What makes watching sports great are the narratives.
It’s why we watch the matches, the tournaments, the meets, the Game 7s and the rest. Without a narrative, whether it’s a big or small one, it’s just another sporting event.
And what’s great about sports narratives is they change, oftentimes doing 180-degree turns on a dime. No narrative is really set in stone in sports, because there is always another season, another match and another opportunity. Until it ends by retirement, firing or contracts ending.
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The best examples in professional sports I can think of in America are the Cincinnati Reds of the 1970s in Major League Baseball and John Elway in the National Football League.
The Reds weren’t “The Big Red Machine” until 1975, after five years of being World Series favorites but losing in the World Series and in the National League Pennant. They couldn’t beat the Mets. They couldn’t beat Baltimore. They struggled against the Dodgers.
Until they didn’t.
Now few remember the 1973 National League Championship Series debacle. They just remember Carlton Fisk’s meaningless home run and the two World Series titles in 1975 and 1976.
Elway was the most talented quarterback of his era, sorry Dan Marino, but he was always second to Joe Montana. Elway lost, very ugly, in the Super Bowl multiple times. His career was marked by big-game disappointments. It wasn’t the Super Bowl, but the 1996 NFL playoff defeat to the Jacksonville Jaguars was one of the biggest upset losses in league history.
Then he won back-to-back Super Bowls and retired, and few talk about his mixed playoff record.
It’s what Leinster Rugby hopes to do when they face the defending European champions, Union Bordeaux-Bègles, in the 2026 Investec Champions Cup this week.
Leinster Rugby Can Change The Irish Vibe In The Investec Champions Cup Final
When Leinster takes the field in Bilbao, Spain, at 9:45 a.m. ET on May 23 — a match streaming on FloRugby and the FloSports app — they’ll do so as a rare underdog in a match they have famously lost three times this decade. In fact, dating back to 2019, they’ve lost this match four straight times.
Stuck with four stars on the jersey — the four stars that signify previous European championships — Leinster usually enters this match as the favorite. They were both times they lost leads against La Rochelle in 2022 and 2023. They were favorites, by some, when they lost to Toulouse, whom they were trying to tie for the most European titles, in 2024.
But the worst loss was in 2025, and it didn’t even happen in the Final. Leinster may have assembled the best professional rugby club ever that season when they welcomed All Blacks superstar Jordie Barrett and RG Snyman of South Africa via rival Munster to the roster.
They tore through the URC, ripped apart the ICC pool and suffocated teams with defense until the Champions Cup semifinals.
Then it was over after 80 minutes against Northampton.
The United Rugby Championship they won a few weeks later was a triumph. But the season felt incomplete.
This year’s Leinster team hasn’t been as good as that squad. Barrett is back in the Pacific. The stars of 2022, 2023 and 2024 are older. But here they are, facing a Bordeaux team that not only won the title last year, but hasn’t lost a Champions Cup match since April 13, 2024.
(Leinster, for what it’s worth, hasn’t lost in the ICC this year.)
Bordeaux employs the next great rugby star, and perhaps the best of this rising generation, in Louis Bielle-Biarrey. He won’t even turn 23 until next month and has already been the best player in a Champions Cup Final and Six Nations tournament. They have one of the best players of the previous generation, Damian Penaud, and they have, in total, six players on the FloRugby Top 100.
Leinster has 13. It’s why the narrative exists.
Leinster, who is the No. 1 club in the world according to our rankings, beating UBB this year probably wouldn’t end the ongoing Irish rugby narrative that looms over Leinster. Only Andy Farrell and the national team can do that in 2027. But snapping this big-match losing vibe would break the ice and could be the first step in a new narrative for Leinster and Irish rugby.
Winning a Champions Cup this year won’t erase the past failures for this Leinster core of James Lowe, Andrew Porter, Jamison Gibson-Park and Caelan Doris. But those loses will be pushed down the page in the history books if Leinster can win just one title against Bordeaux in the shadow of France.
Investec Champions Cup Final
Saturday, May 23
EPCR Challenge Cup Final
Friday, May 22
How To Watch Rugby Matches In The United States On FloRugby
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