Rugby Football

Rugby football started about 1845 at Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, England, although forms of football in which the ball was carried and tossed date to the Middle Ages.
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.[5] Rugby union turned professional one hundred years later, following the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa.

Rugby league football, commonly known as just rugby league and sometimes rugby, football, footy or league, is a full-contact sport played by two teams of thirteen players on a rectangular field measuring 68 m (74 yd) wide and 112–122 m (122–133 yd) long with H shaped posts at both ends.[1] It is one of the two codes of rugby football, the other being rugby union.[a] It originated in 1895 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England as the result of a split from the Rugby Football Union (RFU) over the issue of payments to players.

Rugby union, commonly known simply as rugby, is a close-contact team sport that originated at Rugby School in the first half of the 19th century. Rugby is simply based on running with the ball in hand. In its most common form, a game is played between two teams of 15 players each, using an oval-shaped ball on a rectangular field called a pitch. The field has H-shaped goalposts at both ends.

Rugby union is a popular sport around the world, played by people of all genders, ages and sizes. In 2014, there were more than 6 million people playing worldwide, of whom 2.36 million were registered players. World Rugby, previously called the International Rugby Football Board (IRFB) and the International Rugby Board (IRB), has been the governing body for rugby union since 1886, and currently has 101 countries as full members and 18 associate members.

Australian football, also called Australian rules football or Aussie rules,[2] or more simply football or footy, is a contact sport played between two teams of 18 players on an oval field, often a modified cricket ground. Points are scored by kicking the oval ball between the central goal posts (worth six points), or between a central and outer post (worth one point, otherwise known as a "behind").

During general play, players may position themselves anywhere on the field and use any part of their bodies to move the ball.

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Tony Collins is a British social historian specializing in the history of athletic sport. Professor
Collins is well accredited as he is an emeritus professor of history at De Montfort University, a
Research Fellow at the Institute of Sports Humanities, and in 2018 was a visiting professor at
Beijing Sports University. In 2020 Dr. Collins
His works on Rugby history include:
1999, his first book Rugby’s Great Split, which won the Aberdare Prize for Sports History Book
of the Year. The great Rugby Football expert also won this same Prestigious award for later
works such as:
Rugby League in Twentieth-Century Britain (2007),
A Social History of English Rugby Union (2010)
The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby (2016).
A Social History of English Rugby Union was also a winner of the 2015 'World in Union Book
Award' for the best academic book on rugby union
Other works to his credit are:
Sport in Capitalist Society (2013)
How Football Began: How the World’s Football Codes Were Born (2018).
To share much more about the sport, Dr. Collins launched a sports history podcast called Rugby
Reloaded looks at the history of rugby and the other football codes worldwide.

Here is the home of Tony Collin's complete archive of Rugby Reloaded podcasts. Learn all about the game of rugby football, both current and past, in one place, from one of the foremost experts on football history.