Football match on the 1846 Shrove Tuesday in Kingston upon Thames, England
Rugby football is the collective name for the team sports of rugby union or rugby league.
Rugby football started at Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, England,[1] where the rules were first codified in 1845.[2] Forms of football in which the ball was carried and tossed date to the Middle Ages (see medieval football).[3] Rugby football spread to other English public schools in the 19th century and across the British Empire as former pupils continued to play it.
Rugby football split into two codes in 1895, when twenty-one clubs from the North of England left the Rugby Football Union to form the Northern Rugby Football Union (renamed the Rugby Football League in 1922) at the George Hotel, Huddersfield, over payments to players who took time off work to play ("broken-time payments"), thus making rugby league the first code to turn professional and pay players.[4] Rugby union turned professional one hundred years later, following the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa.[5][6] The respective world governing bodies are World Rugby (rugby union) and the International Rugby League (rugby league).[7]
Canadian football and, to a lesser extent, American football were once considered forms of rugby football, but are seldom now referred to as such. The governing body of Canadian football, Football Canada, was known as the Canadian Rugby Union as late as 1967, more than fifty years after the sport parted ways with rugby rules.[8][9][10]
^"200th Anniversary – Rugby School". rugbyschool.co.uk. Retrieved 8 September 2023.
^Trueman, Nigel. "History of the Laws of Rugby Football". rugbyfootballhistory.com. Retrieved 8 September 2023.
^"Rugby Football History". rugbyfootballhistory.com. Archived from the original on 15 April 2020. Retrieved 19 June 2013.
^"Rugby Football History". rugbyfootballhistory.com. Archived from the original on 1 December 2014. Retrieved 30 November 2018.
^"Broken Time -review". The Guardian. 2 October 2011. Archived from the original on 14 April 2019. Retrieved 14 April 2019.
^"27 August 1995:Rugby Union turns professional". MoneyWeek. 27 August 2015. Archived from the original on 14 April 2019. Retrieved 14 April 2019.
^Williams, Richard (15 January 2019). "Jonathan Davies: 30 years on from the day he switched to Rugby league". BBC Sport.
^"The Rugby World Cup: Second Only to the Soccer World Cup in Attendance [Infographic]". Forbes. 18 September 2015. Archived from the original on 14 April 2019. Retrieved 14 April 2019.
^"Rugby League World Cup:Will World Cup joy finally come for Sam Burgess?". BBC Sport. 30 November 2017. Archived from the original on 14 April 2019. Retrieved 14 April 2019.
^"The Other (and Less Popular) Rugby World Cup Gets Underway". The New York Times. 27 October 2017. Archived from the original on 14 April 2019. Retrieved 14 April 2019.
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Test match (indoor cricket) Test match (rugby union) Test match (rugby league) Test match (association football) Test match (netball) Test Match (board...
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