WE ALL know that rugby league became a separate sport from rugby union when 20 clubs broke away from the Rugby Football Union in 1895 to establish the Northern Union.

I would love to know how those early rebels thought the game they now controlled would develop in the succeeding years.

Did they think it would remain a game played only by the original breakaway clubs?

Or did they believe that, like association football, it would gradually spread throughout the country and beyond?

Unfortunately, it developed more along the lines of the former rather than the latter.

It’s fair to say that the game’s footprint is little different today compared to what it was in 1900.

If anything, the footprint has slightly diminished, as some of the clubs that were on board in the early years either switched codes to football or became extinct.

All the clubs that broke away initially were in Yorkshire and Lancashire.

The only reason it wasn’t described as an M62 sport in those days was because that motorway hadn’t yet been built.

Of course, the game did expand to Australia and New Zealand in the early years of the twentieth century and it was very firmly established in the states of New South Wales and Queensland.

But in those years it failed to get any significant foothold in the other mainland Australian states of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, where Aussie Rules was and still is the dominant code of football.

In New Zealand, the game was established in the major cities but it was unable to break through elsewhere, mainly due to the rugby union authorities taking steps to stigmatise rugby league and ensure that it could gain little traction outside Auckland and Christchurch and places like Greymouth, a coal-mining town on the west coast of the South Island.

Rugby league’s next significant expansion was to France in the 1930s, but its footprint since then has actually grown smaller, helped partly by the Vichy ban on the game during the Second World War, and partly by the unstinting antipathy of the other rugby code, which has done everything in its power to strangle rugby league in that country, to such a degree that the game’s survival is actually a minor miracle.

Since then, rugby league has often tried to expand into new markets, but usually without having the resources to forge a lasting presence.

The best example is the attempted move into London in the early 1980s, which looked promising at first, particularly when the new club, Fulham, defeated Wigan in their opening game at Craven Cottage.

The new club had been inspired by Fulham FC’s then owner, Ernie Clay, who wanted to use Craven Cottage more productively.

But he lost interest in the new club, which then moved out of Craven Cottage and then had a nomadic existence for many years, at one time being owned by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group.

But even Branson couldn’t find a way for the club to put down firm roots in London, despite playing in the Challenge Cup Final in 1999, and now the club is owned by Australian icon Darren Lockyer and his business partner Grant Wechsel, who have pledged to raise the club’s profile in our capital city.

That will almost certainly depend on London Broncos being in Super League in 2027.

There is only one place in which rugby league has successfully forged a major presence from a standing start in the last 25 years.

That is the Australian city of Melbourne, in which rugby league was virtually unknown before the Super League war of the 1990s and the creation of the Melbourne Storm by News Limited as it tried to launch a Super League in competition with the ARL competition at that time.

And such has been the success of rugby league in the capital city of the state of Victoria that a record crowd of 91,671 fans turned out at the MCG in June for the second State of Origin clash this season.

The Storm have enjoyed unprecedented success since their creation and junior participation numbers are continuing to rise at unprecedented levels.

But it wasn’t always smooth progress.

“We recognised we needed to keep helping them as much as we could,” said former NRL CEO David Gallop.

“In the mid-2000s, I remember flying to Melbourne and meeting with the Premier of Victoria, saying, ‘We need more support for this rugby league team. We need you to build a new stadium.’

“As part of the deal, we said we’ll bring Origin games back to Melbourne and there would be greater investment from the government in junior development. The whole deal was stitched together quickly over the next couple of days and ultimately led to the construction of AAMI Park.”

The construction and opening of AAMI Park in 2010 allowed the club to attract new sponsors and opened up new revenue streams, while the team began an era of success on the field, although it had a well-documented salary-cap scandal in 2010 that, for a time, looked as though it might undo all the good work that had been achieved.

But the club recovered to make eight Grand Finals between 2011 and 2025 and win three premierships.

That success helped attract more supporters while making the leading Storm players and their coach, Craig Bellamy, household names in Victoria.

So what lessons can we adapt from the Storm to London Broncos?

To enjoy sustained success, a club in a rugby league outpost must be well financed, play at a high-quality venue, forge a strong identity linked to its location, be competitive against the best teams in the competition and receive strong support from the governing body.

If all those things can come together, then it just may be possible for the Broncos to emulate some of the success enjoyed by Melbourne Storm.

First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 522 (July 2026)