What Is the Difference Between Rugby Union and Rugby League?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Both codes share an origin story. According to legend, in 1823 a pupil at Rugby School in Warwickshire called William Webb Ellis caught the ball during a game of football and, instead of kicking it, ran with it in his hands, inventing the handling game. A plaque at the school repeats the tale, and the trophy awarded at the Rugby Union World Cup is named after him. The story is charming, and it gives the sport a single founding moment that is easy to celebrate.

Historians are sceptical. The only source is a recollection published more than fifty years later by a former pupil who had left the school before the event supposedly happened and had not seen it himself, and it appeared at a time when former pupils were keen to claim the game for Rugby. Football at English public schools varied widely, and carrying the ball seems to have developed gradually. What is solid is that pupils at Rugby School wrote down their rules in 1845, and that the Rugby Football Union was founded in 1871, giving the game the shared rulebook that the 1895 split later divided.

In early rugby, grounding the ball over the line scored nothing by itself. It earned the attacking side the right to try a kick at goal, which is where the name comes from, and matches were decided by the number of goals kicked. Only when goals were level did tries come into the reckoning, and even then not everywhere. As the game spread, clubs needed a fairer way to settle results, and points systems were introduced in the 1880s and 1890s, at first valuing a try below a goal, since it was still seen mainly as a chance to kick one.

Over the following century both codes moved in the same direction, making the try worth more relative to kicks in order to reward attacking play. In union a try was worth one point in the early scoring systems, three from the 1890s, four from 1971 and five from 1992. League, which kept a three-point try after the split, raised it to four in 1983, and in the early 1970s cut its drop goal from two points to one. The values in the table above are only the latest settlement of a long argument over how much running with the ball should count for compared with kicking it.

Alongside the two main codes, rugby union has a much shorter, faster variant played by seven players a side on a full-size pitch, with halves of only seven minutes. It began in 1883 in Melrose in the Scottish Borders, reportedly as a fundraising tournament, and the small numbers on a large field leave so much space that games are dominated by speed and evasion.

Sevens became the format through which rugby returned to the Olympic Games in 2016, after an absence of more than ninety years, with both men's and women's tournaments. Its short matches suit festival-style events where many games are played in a single weekend. Many players who start in sevens move to the fifteen-a-side game, and the two now share players, coaches and rules.

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.