Top 10 number eights in rugby: Springboks enforcer tops chart from All Blacks great and Ireland’s returning talisman
Top 10 number 8s in rugby
Planet Rugby have named the top 10 number eights in the world right now, and it’s a destructive Springbok who sits proudly at the summit.
Here are our top 10 number eights.
Top 10 number eights
10 Aaron Wainwright (Leicester Tigers, Wales): Wainwright has spent his career being the reason Wales stayed in matches rather than the reason they won them, which is the most thankless way there is to build a reputation. He is the athlete of the Welsh pack, quick over the first 10 metres, capable in the wide channels and rarely out of position, and he has been the most consistent forward in that side for the best part of five years.
The 2026 Six Nations numbers make the case better than any description can. He was second only to Ben Earl for carries with 67, and third in the Championship for metres through contact with 117, in a side whose possession figures were the worst in the competition. When Wales needed a phase and there was nothing on, Wainwright took it. He earned every one of those metres twice over.
He came to the game late, having been a footballer into his teens, which explains a running action that looks nothing like the rest of the position. It is a career built the hard way. Give him a pack going forward for a season and this ranking would still look conservative.
9 Cameron Hanekom (Bulls, South Africa): The most athletic forward South Africa have brought through in years, and the one who looks least like a traditional Springbok back-rower. Hanekom is quick, he is a genuine lineout option and he covers ground that heavier men in the position simply cannot.
He has arrived in a system that already had Jasper Wiese, Siya Kolisi and Pieter-Steph du Toit in it, which is a difficult room to be heard in, and he has been heard anyway. The Springbok back-row is the most competitive in world rugby and he has made himself part of the conversation in it. Against Argentina this month he carried 13 times for 82 metres and scored, and was one of the outstanding forwards on the field. This is no longer a projection.
8 Jack Dempsey (Glasgow Warriors, Scotland): Dempsey has been the difference in the Scotland back-row since he qualified, and Glasgow’s title was built on the sort of forward work he provides week after week. He is a heavy, direct carrier with more subtlety than the frame suggests, and he offloads out of contact better than most eights in the northern hemisphere. The 2026 numbers back it up: 136 carry metres and 11 defenders beaten in the Six Nations, then 56 metres and 25 tackles in his first two Nations Championship appearances.
He qualified for Scotland through his grandfather after 14 Australia appearances, arriving with a reputation for being talented but injury-prone, and has spent the seasons since being consistently available and consistently good. He led the tackle count in Glasgow’s 2024 URC final. Scotland now have a forward who guarantees them front-foot ball, which they did not have before him.
7 Jack Conan (Leinster, Ireland): Conan is the big-occasion forward. Two Lions tours, a Leinster career that has run through every kind of European night, and a habit of producing the best rugby of his season when the stakes are highest.
July settled the current-form question. He made 41 carries and 52 tackles on the tour, the fifth-highest tackle count in the competition, and scored twice. That is a man taking the difficult carry and then doing a flanker’s defensive shift on top of it.
Conan carries with a low body height and a heavy leg drive, he is one of the better ball-players at the back of a scrum in the game and he has an instinct for the phase before the try rather than the try itself. Ireland have not found a way to leave him out even in the seasons when they have tried.
6 Tom Willis (Bordeaux-Bègles, England): The other Willis, and no longer the one you have to explain. Tom has become the most reliable carrying eight in the Prem, and the move back to Saracens from Bordeaux gave him a platform he has not wasted; he was among the leading forwards in the league for carries and metres last season and he did it as the man opponents were set up to stop. The ball at the base is safe with him, he picks and goes with real intent off a retreating scrum, and he offloads out of contact more than his size suggests he should.
What keeps him here rather than higher is the Test record. He was the man dropped when England wanted Earl against France, he was hooked at 35 minutes against Scotland and he’s yet to impact on the Test stage. Nobody who rates him, and plenty do, can look at those two afternoons and put him above Earl above him on this list.
5 Joaquín Oviedo (Perpignan, Argentina): The form eight in world rugby over the last 12 months, and the one nobody outside France and Argentina had heard of two years ago. Oviedo has gone from a Perpignan squad player to the man the Pumas build their loose forward play around, and the rate of improvement is the most striking thing about him.
