under FIT mixed rules a maximum of three males may be on the field at any one time out of the six. A team that stacks its interchange with men cannot use them.

That constraint changes the game rather than decorating it. A defensive line that leaves the two quickest women unmarked gets taken apart, and an attack that funnels every ball through the biggest man on the pitch runs into a numbers problem by the sixth touch. The result is a genuinely mixed sport at every level up to international competition, played by adults, competitively, which is rare enough in British team sport to be worth pointing out.

Walking rugby is mixed by default at most clubs, though usually without a stated ratio, because the numbers turning up rarely justify one.

Both formats also do something for players who would never be selected in a contact side. Body shape matters much less. A prop who cannot run a hundred metres can play dummy half all evening, and does. The mixed-ability rugby movement that grew out of Bradford has pushed the same principle into the contact game, and touch and walking rugby are the low-friction version of it: turn up, get a game, no trial. The equivalent structured route for women and girls coming into the sport is set out in the guide to the women's rugby pathway in England.

Kit: what you need, what you do not, and where the money goes

Touch needs almost nothing. Trainers or astro shoes on dry summer ground, shorts without pockets or with the pockets taped, a shirt. Metal studs are banned at a lot of venues and pointless at most of the rest; moulded studs are worth having only if your club's summer pitch stays soft. A gumshield is sensible even in a non-contact format, because two players going for the same ball still occasionally clash heads.

Walking rugby needs less. Indoor sessions run in trainers on a sports hall floor, outdoor ones on whatever the ground allows.

Costs work through two models and it is worth knowing which one you are being offered. Pay-as-you-play is a fee at the door for that session, which is how most walking rugby and most casual touch runs. League entry is a fee per team for the season, paid by a captain and split among the squad, which is how organised summer touch runs. Clubs set both locally, so any figure quoted nationally is wrong somewhere.

The thing that is easy to miss is insurance. A player taking part in an activity organised by an RFU-affiliated club is covered by the club's affiliation arrangements; a group who have hired a school pitch and organised their own game are not covered by anything. If that matters to you, ask before the first session rather than after the first injury.

What touch does to a contact player's handling and decision-making

Coaches at English clubs have been sending backs to summer touch for thirty years, and the reason has almost nothing to do with fitness.

A touch game presents a player with a two-on-one every twenty seconds. Over an evening that is hundreds of decisions about when to draw a defender and when to release, taken at full speed, with an immediate consequence and no forwards to hide behind. No structured training session replicates that volume of repetitions.

The handling gain is specific. Because there is no contact, there is no ball presentation to fall back on, so a pass that is half a second late is a lost opportunity rather than a ruck. Players who spend a summer in touch come back holding the ball longer and passing later, which is among the hardest habits to coach into a centre.

Evasion improves for the same reason. A defender cannot be run over, so the only options are footwork, a change of pace and a decision. Wingers get better at the little inside step off the touchline. Half-backs get better at reading which defender is drifting and which is jamming.

There is a limit, and it should be stated. Touch does nothing for contact skill, and a summer of it will leave a forward's tackle technique worse than it was in April. That is a real cost in a sport where tackle technique is a safety issue, which is why pre-season contact reintroduction exists and why the tackle height law in the English game gets drilled before anyone plays a contact fixture. Touch is a supplement. Any coach who tells you otherwise is short of players in July.

The sevens comparison

Touch is often described as sevens without the tackling, and that is wrong in a way worth correcting. Sevens is a contact game with union's full law book, its own scrums, its own lineouts and its own kicking game, played on a full-size pitch. The overlap with touch is the space, the fatigue and the punishment for a poor decision, and nothing else. The sevens format as played in England is a separate discipline with its own competitions and its own selection.

Self-refereeing, and the etiquette that keeps a social game honest

1. 1The callThe defender who made the touch calls it, loudly. The carrier is expected to stop on the call.
2. 2The doubtIf the carrier did not feel it, they say so immediately rather than playing on and arguing afterwards.
3. 3The defaultConvention gives it to the defender. Most players concede a marginal touch rather than stop the game.
4. 4Repeat offenceA player who calls touches they did not make gets a word from their own side first.
5. 5EscalationOnly if it keeps happening does the organiser step in, usually by rebalancing the teams rather than penalising anyone.

The convention in English social touch, not a published law. Affiliated competition uses appointed referees and none of this applies.

Affiliated touch has qualified referees, and the ETA runs a referee pathway with its own grades and appointments to national competition. Social club touch mostly does not. A summer league with four pitches running at once cannot staff four referees on a Wednesday, so the players call their own game.

It works better than it sounds, and the reason is that the sanction for cheating is social rather than procedural. A player who claims touches they did not make is playing with the same forty people every week until August, and the correction arrives from their own team-mates long before it arrives from anybody official.

Where it breaks down is with new players, who do not know the convention favours the defender and who genuinely believe they were not touched. That is a briefing problem rather than a character problem, and the clubs that run touch well spend two minutes on it before the first game of the season.

Walking rugby usually does have a referee, because the one rule that most needs policing — both feet leaving the ground — is precisely the one a player cannot judge in themselves.

Finding a session, and the step up into contact if you want it

Start with your nearest union club's website in March or April, because that is when summer touch entries open and it is the single largest supply of sessions in England. If the club runs it, the page will be there. If it does not, the club will usually know who does.

The England Touch Association is the route to the organised game, and its affiliated clubs run through most English cities and a good number of towns. University sides take non-students over the summer months in a lot of places. Workplace leagues exist in London, Manchester, Bristol and elsewhere, and accept teams with no club attachment whatsoever.

Walking rugby is harder to find because it is not always advertised as a playing activity. It frequently sits under a club's community or social programme rather than its rugby pages, and a phone call will find it faster than a search will.

Moving from touch into contact is a real pathway and clubs are actively looking for people to take it. What it involves is not a formality: contact introduction sessions, tackle technique taught from the ground up, and for adults arriving without a playing history, a genuine physical adjustment. The route in is set out properly in the guide to starting to play rugby as an adult in England, and where you land depends on the level your local club plays at in the RFU pyramid. Parents who arrive through their children's Sunday morning rugby take a different route again, described in the mini and junior rugby guide.

Not everyone wants that step. A large number of touch and walking rugby players in England have no intention of ever being tackled and are entirely content about it, which the sport took an embarrassingly long time to accept as a legitimate way of playing rugby. The wider section on rugby in England covers the contact game these formats sit beside.