The cult of individual improvement

For the public-school-educated amateurs of the Rugby Football Union, it was the root of all evil. For the departing members of the Northern Union, as rugby league was originally called, it was what made the world go round.

The men who ran the Northern Union had earned their money not from inheritance or landowning but from industry and business, and 'their commitment to amateurism was further weakened by their general values', observed Eric Dunning and Kenneth Sheard in their Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players: A Sociological Study of the Development of Rugby Football. 'That is, they were more openly achievement-oriented and acquisitive, and showed a greater tendency to place money value on social relations and personal attributes.'

In 1904, nine years after splitting from its amateur cousin, rugby league changed its rules, making it possible for its players to be full-time employees of their clubs, which in turn were financially dependent on admission money paid by spectators. In effect, rugby league became a fully professional sport. It was by no means unique in this respect. Association football had been professional for almost twenty years, and prizefighters had been boxing for money since the eighteenth century. Yet the division of the two rugby codes symbolised a new age, one in which professional and amateur sports would coexist, not always easily but in a stable state that would endure for the next eighty years.