Our journey around the villages, towns, cities and regions that have rugby league running through their veins arrives in the Welsh capital.
CROESO i Caerdydd – sometimes!
With Cardiff being the spiritual home of Welsh rugby union, rugby league hasn’t always been welcome.
But the country’s capital, which takes its name from the fort (caer) established by the Romans alongside the River Taff (dyf in medieval Welsh, dydd in the modern language), has long had links with the rival code.
The city spawned such stars as Billy Boston, knighted in this year’s King’s Birthday Honours, Gus Risman and Clive Sullivan.
And it has staged international and Super League matches at a string of venues, including the national Principality (previously Millennium) Stadium, and twice had a presence at professional club level.
The Cardiff story starts in November 1928, when the Wales national team took on England at the Sloper Road Greyhound Stadium, a new 40,000-capacity venue also known as the Welsh White City in the Grangetown suburb close to Cardiff City Football Club’s then Ninian Park home (more of which later).
Wales internationals had previously been played in Aberdare, Ebbw Vale, Pontypridd and Tonypandy, and the clash in Cardiff attracted 15,000 to see England win 39-15.
The Welsh White City, which also staged speedway, had closed (in 1937) by the time Cardiff gained a first professional team in the sporting boom years which followed the Second World War.
Backed by businessman Horatio Evans, who was disillusioned with the city’s rugby union club, Cardiff were inaugural members of a Welsh League formed in 1949 (that competition ran until 1955) and were admitted to the Rugby League in April 1951, on the same day as Doncaster.
Playing out of the new 30,000-capacity Penarth Road Stadium, built to host the Cardiff Dragons speedway team and also in Grangetown, to the west of the city centre, they gained ten points, and finished above Liverpool City in the one-division final table of 1951-52.
But crowds were poor – just 199 paid to see a late-season clash with Workington – and what turned out to be their final home game against Wigan was switched to the smaller Maindy Stadium in north Cardiff, which staged the cycling events at the 1958 Commonwealth Games.
Seven Welsh professional clubs (Aberdare, Barry, Ebbw Vale, Merthyr Tydfil, Mid-Rhondda (from Tonypandy), Treherbert and Pontypridd) had previously come and gone.
And after just one campaign, Cardiff joined that dispiriting list, folding despite a subsidy of more than £2,200 from the governing body, who were desperate for the game to grow in the Principality.
While the Penarth Road Stadium shut its doors a year later, the Maindy track still exists, and now has an adjacent indoor swimming pool.
Meanwhile Ninian Park, which had existed since 1910, became a rugby league venue for the 1981-82 season when ,encouraged by the launch of a rugby league team by Fulham Football Club the previous season, both Cardiff City and Carlisle United took the plunge and entered the Second Division, from which the Londoners had won promotion.
In Wales, the 13-a-side code still had one particularly stubborn opponent – the country’s Rugby Union, who frustrated by the number of players who had ‘gone North’, including Boston, Risman and Sullivan, ostracised anyone who had played league at any level.
The strength of Welsh rugby union throughout the seventies, when the likes of Gareth Edwards, Barry John and JPR Williams thrilled fans and the national team bossed the then-Five Nations and claimed three grand slams, meant it was still going to be hard for a league club to prosper.
But Cardiff City Blue Dragons gave it a go, with football club chairman Bob Grogan bringing in David Watkins, the former Salford star and a Great Britain and Wales international in both codes, to run the club.
Watkins, who had coached both the Wales and Great Britain league teams, installed another dual-code international, former St Helens prop John Mantle, as team chief and snapped up a string of 15-a-side internationals in Steve Fenwick (Bridgend), Tommy David (Llanelli and Pontypridd), Paul Ringer (Ebbw Vale and Llanelli) and Brynmor Williams (Cardiff, Newport and Swansea), much to the chagrin of the Welsh Rugby Union.
The club also recruited seasoned players like Tony Karalius, the former St Helens hooker who had played for Fulham, and Hull back Paul Woods.
Things began well, with 9,247 turning up at Ninian Park for the opening game – a 26-21 defeat by Salford.
But the next home match, in which the Blue Dragons recorded their first win, 32-19 over Hunslet, attracted only 3,401.
By the end of a season in which Cardiff finished eighth out of 17, crowds were down to three figures, with only 508 watching the clash with Blackpool.
In 1982-83, with Watkins now coach, Cardiff again finished eighth, and the average attendance fell from 2,008 in the first season to 854, with money increasingly tight.
In 1983-84, when Watkins’ side finished eleventh, the average gate was 581, and the club lost a valuable ally when Grogan died.
Cardiff City Blue Dragons went into liquidation before being bought out by a consortium who immediately came under pressure to leave Ninian Park from the Football Association of Wales, who wanted the ground as their permanent headquarters and were opposed to sharing it with another sport.
The club became Bridgend Blue Dragons, but lasted just one season.
Ninian Park staged six Wales internationals between 1981 and 1995, when as well as the Dragons’ 28-6 World Cup win over France, which drew 10,250, Les Bleus also faced Samoa there (the ground closed in 2009 when the football club constructed a new stadium nearby).
Meanwhile rugby union’s seismic decision to allow professionalism in 1995 led to a thaw in relations with league, and Cardiff Arms Park, in the shadow of the national stadium, was among the grounds used by the South Wales club in their sole (third-tier) season of 1996.
The same year the venue hosted a Super League clash between Sheffield, technically the home team, and St Helens and also Wales’ European Championship clash with England.
Two years later, Super League was back when Castleford and Warrington played in the ‘On the Road’ round, and in 2015, there was a meeting of Wales and France.
In 1999, the 74,000-capacity Millennium Stadium opened, and staged two ties at the 2000 World Cup, plus another two in the 2013 tournament, when 45,052 saw the double-header in Australia beat England 28-10 before Wales went down 32-16 to Italy.
The arena has also hosted a Wales versus New Zealand international in 2002, three Challenge Cup finals (from 2003 to 2005) and has three times been used for Magic Weekend (the first two, in 2007 and 2008, then again in 2011).
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 511 (August 2025)