Across July he made 60 carries, 86 post-contact metres and beat 19 defenders, which is the workload of a man his side turns to whenever the ball needs moving forward and nothing is on. What has changed most is the decision-making. Two years ago he was a carrier who found contact; now he finds the right contact, and that distinction is worth about 20 places in a ranking like this one.
Argentina’s forward stocks are the best they have been in a generation and Oviedo is at the front of them.
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4 Ben Earl (Saracens, England): Earl has become the most relentless high-volume carrier in international rugby. The numbers keep saying the same thing: give England a difficult carry, and Earl takes it.
He led the 2026 Six Nations with 94 carries and went into the France match with 26 more than anybody else in the championship. England Rugby has him beyond 2,000 Test carry metres across his international career. In the Nations Championship, he and Oviedo were the only two players through 30 carries after the opening two rounds, which is the company he keeps.
That is a remarkable return for a man who is not the biggest eight in this list and does not play behind the most dominant pack in it. Earl is a shift worker. He takes the ball flat, goes at the shoulder rather than the chest, gets back to his feet quicker than the defence expects, and then he does it again on the next phase. And the one after that. And, above all his raw gas offers England a huge point of difference.
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The rest of the game has caught up with the carrying. He is a genuine jackal threat, his support lines are excellent and he has become one of England’s more reliable defenders in the wide channels. He can play seven as well and has done for England more than once, though eight is where the numbers say he belongs.
Top 3 number eights
3 Caelan Doris (Leinster, Ireland): On his day the best in the world, and third here only because the body of evidence this year is thinner than it should be. A Mayo man in a county that thinks about a different code entirely, he has spent his career being the most reliable forward on any field he walks onto.
The arithmetic is brutal. Shoulder surgery after Leinster’s Champions Cup semi-final defeat by Northampton in May 2025 cost him six months and the Lions tour to Australia. He came back off the bench against New Zealand in Chicago in November. He got through the 2026 Six Nations, then went off early in Leinster’s URC final win over the Bulls in June and was ruled out of Ireland’s entire Nations Championship tour with a foot injury. He has not played a Test since March.
Two full international windows gone in 15 months, and no Test rugby since March. That is the only thing keeping him off the top two.
None of that changes what he is. He remains the most technically complete eight in the northern hemisphere, equally good carrying into traffic and playing on the edge of a defence, and he reads a game like a back. Leinster and Ireland both look like different sides without him, which is the highest compliment available.
Give him a clean season and he will be at the top of this list rather than near it.
2 Ardie Savea (Moana Pasifika, New Zealand): Savea completes the skill set, and he does it in a shirt he has made his own after years of being told he was a seven. He is not the biggest eight in this 10 and it has never mattered. He carries into contact with a body height nobody else in the position can hold, he is almost impossible to stop cleanly once his legs are moving, and he scores tries at a rate no back-rower should.
Against the test this list sets, he is close to the perfect answer. Give Savea the ball when there is nothing on and he will manufacture something anyway, either through the tackle or out the back of it. Nobody in the game turns broken possession into front-foot ball more often.
And there is the cultural weight too. Ardie is the modern definition of New Zealand rugby, ferociously inventive with ball in hand, a monster in defence and a man who understands exactly what it means to be an All Black. The sensible approach is to pick him first and select the rest of the back-row around him.
1 Jasper Wiese (Urayasu D-Rocks, South Africa): Wiese is the tin opener. There is nothing complicated about it and he would not want there to be. He is enormous, he runs straight, he does not slow down before contact and he gets over the gainline against defences that know precisely what is coming and can do nothing about it.
Rugby runs in the family, with brother Cobus also a Springbok, and you get the strong impression the Sunday lunches were competitive.
That is the crude version. The real value is what it does to a game. South Africa play a territorial, pressure-based style that only functions if somebody can guarantee front-foot ball from the base, and Wiese guarantees it in a way no other forward in the world does with such consistency. Everything the Springboks are famous for rests on that foundation.
He is not the ball-player Conan is or the athlete Hanekom is. He does not need to be. He is the man you pick when you want the first 10 metres of every phase to belong to your side, and no team in the world has won more by owning those metres than this one.