A radical plan by World Netball to increase opportunities at the elite level could see the Netball World Cup being hosted every two years instead of the current four-year gap between tournaments.

On Monday, UK based newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, reported the game’s powerbrokers of Netball New Zealand, Netball Australia and Netball England had partnered with World Netball to introduce a new competition, the Continental Cup, signaling the hope to grow the sport of netball and its commercial opportunities.

Vice president of World Netball, Shirley Hooper, however, told Newstalk ZB the idea was “very premature” and only a prospectus as part of the global event strategy had been released.

“We were essentially going out to market with a bunch of different ideas of things that we could do. We’re trying to build on the very successful 2023 Netball World Cup in South Africa, build on the burgeoning interest in women’s sport and identify partners, whether they be agencies and investors and the like that we can work with to grow the sport of netball and those ideas that were expressed in that story are some of the ideas that we are thinking about, but we haven’t resolved anything, we haven’t confirmed anything at all,” she said.

The Continental Cup was proposed to start next year with the top-ranked team from each of the five World Netball regions taking part – Asia, Oceania, Europe, America and Africa.

It would be repeated in 2026 in a one-off move and held every two years from that point with the World Cup also moving to a biennial event, rather than the current four years, following the Sydney 2027 tournament.

Some of the additional prospective changes reported by the Telegraph include the possibility for the Fast5 World Series to be held more regularly than once a year as well as an aligned global calendar.

Hooper said there were several discussions to have before anything was set in stone.

“There are so many things that we need to consider. So, what we want to do is to take the time to consider that and it’s not just the top three nations that come into play there. It’s all the other countries as well who are arguably a lot less resourced in terms of figuring out how we get there,” she said.

“I think if we’re honest, money can solve many problems and so it also comes down to the question of how much commercial funding is out there for what it is that we want to create. That’s the step we have to go through first before we can even start to finalize all those things,” she added.