What Is the Difference Between Rugby Union and Rugby League?
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Rugby union and rugby league look alike for about ten seconds: an oval ball, a try line, a pack of large men. Then a tackle happens and the two sports part company. In union the tackle starts a contest for the ball. In league it ends one, and the game restarts on a count. That single difference, plus a dispute about money in a Huddersfield hotel in 1895, explains almost everything else that separates them.
The split of 1895
Rugby football was one game until the 1890s, governed from London by the Rugby Football Union, which held to strict amateurism. Its northern clubs, in the mill and mining towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, drew working-class players who lost wages when they played on Saturday afternoons, and the clubs wanted to compensate them for broken time. The RFU refused, and in August 1895 twenty-two northern clubs met at the George Hotel in Huddersfield and formed the Northern Union.
The new body paid its players and, over the next decade, changed the rules to make a faster, more open game for paying spectators: thirteen players instead of fifteen, and the play-the-ball instead of the ruck. Rugby union stayed amateur, officially at least, until 1995, a full century later. By then the two codes had separate histories, separate heartlands and separate international competitions.
What happens after a tackle
In union, a tackled player must release the ball, and players from both sides can compete for it on their feet in a ruck; if the tackled player stays up and is held, a maul forms and the ball is fought for standing. Possession can change at any tackle, so a team may keep the ball for twenty phases or lose it at the first. In league, the tackled player stands up and rolls the ball back with a foot to a teammate, the play-the-ball, and the defence retreats ten metres. The attacking side gets six tackles to score; after the sixth, possession passes to the other team, usually after a kick on the fifth.
That six-tackle set is the engine of league. It produces a rhythm of structured attacks and kicks, favours running and passing over contests for the ball, and keeps the game moving with fewer stoppages. Union's contested breakdown produces more variety and more risk, along with more whistle.
Set pieces
Union restarts play from the touchline with a lineout, in which the forwards form two lines and one team throws in while players are lifted to catch it, and restarts most infringements with a scrum in which eight forwards from each side bind and push for the ball. Both are real contests. League has no lineouts; the ball goes out and play restarts with a scrum or a tap. Its scrums involve six players a side and are barely contested, serving mainly to bring the forwards together and free space behind.
Union's set pieces are why it keeps fifteen players and why its forwards are so specialised: props built to push, locks tall enough to be lifted, hookers who throw in. League's thirteen are more uniform, since everyone tackles, runs and plays the ball.
The scoring
Both codes score tries by grounding the ball over the line, with a conversion kick to follow, and both allow penalty goals and drop goals, but the values differ and shape tactics:
- •Try: 5 points in union, 4 in league
- •Conversion: 2 points in both
- •Penalty goal: 3 points in union, 2 in league
- •Drop goal: 3 points in union, 1 in league
Where each is played
The two codes barely overlap on the map. Rugby union is the national game of New Zealand, Wales and, in effect, South Africa, and is strong in England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Australia, Argentina, Fiji and Japan; its World Cup is one of the largest sporting events on Earth. Rugby league dominates in the north of England, in the eastern states of Australia, where the National Rugby League is the biggest sport, and in Papua New Guinea, where it is the national game. Players do cross between the codes, and the switch is easier from league to union than the other way, because league's tackling and running transfer while union's set pieces take years to learn.
Since union went professional the two games have converged a little: union has borrowed league's defensive lines and fitness, and league's play-the-ball has slowly become more of a contest. The founding argument, though, was settled in 1995 when union finally agreed that players could be paid. It took a hundred years to concede the point the northern clubs made in the George Hotel.
The takeaway
Rugby union and rugby league split in 1895 over paying players and grew into different games: fifteen a side with contested rucks, scrums and lineouts, against thirteen a side with a six-tackle set and a play-the-ball. Tries, penalties and drop goals are worth different amounts, and the two codes hold different parts of the world, with union global and league concentrated in northern England and eastern Australia.