ABSTRACT
Areas of Rugby League’s popularity map closely onto areas where, in 2016, populations voted in favour of the UK leaving the EU. The working-class communities of the North of England have been represented in the media in injurious terms during the UK recession and the Brexit debates, and there has emerged in the press a narrative of communities that have been left behind by neoliberal economic development. As part of this resistance to nostalgia, histories of Rugby League and their communities are important and significant to British politics, moving us from the generalised and injurious to the specific and nuanced. The process of talking about Rugby League for its own sake opens up the differential levels of access given to male and female participants and is the occasion for the articulation of intricate dynamics of engagement, resistance and recognition.
