Ex-Scotland Sevens star James Fleming at home in the Scottish Borders. Image: © Craig Watson –
www.craigwatson.co.uk 
JAMES FLEMING’s blistering pace helped the former Perthshire wingman rack up 112 tries in 45 tournaments during the best part of a decade on the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series circuit – and, by his own admission, he was just as quick when it came to expressing opinions off the pitch.
That perhaps helps explain why Scottish Rugby showed zero interest in keeping him on in a business capacity after he hung up his boots in 2018, despite the governing body having been persuaded to help fund the MBA he had recently completed at Edinburgh Business School.
Dissenting voices were not embraced around Murrayfield’s corridors of power in those days, and the jury is out on whether that has changed much despite the significant governance upheaval of a few years back which was meant to make the organisation more transparent, responsive and progressive.
World Rugby, the HSBC SVNS Series and why it isn’t working like it could
URC semi-final: Nigel Carolan gives injury update on Huw Jones, Zander Fagerson and Jack Dempsey
The Monday Bulletin (2nd June): Scots on the move and Gatland gets a job
Now Managing Director of Lovat Mill (the ‘home of tweed’) in Hawick, Fleming’s active rugby involvement has been limited over the past seven years to a few fun hit-outs, including for the ‘Auld Stars’ invitational side put together by his old Scotland team-mates Scott Wight and Mark Robertson for last year’s Earlston Sevens, plus a bit of youth coaching most recently with his eldest son’s minis team.
He continues to follow the game closely, however, and noted with interest the recent news about the IRFU disbanding their international sevens programme just two-years after finishing second in the HSBC SVNS Series and Team GB downgrading theirs to essentially a part-time “camp and competition” model.
He was moved to post his thoughts on social media, stating: “Surely now makes sense to go back to home unions and make it a pathway (again). At least you have a base to start from with players who will at least come through system together. Really sorry state of affairs and sad to see on eve of Melrose Sevens. Be brave Scottish Rugby.”
Surely now makes sense to go back to home unions and make it a pathway (again). At least you have a base to start from with players who will at least come through system together. Really sorry state of affairs and sad to see on eve of @Melrose7s be brave @Scotlandteam https://t.co/De86xB2Uuc
— James Fleming (@FlemJames) May 23, 2025
When he takes time out his schedule to talk at more length about the issue, Fleming points out that the real body blow was suffered back in the summer of 2022 when it was announced that Scotland, England and Wales were to join forces as Team GB for the 2023 HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series onwards. This was apparently mandated by World Rugby so as to align the series with Olympic qualification requirements, but you couldn’t help but suspect that not too much resistance had been put up by the unions impacted – with Scottish Rugby having been frustrated in their plans to disband their sevens a programme a few years earlier (in 2015) after the scheme was leaked to the media and public outcry prompted a quick about turn.
It was clear at that time that this was a stay of execution rather than a reprieve, but Fleming and his team-mates did a pretty good job of making it difficult for Murrayfield to revisit the matter.
“They weren’t investing in it, they weren’t really looking to develop it, but it kind of galvanised us and we were lucky that we had this strong and committed core squad,” he recalls. “So, we had a really good 2015 then backed that into the 2016 season when we won the final tournament at Twickenham.
“And then the following year, we got to the final in Paris and then won back-to-back Twickenham tournaments, and people are thinking: ‘Here’s a Scotland Sevens team everyone can get behind after a bit of success’. And the guys at Murrayfield are thinking: ‘Oh, damn, we’d better keep this going for a bit longer’.
“I think that’s what’s happened with Ireland now. They’ve had a bit of success, but then they’ve pulled support, and luckily for the IRFU they’ve not done so well which means it’s easier to pull the plug, because there’s not quite as much noise being made around it.”
When Scotland were eventually jettisoned from the World Series three years ago, there was some chat about continuing with a watered down programme which would take in the Commonwealth Games, but sevens will not now feature at next summer’s event in Glasgow (which has been slimmed down for financial reasons) meaning the programme remains locked away in cold storage.
