Fair to say the English Super League has seen better days.
Yet for all of its current turmoil, rugby league fans the world over will be forever indebted to the role its forefathers played in giving us the ‘greatest game of all’.
On this day 130 years ago—29 August 1895—a group of disgruntled English rugby union clubs met in the George Hotel in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, voting to break away from the resolutely amateur Rugby Football Union (RFU) in a long-running dispute over various issues including the delicate, and outlawed, matter of player compensation payments.
Collectively, 21 clubs formed the Northern Rugby Football Union that day and the first game followed shortly after on 7 September 1895.
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Within fifteen years of that inaugural meeting, hundreds of RFU clubs had left to join the ‘rugby league’ and the rest is history.
The rules of the game were gradually changed to create the rugby league we know today, with teams reduced from fifteen to thirteen players, line-outs abolished and rucks replaced with a play-the-ball after tackles.
1907, rugby league is born in Australia
More than 17,000 kilometres away, the pioneering New South Wales Rugby League was founded on 8 August 1907 with the first full season of rugby league in Australia taking place in Sydney in 1908 with nine clubs. (Club football started in Queensland a year later in 1909.)
At the end of that first 1908 season an Australian representative rugby league side even travelled to England.
Alas, for all its history, the tour was something of a disaster with the Australian side losing 22 of 45 matches on the field, while the organisers reportedly lost fistfuls of money off it.
In 1922, the Northern Rugby Football Union became officially known as the ‘Rugby Football League’, the name the English governing body continues to operate under today.
Happy birthday rugby league.