The Australian Rugby Championship, often abbreviated to the ARC (also known as the Mazda Australian Rugby Championship or the Mazda Championship for sponsorship reasons), was a domestic Rugby union football club competition in Australia which ran for only one season in August–October 2007. The competition, similar to New Zealand's ITM Cup and South Africa's Currie Cup, aimed to bridge the gap between existing club rugby and the international Super Rugby competition then known as Super 14. The ARC involved eight teams: two from Queensland, three from New South Wales and one each from Australian Capital Territory, Western Australia and Victoria.
From its inception the ARC divided many in Australian rugby, with arguments over the structure and format of the competition and concerns that the creation of arbitrary state-based teams undermined the strong club competitions in Sydney and Brisbane. On 18 December 2007, the Australian Rugby Union (ARU) announced that the ARC would be scrapped due to financial losses of A$4.7 million (US$4.0 million, € 2.8 million, £2.0 million).
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