Rugby
Rugby football is a style of football that refers to two current sports, rugby league and rugby union. Although the two distinctively different forms of rugby - rugby union and rugby league - share the same basic rules of the game, that is, getting the ball over the line to score a try, the rules for each of the forms, are different.Rugby football developed from a version of football played at Rugby School and was one of several versions of football played at English public schools during the 19th century.[1]In 1871, English clubs met to form the Rugby Football Union (RFU). In 1892, after charges of professionalism were laid against some clubs for compensating players for missing work, the Northern Rugby Football Union, usually called the Northern Union (NU), was formed,[2] the existing rugby union authorities issuing sanctions against the clubs, players and officials involved in the new organisation. After the schism, the separate codes were named "rugby league" and "rugby union".[3]Rugby union is both a professional and amateur game, and is dominated by the first tier unions: Argentina, Australia, England, France, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa and Wales. Second and third tier unions include Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Fiji, Georgia, Japan, Mexico, Namibia, Peru, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Samoa, Spain, Tonga, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela. Rugby Union is administered by the International Rugby Board (IRB), whose headquarters are located in Dublin, Ireland. It is the national sport in New Zealand, South Africa, Wales, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and Madagascar, and is the most popular form of rugby globally,[4] with the seven-a-side version of the game, known as Rugby sevens, having been admitted into the programme of the Olympic Games from Rio de Janeiro in 2016 onwards.[5] There was a possibility sevens would be a demonstration sport at the 2012 London Olympics but many sports including sevens were dropped.[6]In Canada and the United States, rugby union evolved into gridiron football. During the late 1800s (and even the early 1900s), the two forms of the game were very similar (to the point where the United States was able to win the gold medal for rugby union at the 1924 Summer Olympics), numerous rule changes have differentiated the gridiron-based game from its rugby counterpart. Among unique features of the North American game are the separation of play into downs instead of releasing the ball immediately upon tackling, the requirement that the team with the ball set into a set formation for at least one second before resuming play after a tackle (and the allowance of up to 40 seconds to do so), the allowance for one forward pass from behind the site of the last tackle on each down, the evolution of hard plastic equipment (particularly the football helmet and shoulder pads), a smaller and pointier ball that is favorable to being passed but makes drop kicks impractical, a generally smaller and narrower field measured in customary units instead of metric (in some variants of the American game a field can be as short as 50 yards between end zon