Sevens is one of the most well distributed forms of rugby, and is popular in parts of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and especially in the South Pacific.

Many sevens tournaments have a competition for a cup, a plate, a bowl, and a shield, allowing many teams of different standards to avoid leaving empty-handed.

There are several variations in laws which apply to rugby sevens,[10][11] primarily to speed up the game and to account for the reduced number of players.

[19] At Loretto School in Musselburgh, Scotland, the then headmaster Hely Hutchinson Almond got the schoolboys to play short-sided matches in the 1860s and 1870s.

Almond stated that he: urged on his boys in the sixties that if only they would pass constantly and systematically to each other, they would baffle any side unaccustomed to such tactics.

Matches attracted large crowds and raised thousands to support the clubs or local hospital charities.

The Rainford Athletics Club hosted a Sports Day on 7 August 1888 with a 3 team rugby sevens tournament, but this was a one-off and not repeated.

English clubs, particularly those close to the Scottish border and aware of the game's success in Scotland, wanted to play their own tournaments.

[30] Invitation sides graced the Sevens tournament:- such as Sale RFC in 1936, which included such players as Wilf Wooller and Claude Davey of Wales and Ken Fyfe[37] of Scotland amongst their backs; and in 1939, Cardiff RFC, which included players such as Wilf Wooller again, and Les Spence and Wendy Davis.

The Dalhousie side unsurprisingly won the match; with the newspaper report seeming to blame Chamba's native players for the loss, a sad reflection of the times.

The Buenos Aires club went on to host Sevens tournaments on 9 July every year; however a pitch-invasion tradition at the final meant that no further winners were recorded until 1937.

Founded largely by expats such as "Tokkie" Smith, the Hong Kong Sevens were ahead of their time and an influential force in the modernisation of rugby union.

By 1986, the Hong Kong Sevens were held up as a positive example to others, although many of the smaller nations' teams were largely made up of expatriates.

[49] In honour of the role of Melrose RFC in the creation of rugby sevens, the club was inducted, along with Haig, to the IRB Hall of Fame in 2008.

[52] Rugby sevens has become popular in places such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai, which are not so successful in the fifteen-a-side code.

In addition, seven of the 15 current "core teams" that compete in all legs of the World Series represent nations that are not within the recognised top tier of the 15-man game – Fiji, Samoa, Kenya, the United States, Canada, Portugal, and Japan.

The world record rugby league crowd for sevens was 80,000 in Roundhay Park, Leeds, 1932, before a royal audience.

World Rugby announced it will fully combine the men’s and women’s tours aligning with the Olympic competition model, with both taking place on the same weekends in the same cities and venues starting in December 2023 in Dubai and will conclude in Madrid in June 2024.

World Rugby chief executive Mike Miller endorsed the concept of a combined British sevens team in 2011 for the 2016 Olympics and beyond.

[59][60] In the men's competition Fiji won the gold medal in the sport's Olympic debut, with Great Britain taking the silver and South Africa the bronze.

The New Zealand team has won the gold medal four times with South Africa winning the tournament at Glasgow 2014 beating the defending champions in the final.

[64] The Rugby Europe Sevens Grand Prix Series serves as a regional qualifier for two types of tournaments.

The Europe Grand Prix also serves as a regional qualifier for major quadrennial tournaments, such as the summer Olympics and the Rugby World Cup Sevens.

In the Grand Prix Series era from 2011 to the present, the champions became England and France; both teams won the trophy twice in a row.

[65] The league began play in 2021 and has been scheduled opposite to the World Rugby Sevens Series in order to feature top American and other international caliber players.

The United States won the Hong Kong Sevens in 2008 by defeating Canada in the final (New Zealand failed to send a team).

England defeated Canada 12–0 in the Bowl final while Australia edged New Zealand 15–10 in extra-time to become the first to win the Women's Rugby World Cup.

Former Wales rugby union player and current pundit John Taylor wrote in 2010, stating: [Sevens] is in danger of becoming a totally separate game.

Many international players refined their game on the Sevens circuit including all-time greats such as Jonah Lomu.

In Sevens that is not required and new training regimes are making body fat levels even lower so they are not able to transfer from one game to the other.