In a league of their own - but for how long?

Will the World Cup, which starts tomorrow, be Rugby League's last celebration before commercialism rips the sport from its community base? Laura Thompson reports

In 1895, 22 clubs in the Rugby Football Union broke free of the constraints of amateurism, to form what was then called the Northern Union. At first, this new league was compelled by simple need: the need of its players to be paid for lost earnings. Soon, however, it came to symbolise a whole ethos which now, 100 years after it was forced into being, may be under threat.

As a southerner who fell in love with the sport only five years ago, I do not belong to the world of Rugby League, but my respect for it is absolute. The origins of the sport are still wholly apparent, and they infuse it with a kind of dignity, warmth and meaning that no other sport seems to have.

Traditionally, Rugby League players were men who lived and worked within their club's community. They transcended its limitations - those of a dour, industrial northern town - but they remained essentially part of it. Today, players in a team like Wigan - acknowledged, even by the dominant Australians, to be the best club side in the world - are rather glamorous young men with wage packets that could buy up whole streets around their team ground. Yet they still have this extraordinary relationship with a community from which their money and status should, in the normal way of things, remove them.

When you attend a Rugby League game, it feels as if the players, the club, the supporters and the town all belong to each other. You hear little girls, propped happily between both their parents, shouting: "Get 'im down, Shaun! Off side!" You see old ladies in wheelchairs, sitting at the edge of the pitch, receiving embraces from sweaty players at the end of the game. You find impeccable middle-aged women with team scarves looped around their suits.

They are there not because it is fashionable or because television has sold it to them, but because there is nowhere that they would rather be. Although huge amounts of emotion are being created and expended there is, on the whole, no aggression. Men who attend Rugby League games seem to feel none of the frustration that goes with football, which so rarely gives its fans the ineffable joy that they crave. With Rugby League, even if your team loses, you have still received what you came for: that sense of communion.

There may be some southern sentimentalism in this view of the sport. Certainly, its average supporter doesn't think about it in this way - to him or her, Rugby League just is. And that, above all, is what I envy. When I go to the final of the sport's most prestigious event, the Challenge Cup, and walk up Wembley Way on a late spring afternoon amid the waving scarves, the good-humoured chants, I always think of what we self-conscious southerners are missing, with our choked inability to give ourselves to an event in this way. As the Challenge Cup crowd sings Abide with Me before the start of the game, a part of me is too embarrassed to do more than mouth the words. Another, better part is inexpressibly moved.

All this would signify far less were it not for the fact that Rugby League is a truly great sport. The impartial observer would, I think, have to admit that it creates a better spectacle than Union; and this, too, is connected to its origins. Because League was a professional game, it had to please crowds as wall as players. Changes were therefore made to increase its speed, flow and excitement. The number of players was reduced from 15 to 13; line-outs were abandoned; scrums became perfunctory, a means of restarting the game rather than, as in Union, embroiling it in murky longueurs.

Whereas Union frees itself all too rarely from the constraints of scrum, kick to touch, referee's whistle, League somehow thrives on the tension between darting run and daunting tackle. It instils in the spectator that sense of panicky hope which is vital to good sport.

But what really compels is the vestigial sense of necessity that seems still to possess its players. They may be removed from the days when winning the game meant more food on the table, yet they retain an air of hard, unquestioning purpose. By comparison, Union boys can look vaguely dilettante, as if they had a choice about whether or not to sustain a cauliflower ear. For all their undoubted toughness, there are few Union boys who make you feel, as Wigan captain Shaun Edwards does, that he would carry on playing if he were bleeding on the inside, not just the outside. When Edwards's jaw was broken during a Challenge Cup final against Warrington, Wigan supporters were proud but unsurprised that he played on.

Like most things, Rugby League has made some imagistic changes to itself over the past few years. The point of these has always been to widen the appeal of the game: to bring in the southerners. Players like ex-Great Britain captain Ellery Hanley and Wigan winger Martin Offiah were seen in adverts for The Gap and Nike.

