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Rugby 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]
Romania versus France at the Inter-Allied Games of 1919. Rugby football was introduced into France by the British in the early 1870s.. It was in 1872 that a group of British residents formed the Le Havre Athletique, [2] which played a hybrid form of football, a cross between rugby football and association football, called "combination".
William Webb Ellis (24 November 1806 – 24 February 1872) was an English Anglican clergyman who, by tradition, has been credited as the inventor of rugby football while a pupil at Rugby School. According to legend, Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it during a school football match in 1823, thus creating the "rugby" style of play.
Rugby football has strong claims to the world's first and oldest "football club": the Guy's Hospital Football Club, formed in London in 1843, by old boys from Rugby School. Around the English-speaking world , a number of other clubs formed to play games based on the Rugby School rules.
In 1845, the first laws were written by pupils at Rugby School; other significant events in the early development of rugby include the decision by Blackheath F.C. to leave The Football Association in 1863 and, in 1895, the split between rugby union and rugby league. Historically rugby union was an amateur sport, but in 1995 formal restrictions ...
World Rugby was founded as the International Rugby Football Board (IRFB) in 1886 by Scotland, Wales and Ireland, with England joining in 1890. [7] Australia, New Zealand and South Africa became full members in 1949. [7] France became a member in 1978 and a further 80 members joined from 1987 to 1999. [7]
1973 Bahamas Rugby Football Union [22] 1974 Arabian Gulf Rugby Football Union (founded as Gulf Rugby Football Union) — then an overseas member of the Rugby Football Union; became independent in 1990. Officially disbanded in 2011; to be replaced with separate national unions in each of its former member countries.
The history of rugby league as a separate form of rugby football goes back to 1895 in Huddersfield, West Riding of Yorkshire when the Northern Rugby Football Union broke away from England's established Rugby Football Union to administer its own separate competition. [3] Similar schisms occurred later in Australia and New Zealand in 1907.