Rating
92
Elite — top 1% of the field · Glicko-2 2512 ±76
Record
51-0-14
78.5% of 65 matches in the last five years
Average margin
+15.4
33.6 for, 18.1 against
Home advantage
+5.5
Points per match better at home
Attack
+28%
33.6 scored per match, against the placed field's average
Defence
+34%
18.1 conceded per match; positive is fewer than average
- Head coach
- Rassie Erasmus
- Captain
- Siya Kolisi
- Union
- SA Rugby
- Emblem
- Springbok
- First match
- South Africa 0–4 British Isles (Cape Town, South Africa; 30 July 1891)
- Most caps
- Eben Etzebeth (146)
- Leading scorer
- Percy Montgomery (893)
- Most tries
- Bryan Habana (67)
- World Cups
- 8, from 1995
- Best World Cup
- Champions (1995, 2007, 2019, 2023)
Anthem
National Anthem of South Africa
October 10, 1997 · 2:03
The words may still be in copyright — no death year could be established for the author — so they are not reproduced here.
Recording from nationalanthems.info, used under CC BY 4.0.
From Wikipedia, read 2026-10-19. Not an input to any forecast — the rating does not know who is coaching.
Australia2026-09-27 · away38–42lost
New Zealand2026-09-12 · home43–28won- New Zealand2026-09-05 · home29–24won
- New Zealand2026-08-29 · home33–26won
- New Zealand2026-08-22 · home16–33lost
Newest first, from South Africa's own point of view. Home and away are as the record stores them; a fixture the record does not mark neutral is listed as one side's home, which is right for a league round and wrong for a final played at a third ground.
Biggest win: 76-0 v Romania
Heaviest defeat: 16-33 v New Zealand
Elite — top 1% of the field
Box is the middle half of the ranked field, line is the median, dot is South Africa. The scale is this domain's own and does not compare across the two.
Teams that play alike sit close together. The two axes hold 72% of the variation between teams. Component 1 (42%) rises with more average margin and win rate. Component 2 (30%) rises with more high-scoring matches and margin swing.
29 of 66 teams sit too close together to name without covering another team's point, so they are drawn unlabelled. Every dot is still a link to that team, and hovering one names it.
- 1Ireland0.11
- 2Finland0.69
- 3Georgia0.74
- 4New Zealand1.18
- 5France1.26
Distance in the projection above, nearest first.