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Rugby League
Rugby league has been played for many years and can trace its roots back the formation of the Northern Football Union in 1895. Although the sport of rugby had been played prior to this date the development of league rules only occured after the RFU decided to enforce the amateur principle of the sport preventing broken time payments to players who had taken time off work to play rugby. Since the Northern based teams usually had far more working class players hailing from the coal mines and the mills who couldn't play without this compensation, whilst Southern team players usually had secondary forms of income and it was more of a middle class game the Northern Football Union was created to protect the rights of Northern players. This moment defined the future of rugby league and since then the rules have been steadily redefined to seperate it from Union.
The United Kingdom was not the only country in which rugby league was played, many other countries felt similarly to the British with regards to the broken time payments, and the straw that broke the camels back and actually forced the foundation of the NFU was an 1895 decree by the RFU that banned the playing of rugby at grounds where the entrance fees were charged led to twenty-one clubs meeting at the George Hotel in Huddersfield and forming the Northern Union. Within fifteen years more than two-hundred clubs had joined and began to play using rugby league rules.
Rugby league is played in more than thirty countries worldwide, and although the league version of the game is commonly seen as a Northern sport in the UK it has began to spread to the South. It is also very common in Australia and New Zealand, and Australia play it as a winter sport. It is also popular in France and rugby league is the national sport of Papua New Guinea. Australia has taken rugby league victory in every world cup since 1975, and it was not until 2005 when they lost their first international tournament against new Zealand in the 2005 Tri-Nations in Leeds. Rugby league is also expanding slowly into Europe with other countries joining France in the league version of the game and getting involved with the sport, including Georgia, the Netherlands, Germany, Estonia, Serbia, Argentina, and Malta.
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