Broadly, the late 19th century; specifically, 6.30pm on Thursday 29th August 1895.

In the early 19th century pre-industrial mass football games were on the wane, while public schools played numerous local versions. The Football Association (FA) and Rugby Football Union (RFU), founded in 1863 and 1871 respectively, codified versions of the various public school football games played around the country to allow for wider competition between clubs, often formed by ex-public schoolboys. Both were predominately southern, middle class and amateur at their formation (in class terms the FA edged it, with its members drawing from the higher status public schools such as Eton and Harrow, rather than Rugby, Marlborough and Cheltenham of the RFU).

Both codes became popular across the country, attracting northern working class players and supporters, and remuneration became an issue. The FA (not without controversy) adopted professionalism and formal competition with the FA Cup and the Football League; the RFU resolutely opposed professionalism, not least after seeing professional northern clubs dominating the FA Cup. This led to the Great Split; in August 1895 the Northern Rugby Football Union was formed which would become the Rugby Football League in 1922, splitting rugby into the (broadly) southern, amateur Rugby Union and northern, professional Rugby League codes. Authors such as Dunning and Sheard and Tony Collins point to the class upheaval of the 1890s, marked by the events such as the formation of the Independent Labour Party, as a factor in the more acrimonious advent of professionalism in rugby compared to football and cricket. Association Football was hugely popular by the end of the 19th century; "No longer the game of exclusive gentlemen’s clubs, the association game was now the sport of the multimillioned masses. It had, as Eric Hobsbawm would note, become ‘a sort of lingua franca’ of working-class men the length and breadth of Britain." (Tony Collins, How Football Began). Rugby's split, meanwhile, saw League largely confined to Lancashire and Yorkshire (in the UK) and Rugby Union remaining amateur until the 1990s.