![]() Weeks later the club reformed as Leeds City AFC, the forerunner of Leeds United. At the end of the season St Helens and Holbeck tied for the second promotion place in the second division.Ī play-off match was arranged which Saints won and Holbeck - who played at Elland Road - resigned from the NU in a fit of pique. The new set-up led indirectly to the formation of Leeds United soccer club. ![]() The following year the system was changed yet again, this time to two divisions with 18 teams. Only, Hull, Huddersfield, Salford and Warrington of today’s Super League were present, with many more familiar names, such as Leeds, Wigan and St Helens playing in the Lancashire and Yorkshire leagues, seen as the second tier of professional sides. The new ‘super league’ makes strange reading today. This anomaly had not escaped the attention of the game’s leading clubs and in April 1901 Halifax proposed starting an elite Northern Rugby League of the top 14 teams. Yet bizarrely there was no final between the winners of the two leagues, so effectively there was no champion club from 1897 to 1901. So it was decided to replace the Northern League with separate Lancashire and Yorkshire Leagues. The situation was also made worse at the end of the first season by large numbers of clubs leaving rugby union and wanting to join the NU. It produced an exhausting 42 league matches for each club and by the end of that first season many sides were complaining about the costs of travel and the length of the season. ![]() So in the first season, the Northern Rugby Football League was created, comprising all 22 teams that had formed the NU, playing each other home and away. The huge popularity and commercial success of the Football League was the model the NU wanted for rugby. One of the Northern Union’s fundamental aims when it was founded in 1895 was to establish a league system similar to that of the Football League, which had been formed seven years earlier. And that has led to significant changes in how the champion club has been decided. Over the 121 years of its existence, rugby league has continually honed and fine-tuned the structure of its competitions in a search for the optimum relationship between competitive balance, spectator interest and financial well-being. ![]()
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