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Players picked for the 2025 British and Irish Lions will be available for the whole tour of Australia thanks to a new partnership with Premiership Rugby and the United Rugby Championship.<\/span><\/p>\n Players involved in knock-out stages of club competitions – like Saracens’ Jamie George in 2021 – have missed the start of recent tours.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But they will now able able to take part in all pre-tour activities.<\/span><\/p>\n Lions chair Ieuan Evans celebrated the “unity” underpinning the agreement.<\/span><\/p>\n He added that the tour will now be able to “showcase the best of what our game has to offer”.<\/span><\/p>\n “To achieve our ambition of success on the pitch, we need our very best players, and this partnership is crucial to this,” Evans added.<\/span><\/p>\n The Lions’ last Test series win came in Australia in 2013, before a drawn series in New Zealand in 2017 and a loss to South Africa in 2021.<\/span><\/p>\n The deal comes after several players from the Premiership – the top flight in English rugby – were unavailable in 2021 when a warm-up Test against Japan clashed with the Premiership final, which took place on the same day the tour began.<\/span><\/p>\n Earlier this year, the opening three weeks of the Premiership coincided with the knock-out stages of the World Cup.<\/span><\/p>\n