The Persecuted Game

Hands up if anyone has ever said to you ‘rugby league is a small sport played in the north of England and a couple of Australian states’. Hands up if you ever come across someone derisively aiming this at rugby league? I imagine that most of us have.

Our sport is 125 years old this year and most of us would love the sport to have a greater geographic footprint, both nationally and internationally. These strange times have made us value the things that we have.

You may have seen our blog the other week looking at our values and history and how they remain relevant to this day. If you have not seen it, check it out here!

When researching for that blog, I learned a lot more about our sport’s distinguished past. For example, I was aware that several northern-based clubs broke away from the rugby union to form the Northern Union in 1895 (later becoming rugby league). What I did not know is that the origins of the dispute that led to the split.

I did not know that the northern-based rugby union players were forbidden from earning a wage, limiting their ability to train and pay for medical treatment should they be injured. The northern players were men who could ill-afford time off work for such purposes. Meanwhile, their comparatively richer southern-based counterparts were better placed.

I did not know that Huddersfield were banned from rugby union for compensating players for missing work, meanwhile later the RFU did allow southern-based players to receive such compensation. Some of the Huddersfield men even received criminal convictions for their apparent 'crimes'.

From our very origins, the sport has been persecuted. This is not a complaint. It is a statement of fact. It is also a sad statement of fact that for 125 years, wherever rugby league has gone, the persecution followed.

To give just a handful of examples, national Governments have banned the sport, seized its assets and even banned the sport calling itself “rugby”. 

From Greece to Japan, from Italy to Serbia, from Canada to Morocco, the sport has been shut down and crushed at one point or another by the establishment. And then this has all been whitewashed.

The Canadian Rugby Union authorities have a detailed history on their website, which makes for a nice read. What they fail to mention is that their sport's governing body shut down rugby league when it started to make inroads in the early 1900's. I wonder why?

This is not just relics from a bygone era. This persecution continues to the modern era. Let’s turn to Italy. They competed in their first Rugby League World Cup in 2013 and made a good fist of it. They even defeated a strong England side in a warm-up match. 

It may therefore come as a surprise that rugby league was not recognised as a sport in the nation until 2015. This arose from the 1960’s when any rugby union player who was ‘caught’ playing rugby league received a lifetime ban.

Speaking of 2013, a Great Britain amateur side toured Morocco for a four-game tour. That is quite unremarkable, right? An amateur side going to another country to play a few games is as inoffensive as it gets, or so you would think. Only one of the planned four games was played.

The second match was called off just one hour before kick-off due to outside interference of the rugby union authorities. The one game that did go ahead only did so following an intervention of the president of the local rugby league club, who happened to have contacts ‘in the right places’.

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What comes to mind if we were to ask the following question?



Our answer might not be what you think…Greece’s qualification for the 2021 World Cup. In keeping with the theme of this blog, this was in the face of yet more animosity and persecution. At a recent domestic match, the game was halted by police. The apparent crime? Playing rugby league.

The police did allow the match to finish, although after the match club officials were taken to the local police station and questioned. Even at an international level, one of Greece’s 2021 World Cup qualifiers had to played at a secret location at midnight to escape the attention of authorities.

Such stories should be the exception. However, in rugby league they seem to be the rule. And this has been the rule for 125 years. This is probably why the UK Government’s loan to support rugby league through the Coronavirus pandemic was such a surprise. It is one of the first times that we have been given a helping hand, instead of being kicked whilst we are down.

The stories of persecution in this blog are only a very brief snapshot of the hardship we have faced without reason or justification. If it were to be dealt with in detail, you would need to write a series of books rather than a relatively short blog.

The obvious question which comes to mind is why has our sport suffered in this way? Would it be cynical to suggest it is because we want to play sport that is primarily enjoyed by the working classes?

In the face of such persecution, rugby league should have been dead before it even had a chance to draw its first breath. Instead, we are due to host a 16-team World Cup next year. We have an international federation comprising of 54 members (including observers and affiliate members) with several proposed members with applications pending.

Our sport has been played at some of the world’s most famous stadiums, broadcast around the world by national broadcasters and continues to be played at a professional level. We may not be the biggest sport in the world but the fact that we are indeed a sport at all, is due to those who put their heart and soul into it, often at the risk to their own personal wellbeing.

We may not be the biggest, the richest, the most powerful sport in the world. Yet given the open hostility and persecution that our sport has faced throughout its history, the fact that we have a game of any description is a wonderful achievement.

In all likelihood, the hostility that has plagued our sport throughout its history will persist. We will always be the underdog; we will always face attempts to undermine us and even wipe us out. Some things will never change. But the rebel spirit that was born when the pioneers of the sport broke away to form the Northern Union in 1895 lives on and needs to thrive if we are to grow.

It is a story that is scarcely told but needs to be told. We are fiercely proud of our sport and it is incumbent on us all not to undersell the history of the sport, but take pride in our commitment, our underdog spirit and keep the flag flying through these uncertain times and beyond.

So next time anyone sneeringly states that ‘rugby league is a small sport played in the north of England and a couple of Australian states’, then send them a link to this blog. Most rational minded people would be uncomfortable hearing about the disproportionate resource used to kill rugby league. And embarrassingly, the so-called small sport fought back and would simply not die.

If we have survived against the odds before, we’re not going to let a pandemic stop us, are we?