Rugby League and Union - amateurchampionship.com

The team sport which has had the greatest problems with shamateurism is probably rugby union. At one time rugby had been popular with both the middle and working classes in England yet working class players found it hard to play away games or to cope with injuries. 'Boot money' had long been paid to certain players to help them cope with expenses. The struggle between clubs that supported 'broken time payments' and those that supported a stricter interpretation of amateurism came to a head in 1895 when clubs from the North of England broke away to form the Northern Rugby Union (later known as the Rugby Football League), whose rules eventually diverged from the RFU's, forming the sport now known as rugby league. Rugby league stayed an amateur sport for 3 years following the great schism with the exception of allowing payment for missing work through playing commitments or injury, after this they allowed players to be paid for playing as long as they had a regular job. Full-time professionalism did not come into rugby league until much later and amateurism continued in the form of the British Amateur Rugby League Association.

Rugby union was to officially remain an amateur sport for the next 100 years. This was occasionally strictly enforced as in the famous case of Jock Wemyss who in 1920 was told that he could not be given a Scotland shirt for his second cap since they had given him one six years earlier. In 1931 France was even expelled from the Five Nations Championship following allegations that their domestic league was in fact professional, but without any noticeable changes they were allowed to rejoin just before World War II.

The union authorities placed severe sanctions on associations with rugby league. Even playing an amateur game was sufficient to receive a ban from the sport. In one incident in the early 1900s a union team from Huddersfield played a charity match against a local league side; all the players were subsequently banned for being "professionalised". Union players who actually went to play professional league were routinely banned for life from even attending rugby union matches as supporters. In 1959 Michael Jopling, the Conservative candidate for election in Wakefield was invited to kick off one half of a Wakefield Trinity home match. He was later informed by his local rugby union club that he had "professionalised" himself and that he was no longer welcome at the club.

Payment for expenses was often permitted however. The "amateur" 1908 Australian rugby union tourists to Britain received payment of 21 shillings a week, more than twice the payment for players on the following season's "professional" Great Britain rugby league tour of Australasia.

By the 1980s and 1990s there were mounting allegations that the top players were in fact making a living from the game. The Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport of the British House of Commons observed:

"The absorption of professionalism into Rugby Union in the Northern Hemisphere was dictated by the reality of shamateurism at the highest levels of the game, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, where the pretence of amateur status had become severely undermined and unsustainable."

"Although Rugby Union had been ostensibly amateur since its birth, the regulations prohibiting professionalism were not, in practice, enforced. Governing bodies "turned a blind eye" to breaches of the regulations."

With the advent of the World Cup and the Tri Nations, rugby union had become a big TV ratings draw and there were rumours of a Rupert Murdoch-financed breakaway professional league much as had already happened in Australian rugby league. Finally in 1995 the International Rugby Board decided to open the sport to professionals following the World Cup.