Yet these changes were as nothing compared with those that Rugby Union has wrought upon its image throughout the Carling era of the Nineties. Certainly, Eddie Waring would never have advertised pounds 100 trainers; but it is even more certain that Bill Beaumont would never have flexed his pectorals on a machine dewy with Princess Diana's sweat. Union has smartened up its act immeasurably in the past few years. It has increased its audience to the point where practically every Suzuki Jeep driver in the country follows the game.

This is the problem: League may be a better sport but, as soon as you get away from the M62 corridor, people prefer Union. They may not actually attend matches, but they like the image that the game presents. It is, perhaps, a class thing - Union is seen as being upwardly mobile, while League is what it is. And so it is Union which attracts the television and sponsorship money. It is the Five Nations championship, not the Challenge Cup, which attracts the corporate hospitality.

League's audience is utterly loyal, but it is neither big enough nor representative enough, nor in the eyes of the average sponsor powerful enough to generate income for the sport. Only stellar clubs such as Wigan and Leeds can achieve genuine commercial success. Others, like Workington and Dewsbury, are no less loved by the communities that they represent. But they have no appeal for a world beyond, and no means of survival within it.

One hundred years on from the split between the codes, rugby has been shaken again, and no less profoundly. Within months of each other, Union and League have sanctioned huge changes to their sports. Union has at last admitted the importance of money within the game, and become openly professional. In a different way, League has also admitted the importance of money, and sold itself to Rupert Murdoch for a sum of pounds 87m. It was, according to Rugby League media manager Paul Harrison, "the easiest decision in the world to make".

In return for his investment, Murdoch will receive five years' worth of Rugby League matches for transmission on BSkyB. He has forced a restructuring of the British game into three divisions, headed by a 12-club European Super League, which includes teams of such varying ability as Wigan, Paris and the London Broncos (whose job it is to attract the southerners). From next year, matches will be played in the summer, thus bringing them into line with Murdoch's Australian Super League.

The BSkyB deal was completed by the Rugby League's chief executive, Maurice Lindsay, with the speed of an Offiah try, and the protests against it are still being made. "You're always going to get the traditionalist who says 'don't touch my club'," says Paul Harrison. "But the fact is that some of those clubs wouldn't be there if it weren't for the Super League. It was an open secret that some of them owed a lot of money. The Super League has allowed them to put their houses in order. I mean, we'd all like to live off nostalgia, wouldn't we?"

Some of the pounds 87m has been allocated to small clubs, but much of it is being retained for the Super League. To those who have more will be given - this seems, now, to be how sport works. It is catching up all the time with the rest of life.

Now that money is circulating in both League and Union, will the eventual outcome of all this be to bring the two sports back together? Already, the International Rugby Football Board has accepted that players should be able to move between codes. Will those teams which enjoy commercial success - the Wigans, the Harlequins - come to feel that money has rendered their differences irrelevant, and that it would be better for everyone, especially Rupert Murdoch, if they reunited? Will that, in fact, become the new Super League?

It is a plausible scenario. After all, why should television pay to broadcast two sports, when it could pay for one instead? It is an attractive scenario, in that both codes have something from which the other could benefit. League has the more compelling game; Union the more media- friendly image. It may be that between the two of them, they could make a magnificent and popular sport.

But where would that leave the smaller League clubs, those that can play no part in any Super League? Successful teams like Wigan will always have a future, whatever form it takes. The game itself is assured a future only for the next five years. After that, anything could happen. As it is now Rugby League is an anachronism because its strengths still come from a source that no longer figures in the world of sport: the communities to which it belongs. Now in order to thrive it must find strength elsewhere, in the marketplace. Will it be able to do so? The anguish which is being felt within the game over whether commercialism will change its special nature, may soon come to seem like an emotional luxury.