Is Rugby Considered to be Better Than Football?
Fans of different sports are constantly bickering about the superiority of their favorite disciplines. It is a commonly accepted part of life. Nowhere is this more true than in the football and rugby communities. The similarities between these sports are difficult to look past, and so the slight differences are probably going to be debated over till the end of time.
The whole conflict is further exacerbated by the existence of other football-like sports, such as Australian or Gaelic football. The confusion doesn't end here. Soccer is known as "football" everywhere outside of North America and Australia, which only makes everything messier.
But if we put the name feuds aside and focus on two of the most popular branches of these sports: rugby and American football, can we really make a case for one of them being better than the other? Are the differences in rules and flow of play significant enough? Rugby live stream websites are frequented just as often as those that host NFL streams, so the size of the two fanbases aren't going to provide too much of a clue in that regard.
In this article, we're going to try and break down the two wildly popular sports and see if we can pick a definite winner. Enjoy!
The Case for Rugby
The origins of rugby reach back as far as 1823 when one of the students from Rugby School in Warwickshire (England) has decided to pick up the ball in his hands and run towards the goal during an ordinary game of soccer (or football, depending on where you're from. This story is, of course, to be taken with a grain of salt, but it is the universally agreed-upon origin story of the sport.
The rules of rugby are defined by the International Rugby Board and have remained largely unchanged since the game's conception. In short, players are not allowed to pass the ball forward, running towards the opponent's goal line or kicking the ball towards it being the only viable way of scoring points. Rugby players can throw the ball to each other, provided that the passes are thrown backward or sideways. Opposite team members can tackle the player who's got the ball by wrapping their arms around them and pulling them to the ground. Targeting the area above a player's shoulders or tripping players' legs are considered fouls.
Rugby isn't as unified as you may think, though. There is rugby union, which is played with 13 players per side, and rugby league, with 15 players in each team. Union is by the more popular kind by a large margin. It's governed by World Rugby, an organization that organizes the Rugby World Cup every four years.
Rugby was usually considered an exclusively manly sport. Societal changes nowadays strike faster than a lightning bolt, though, and as of recently, the push to popularize the women's game has been gaining more and more traction.
All in all, there is no denying that rugby is a sport with a richer history, and is a game played around the world with significant popularity in places like South Africa or New Zealand. The same can't really be said about American football, which is considered to be more of a niche sport outside of the U.S.
Purists will also point towards rugby's lack of reliance on protective gear as a superior quality that makes the game more difficult to master, more dangerous, and arguably, more entertaining.
The Case for American Football
Just like in the case of many other disciplines in America, the college sports associations have played (and still do) a great part in molding football into the game it is today. In the 1880s, one of the players from Yale, Walter Camp, proposed certain changes to rugby rules, which marked the beginning of American football.
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Despite the ongoing rift between these sports, the rules of rugby and football are not all that different and mostly come down to semantics such as the number of players on the field (the American version allows eleven team members) as well as the field size and how many substitutions each team is allowed to carry out (in the NFL, there is no limit on the number of subs a coach can make in the game, whereas in rugby the limit is seven substitutions).
The most significant difference between rugby and American football is the use of protective gear in both sports. In rugby, most pros play only with a gum shield. Football players in the States, on the other hand, are clad in shoulder and chest pads, leg protectors, as well as helmets.
The protective equipment could be considered an improvement upon the rugby formula -- football players tend to pick up less serious injuries than rugbyists (although the number of ailments is still pretty high). Another thing that could lead some to believe that American football is the better sport is the fact that it is much more marketable. The Superbowl is one of the biggest sports events of the year despite only being relevant to Americans and an odd number of NFL aficionados abroad.
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Does It Even Matter?
Ultimately, the feud between NFL and rugby fans is pointless, and quite frankly, unresolvable. Both disciplines are wildly popular within their own niches, have millions of fans, and plenty of teams that go at each other's throats every season. There is no quantifiable measure that could settle the matter once and for all -- TV ratings can't be used to determine the entertainment quality of a sport. The same thing can be said about protective equipment.
The other differences are benign and region-specific, which is why so many other variations of the same game have sprung up since the nineteenth century. Rugby fans all over the world should be proud that the sport they followed has become so popular that it led to the creation of many different variations of it, and NFL followers should respect their rugby roots and put these feuds aside. This is the only way sports can move forward as a means of bringing humans together through healthy and fair competition.
Maciej Grzymkowski - an avid traveler with a particular affinity for Southeast Asia. Some of my favorite sports include trekking, football, and golf. I’m a strong believer in outdoor gyms, as I think everybody should have full, uninhibited access to basic exercise equipment.