Meanwhile, the first GB7s cohort to compete in the World Series unveiled in September 2022 had six Scotland players in the 16-strong Men’s core squad (Robbie Fergusson as a player/coach, Kaleem Barreto, Jamie Farndale, Paddy Kelly, Ross McCann and Max McFarland), whereas there was only two Scots (Barreto and Matt Davidson)– in the 2024-25 core squad.
There was no Scots in the core Women’s squad back in 2022-23 while Shona Campbell‘s name was listed at the start of 2024-5, with the likes of Lisa Thomson and Rhona Lloyd having been involved during this period on hybrid contracts. Ciaran Beattie has been the programme lead [men’s and women’s] throughout the period.
So, as frustrating as it is for Barreto and Davidson to have the rug pulled away from under their feet, it is not going to really have an impact on the wider environment of Scottish rugby. And Fleming hopes that it might actually open the door to the prospect of doing something which can deliver worthwhile outcomes for the game in this country longer term, by going back to the future.
“When they first contracted players for Sevens back in 2011, I think we had three senior players and three elite development [academy] players each from Edinburgh and Glasgow Warriors, so there was 12 of us in total in the core squad with others dropping in and out,” he explains. “We’d do pre-season with the clubs, the first tournament was in October on the Gold Coast [in Australia] and from then on it was three weeks away and three weeks back home, right through until May when the series finished up at Murrayfield and then Twickenham. It was full-on but it was good fun.
“On my first trip away, we took James Johnstone who was just out of school and in the academy, we had Scotty Riddell who came away as a club guy, David Denton was still at Edinburgh Accies and had just signed for Edinburgh, and Fraser Harkness from Selkirk was there, so there was quite an amalgamation of pro guys plus really good senior club guys that had sevens experience. And we nearly got to the Cup quarter in our first tournament. Andrew Skeen hit the bar against South Africa in Dubai. Imagine beating in South Africa in the first tournament!
“For me, even though that was a thrown together squad of pros plus club guys, you had this core of people Jimmy [Johnstone], Dougie Fife and Michael Fedo, who were all under-20s guys that were taking their next step. And then there was guys like Denton whose skill-set really developed in that environment, and the next year he got his opportunity with Edinburgh and then ultimately Scotland.
“Team GB was never going to be able to do that because there wasn’t that nucleus of people there who knew each other and are on the same or a similar journey. You are just turning up in London and training for a few days then playing a tournament and going home.
“And because you had a core of boys who were in full-time training, if something happened at Edinburgh or Glasgow you immediately had a player who was fully conditioned with an appropriate skill-set who could just step in and do a job. With the best will in the world, Premiership guys are not in a position to do that.
“A great example of that is our original sevens training squad used to run against the national team because you had enough boys there who had all played fifteens, and actually one of the first times we ran against them we had Finn Russell at 10 as an academy player who’d been called in because he was in Scotland and available.
“We trained through at Ravenscraig at the time, and you’d get a phone call asking you to go and pick up this academy player who was going to get some game-time, or somebody who was on the periphery of the pro team or on their way back from injury, and they would link up with us and really benefit from that.
“So it was the whole ecosystem that the sevens helped create. Yes, we want to try and pinpoint who got a cap from the sevens and that’s what we get carried away talking about, but actually the core development across the board is a big part of it.”
It should be said that there are a fair few Scotland caps who did come through the sevens programme, notably Darcy Graham and George Horne who don’t fit the standard physical profile of a modern professional rugby player but were able to develop their game and prove themselves in the World Series. Hamish Watson, Kyle Rowe and Magnus Bradbury of the current Edinburgh, Glasgow and Scotland squads also had spells on the circuit, and there is several more.
Kyle Steyn was sent away with the sevens to prove himself after his arrival from South Africa in 2018, before being awarded a contract by Glasgow Warriors a few months later, so in this case it almost worked like a vetting process.
“We also have a British & Irish Lions coach who’s an ex-sevens coach in John Dalziel, the head coach at Treviso in Calum MacRae, the lead analyst at Edinburgh Rugby who was an intern analyst for the sevens in Cammy Mack, Mark Robertson as S&C coach at Edinburgh who is an ex-sevens player, Nick Lumley is ex-sevens S&C coach and went on and did a fantastic job at Edinburgh, Ally Little was head physio for the sevens and is now one of the physios for the Scottish national team, and Scott Riddell is now a talent pathway coach at the SRU, so you have this nucleus of other aspects of development as well,” points out Fleming.
