National Conference League

History

In the early days, rugby league had an established structure outside of the professional leagues with county-wide competitions. This decayed into local district leagues usually only featuring teams from one or two towns with no input from the professional game. This eventually saw the number of amateur rugby league clubs reduce to 150 in the early 1970s.

Against this background, the British Amateur Rugby League Association was formed in 1973. One of its first acts was to merge most of the district leagues into three regional leagues: the Yorkshire League, the Pennine League and the North Western Counties League. For geographical reasons, the Hull League, the Cumberland League, the Barrow League and the London League were left as they were.

This allowed clubs to play at more appropriate standards as there were more divisions, and this factor - along with the improved governance of BARLA - saw the standard and numbers of clubs rise quickly. However, while there was a National Cup, the best amateur clubs were still divided between six leagues and thus the desire for an amateur National League arose.

The BARLA National League was formed in 1986. It received 27 applications including five from the Barrow area, and more unusually, one from a London club, South London Warriors.

In the end the league settled on 10 members, all from the northern strongholds of the game. These were four clubs from Yorkshire: Dudley Hill, Milford Marlins, Heworth and West Hull; four clubs from Lancashire: Pilkington Recs, Wigan St Patrick's, Woolston Rovers and Leigh Miners' Welfare; and two clubs from Cumbria: Egremont Rangers and Millom. These ten clubs were to be the members for each of the first three seasons.

The National League soon proved popular. For the 1989/90 season, the top flight was extended to 12 teams to include Lock Lane and Mayfield. However, this modest expansion wasn't enough and the 1989/90 season also saw the addition of a 10-team second division (to expand to 12 teams after one season).

The ten inaugural members of the second division were: Saddleworth Rangers, Leigh East, British Aerospace, Barrow Island, Askam, Knottingley, Redhill, Dewsbury Celtic, Shaw Cross Sharks and East Leeds. This expansion proved successful with Leigh East becoming the first non-founder members to win the league, in the 1990/91 season.

In 1993, the RFL wanted to contract the professional ranks from 35 to 32 teams. However, their initial plan to place the excluded teams in the Alliance (reserve grade) faced a legal challenge so they needed an alternative competition for them. The RFL thus proposed a league to bridge the gap between the professional and amateur leagues to feature the three demoted semi-pro clubs plus Hemel Hempstead (who already played in the Alliance as a semi-pro club) and eight BARLA clubs.

However, BARLA wanted all National League clubs to be in any such league and since the RFL were in a tough legal position they were prepared to compromise with BARLA and thus the three division NCL was born. Other concessions included an increase in the BARLA representation in the Challenge Cup from two clubs to 64 and allowing the NCL champions to apply to replace the bottom team in the pro leagues.

The latter concession soon disappeared as the pro leagues moved to summer and the National Conference League did not want to move. Also, Woolston Rovers' application to replace Highfield was voted out (the one club elected to the league from the NCL being Chorley Borough who were themselves a former semi-pro league club). The NCL soon expanded all divisions to 14 teams, though on occasions it has struggled to reach full complement of members, and lost all the remaining semi-pro clubs within three seasons.

After the switch of the pro game to summer, the NCL became solely a BARLA league, despite being temporarily expelled from BARLA in 2002. Initially, only three NCL teams joined National League Three (intended to bridge the gap between the pro and amateur games) but this changed in 2008 when the NCL downgraded the league's BARLA membership from full to associate. In 2009 the NCL introduced a summer competition for clubs wanting to play year round as a test for a more permanent switch to summer which came in 2012.

From 2012 the Conference played in summer, as tier 3 of the new pyramid, and the initial season saw two former Rugby League Conference National Division clubs admitted (Dewsbury Celtic and Featherstone Lions) with others expected to join from 2013. For one season only the Rugby League Conference National Division ran as Conference division three with no automatic promotion to division two, but after this, all northern clubs were required to meet full Conference criteria to play in tier 3. The RFL also had ambitions of a Conference South which would leave the former NCL as Conference North. From 2013, the limit on member clubs was raised from 42 to 56 and saw an increase to four divisions.

At the end of 2025 the RFL launched its National Community Rugby League initiative which proposed replacing the NCL with two national leagues and a number of regional leagues. While most clubs were not in favour of the initiative, the clubs decided to agree to the proposal "for the good of the sport". The NCL clubs met on 19 January and agreed to dissolve the NCL.

Premier Division

Results

Winners

Division One

Results

Winners

References

Sources

• https://web.archive.org/web/20040828055454/http://www.nationalconferenceleague.co.uk/ - former National Conference League official website
• https://www.rugby-league.com/leagues__competitions/national_conference_league - National Conference League official website
• The Times newspaper archives (results section 1986 onwards plus several articles from 1986 and 1993 about the formation of the National League and National Conference League respectively)

References

1. (January 2026)
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20110716113748/http://www.barla.org.uk/News/Details.asp?id=36
3. link. (2011-08-23)
4. [http://www.abrighterleague.com]{{Dead link. (August 2024)
5. "Talking Grassroots: NCL ‘begrudgingly’ back restructure as legal action averted – Total Rugby League". Total RL.
6. (26 January 2026). "Talking Grassroots". [[Rugby Leaguer & League Express]].
7. (28 October 2017). "Commentary | Normanton Knights v Milford Marlins".