Swinton Lions

The Swinton Lions were created in 1866 by members of Swinton Cricket Club who decided that football was the sport to play in winter. In 1871 they joined up as members of the Rugby Football Union under the name Swinton and Pendlebury FC and played at the Station Road ground in their local town. The first game they played was against the team Eccles Standard. They then moved grounds from playing in a field at Station Road to the Stoneacre area and used the nearby White Lion public house as changing rooms. This is where the Lions part of the Swinton name comes from. The first rugby match under floodlights took place in Salford between Broughton Rangers and Swinton on October 22 1878. In 1886 Swinton were forced to change grounds once again to Chorley Road this time, and by this time they had become a strong side in rugby with a good reputation and commonly played against the likes of Oxford University. Initially the Swinton Lions were very reluctant to join the Northern Union when it was established due to the fact that most of the other teams in the region had done so causing Swinton to suffer a series of financial hardships. The Northern Union was later split into two county leagues and in 1900 they won the Challenge Cup in a victory against Salford at Fallowfield in Manchester. On Saturday 8th September 1906, Swinton hosted a Pontefract team who arrived with only 12 players. The Swinton Lions scored 18 tries in a club record 76-4 victory. This record would stand for ninety years but three months later when the Lions visited Pontefract they lost 5-0. In 1925 they took the Lancashire Cup and the next year the took the Challenge Cup once again.

The first team to win All Four Cup was Swinton, an accolade they are quite rightly very proud of, they were also the only team from Lancashire to ever achieve this feat. Swinton Lions has always featured a strong Welsh presence in the player line-up, and the 1927-1928 season saw the Swinton Lions have a stunning season under Hector Halsall. They ended up top of both the Championship and Lancashire League after defeating Wigan in the Lancashire Cup. In 1929 Swinton Lions moved to a new stadium back at Station Road and created a ground that quickly became a favoured location for major fixtures. In 1941-1952 Swinton left the Lancashire league due to the outbreak of the Second World War and did not come back to playing professional rugby until the 1945-1946 season.

Swinton took victory in the Rugby League Championship in 1962-1963 and the following year and the club made many star signings. When two divisions were reintroduced in 1973 Swinton were removed from the top flight and this seems to have affected their morale as the team have struggled to climb back up to be on top of their game ever since. In 1992 the team suffered at the hands of politics and financial worries and they had to sell Station Road, the team moved to Gigg Lane, the home of Bury FC. Unfortunately the club lost many supporters on the move. It was not until 1996 when Swinton took the "Lions" moniker and added it to their name. They then earned promotion from Division Two in the same year. The financial failure of major creditor and de facto owner Hugh Eaves in 2002 put the future of the club in jeopardy and they were forced to move to Moor Lane in Kersal to regroup. In May 2007, Swinton Lions went into administration for two days in order to restructure the club from top to bottom. A new company was set up to help sort out the clubs financial difficulties and extricate the team from the shareholding problems from the previous administration.