The threat from soccer to Welsh rugby union – in 1922 there were twenty-three professional soccer clubs in South Wales

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Indeed, it was only after pressure from Australia that cheap fifa 15 coins the Northern Union changed its name to the Rugby Football League in 1922.

Expansion was also made more difficult by the RFL’s deep-seated unwillingness to come into direct conflict with the rugby union authorities. At a 1910 exhibi- tion game in Plymouth J. W. Wood stressed that there were no intentions of fol- lowing it up with ‘active propaganda’ and in 1931 John Wilson reiterated this stance in relation to the crisis in French rugby union: ‘The Rugby League does not take the view that malcontents in the Rugby Union anywhere should be welcomed merely for the sake of it … the first step would have to be made by the French themselves.’ Although there was an element of dissimulation in this, it also reflected a deferential view that the game should do nothing to undermine its respectability or the limited social standing that it had gained for itself. If the RFL were seen to be poaching union clubs it would allow rugby union to portray it as an aggressive threat to the status quo, whereas in fact the RFL saw itself as very much part of the status quo in its own social sphere.

But, as was demonstrated by the move to Wembley, these attitudes were not always entirely uniform or consistent.The lure of national recognition was appeal- ing to ambitious clubs and the game itself attracted the interest of a number of commercial entrepreneurs in the 1920s and 1930s. South Wales in particular was the obvious region into which the game could expand. Not only was there a con- stant stream of Welsh players moving to the north but the relaxing of the rugby union’s ban on league players during the First World War meant that many in Wales saw what they were missing. The threat from soccer to Welsh rugby union – in 1922 there were twenty-three professional soccer clubs in South Wales, five of them in the Football League and Cardiff City, the most successful, finished second in Division One in 1924, reached the 1925 FA Cup Final and carried the cup home in 1927 – also gave Welsh union clubs cause for concern about the future.

Accordingly, the first moves to establish league in Wales after the war came not from the RFL but from inside Welsh rugby union itself. In December 1920 Thomas Rees of Ebbw Vale RFC wrote to the Northern Union asking for an assurance that his club ‘would be received into membership of the Union and League in the event of its members making a declaration in favour of the NU code’ and asking that his overture be kept secret. Not for the last time, the game’s leaders demonstrated their ability to never miss an opportunity to miss an oppor- tunity by telling Rees that they could not guarantee the confidentiality of his approach because they were obliged to inform their member clubs! Needless to say, that signalled the end of Ebbw Vale’s tentative courtship.