John Dalziel, who had a spell coaching Scotland Sevens, will be part of the management team on this summer’s British & Irish Lions tour to Australia. Image: © Craig Watson – www.craigwatson.co.uk
The elephant in the room is, of course, the money issue. At a time when the sport is haemorrhaging cash globally and Scottish Rugby specifically is battling to bring back-to-back losses of over £10m per year back under control, the first instinct will be to run with the herd by focussing on the one-size-fits-all academy conveyer belt.
The price of running the Scotland Sevens programme has been cited at as much as £2m per year at its height in the mid-2010s, but it is impossible to say for certain whether that was the case given the lack of breakdown provided in Scottish Rugby’s annual accounts. Fleming doubts it was ever as much as that – estimating the player wage bill was as little as £350,000 after 2015 – and he also argues that much more could have been done to offset costs through proactive marketing of the Scottish brand.
“I’m lucky enough to now be in a position where I sell a Scottish product to the world, so I sell Scotland, and Scotland actually means a lot to people wherever you are in the world,” he says. “At its peak, there was 10 tournaments a year where you could take your Scottish brand, and everyone who doesn’t live in Scotland but has roots here is way more Scottish than we are, so you were in Hong Kong with a whole load of people behind you wanting you to do well. There was sponsors’ dinners, there was all sorts of vehicles there, and you could tell potential partners that we’ll be there on this week every year for the next five years. That’s a brilliant potential opportunity for sponsorship.
“I actually arranged a networking event in Singapore one year, which the SRU weren’t too happy about, and Ali Miller came home afterwards and pulled two business cards out of his pocket. One was from the owner of William Grant & Sons and the other one was from one of the partners at Unilever, one of the biggest companies in the world, and he’d just had conversations with them.
“How many times as a Union do we try and speak to these sorts of people? These guys were there because they wanted to speak to Scottish players and they would have supported something that was there.
“Obviously, as soon as went went to GB all that changed because what does GB people mean to these people? It doesn’t mean anything. So, there’s definitely the potential there as a really strong Scottish brand which I don’t think was fully accessed. You’re talking Hong Kong, you’re talking Singapore, you’re talking Dubai, so not commercial backwaters.
“In fairness, the SRU would put a bit of effort into Hong Kong because everyone goes there, but it never benefited the sevens programme. We’d be paraded with our polo shirts on to go and sign people’s autographs and all the rest of it, but the only recognition we were given was that we occasionally got into the BT box because BT sponsored us. I think one year we managed to sell two tickets on the down low which meant we could buy a speaker for the bus, but that’s the only money we made out of Hong Kong. ”
“I would have thought our wage bill, after they cut it all back in 2015, wouldn’t have been much more than £300,000 pounds for the full core squad. So, I would argue there is value for money there in terms of having that full-time environment, who you can help support the pro teams with, and who can be a route for players who aren’t necessarily ready or suited to the academy system, all for the same as you pay for a badly signed Kiwi prop or two.
“Everyone thinks sevens is fun. It’s relatable, its sellable, and in Scotland it is part of our history,” he adds. “My personal opinion is that sevens means so much more to Scottish rugby than it does to English rugby, [because] they’ve got plenty of professional players however they want to play around with it. Ireland is the same, they’ve got enough. And then Wales, they’ve got their own problems. But we don’t have a bottomless reservoir of players, so we need to think outside the box and this is a chance for us to step into that gap and get it right.
“Finance is important but it isn’t a dead cost because it is creating something which gives players extra time with a ball in their hand, and undoubtedly out of that you develop skills that improve the standard of rugby being played.”
Whatever happens next is not going to be straightforward. A lack of clarity on World Rugby’s strategy for sevens means the HSBC SVNS series faces an uncertain future, but Fleming is hopeful that Scottish Rugby Performance Director David Nucifora – a strong advocate for this branch of the game during his time working for the IRFU – can see the value it can add to the whole ecosystem if organised and managed properly.
World Rugby, the HSBC SVNS Series and why it isn’t working like it could