Key takeaways
- Under World Rugby's Law 8 a try is worth five points, a conversion two, and a penalty goal or dropped goal three each, so a kicker is the only player who converts position into points without a phase of play.
- The conversion is taken on a line through the place the try was awarded, parallel to the touchlines, which means where a try is finished determines how hard the kick that follows will be.
- Kicking reliability compounds across a long season. Plausible differences in conversion and penalty success rates over a 24-match campaign work out at a couple of points a match — the width of a close result.
- A reliable kicker also changes decisions rather than just totals, because the value of kicking at goal instead of to touch depends directly on how likely the kick is to succeed from that spot.
- Goal kicking is a specialist skill that cuts across forwards and backs, so it is a separate draft consideration from positional balance rather than a property of a position group.
- Depth at the role is the part most draft boards ignore. A squad rotated across 24 matches needs a second kicker, because reliability is worth nothing on a week the first choice is not playing.
A goal kicker is the only player in a rugby squad who turns field position into points without a phase of play. Every other route to the scoreboard requires the whole team to do something difficult under contact. A penalty goal requires one player, a tee and sixty seconds.
That is why kickers get mishandled on draft boards. Squad building is organised by position group, kicking is not a position, and a skill that belongs to nobody in particular tends to get picked up last — by which point the reliable ones are gone.
What the laws actually award
World Rugby's Law 8 sets the values: a try is five points, a conversion two, a penalty goal three, and a dropped goal three. For any goal to stand, the ball must be kicked over the crossbar and between the posts without first touching a team-mate or the ground.
Two procedural details in the same law matter more for squad building than they first appear.
The first is where a conversion happens. The kick is taken in the field of play on a line through the place where the try was awarded, parallel to the touchlines. The kicker chooses how far back to go along that line — trading distance for a better angle — but cannot step sideways. A try grounded in the corner produces a kick from near the touchline no matter how good the kicker is, which means the finisher's decision to work infield before grounding is itself worth points.
The second is the clock. The kick must be taken within sixty seconds of playing time from the award, even if the ball rolls over and has to be re-placed. Reliability in this role is reliability under a fixed, short, visible countdown, which is a different quality from accuracy in the abstract.
If the scoring framework itself is unfamiliar, how rugby scoring works covers it in full before any of the draft reasoning below applies.
The arithmetic over a season, not a match
A single missed conversion is forgettable. Twenty-four matches of them are not, and the arithmetic is worth doing explicitly because the intuition understates it.
The figures below are illustrative assumptions chosen to be unextreme, not measurements of anything — the point is the shape of the result rather than the numbers themselves. Take a squad that scores three tries a match across a 24-match season, so 72 tries, and assume half are awarded in central positions and half wide. Give it four kickable penalties a match, so 96 attempts.
A kicker who converts 85% of central conversions and 45% of wide ones lands 30.6 plus 16.2, or 46.8 conversions, worth 93.6 points. A less reliable kicker at 75% and 30% lands 27 plus 10.8, or 37.8 conversions, worth 75.6 points. That is an 18-point gap from conversions alone.
Now the penalties. At 80% the first kicker makes 76.8 of 96; at 65% the second makes 62.4. A difference of 14.4 successful kicks at three points each is 43.2 points.
Combined, that is roughly 61 points across the season, or about two and a half points per match. In a sport where the app's own scoring model includes draws, two and a half points is the difference between a drawn fixture and a won one, repeatedly, across a campaign — and it accrues without the squad playing any better.
Reliability changes decisions, not just totals
The subtler effect is that a dependable kicker alters which decisions are correct in the first place.
A recent analytical framework for rugby union penalty decisions models exactly this: whether to kick at goal or kick to touch, evaluated as an expected-points comparison between the value of a goal attempt and the value of a possession beginning with a lineout. The authors build decision maps showing which option maximises expected points from each field location, using an angle-distance model of kick success estimated from international records.
The implication for squad building is direct. The kick-at-goal branch of that decision is worth the success probability multiplied by three. Raise the probability and the branch becomes more attractive from further out and from tighter angles, which enlarges the region of the field where an opposition penalty is immediately expensive. A squad with a reliable kicker does not merely score more from the same decisions; it gets to make a different, more profitable set of decisions all season.
The reverse is also true and less often said. A weak kicker forces a side into the touch-and-lineout branch from positions where the goal attempt would have been correct, which means more phases, more contact and more exposure to turnovers — a compounding cost in a game where injuries and fatigue are modelled.
Why distance and angle behave differently
It is worth knowing what makes one kick harder than another, because "range" is usually treated as a single attribute and it is really two.
Biomechanical work on the rugby place kick found that the projection angle producing maximum distance is around 30 degrees rather than the 45 degrees basic projectile physics would predict, because the velocity a player can generate falls substantially as the projection angle rises. Skilled kickers, the study found, adopt angles close to that calculated optimum. Distance, in other words, is bought with technique rather than with effort, and it is the attribute most constrained by physiology.
Angle is a different problem. A kick from near the touchline has to cross the posts at a shallow line, so the margin for error in direction narrows even at short range. A kicker with long range and poor angle tolerance and a kicker with modest range and excellent angle tolerance are useful in different circumstances, and a draft board that collapses both into one number will mislead you.
Drafting for the role rather than for the player
24-0 Rugby Draft Pro League is our own app, built by Reign Creative, and the reason this article is framed around the draft rather than around kicking technique is a specific feature of how it is built: you draft forwards, backs, specialists and goal kickers from a pool of more than a thousand players, and that pool rotates so no two draft boards look the same.
A rotating pool makes name-based planning useless and role-based planning essential. You cannot decide in advance to take a particular kicker, because he may not be on the board. What you can decide in advance is that the squad will not leave the draft without the role filled, and at what point in the board you are willing to pay for it.
Three principles follow, and they hold regardless of which players appear.
Prefer kicking attached to a position you need. Goal kicking cuts across forwards and backs rather than belonging to either, which is exactly what makes it a separate consideration from positional balance — a distinction covered in forwards and backs as the two halves of a squad. A player who is both a starter on merit and reliable off the tee costs one squad place. A pure specialist costs one squad place and contributes in one phase.
Price it against the cap, not against the board. The GM season runs under a $200M in-game salary cap with trades, contracts, free agents and payroll to manage, so the real question is points per dollar rather than rank on a list. A mid-priced player whose kicking adds a couple of points a match is competing with whatever else that money buys, and the calculation above gives you a number to compare against.
Draft the second kicker before you need one. Rotation, depth, morale, confidence and job security all move with results across 24 matches, and the game's own description notes that a thin bench becomes a problem around week fifteen. Reliability you cannot select is worth nothing. The cheap version of this insurance is a squad member who can take the role rather than a second specialist, which costs nothing at the draft and saves a fixture later.
The wider squad-building problem — balancing the draft against the season that follows it — is covered in building a rugby squad that survives 24 matches, and the app's full feature list, including the simulator for testing a lineup before committing to it, is on the app page. Everything else in this vein sits under sports career and GM games.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
How many points does goal kicking actually account for?
Where is a conversion taken from?
Should I spend an early draft pick on a kicker?
Why does a squad need more than one goal kicker?
Sources
- Law 8: Scoring (opens in a new tab)World Rugby Passport — accessed
- Kicking for Goal or Touch? An Expected Points Framework for Penalty Decisions in Rugby Union (opens in a new tab)arXiv (preprint) — accessed
- Optimum Projection Angle for Attaining Maximum Distance in a Rugby Place Kick (opens in a new tab)Journal of Sports Science & Medicine (via PubMed Central) — accessed
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