This is the third in a series of articles arising from conversations with Andrew J Sutton, author of The Fighting Welsh. The history and connections explored here draw on his research and the story he has shared.
When millions settle down for the Super Bowl, few will think of a ninth century Welsh chronicler, a merchant buried in Wrexham or a rugby crowd singing ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ in Cardiff. Yet beneath the stars-and-stripes spectacle lies a history shaped far beyond America’s shores—by British ball games, university rivalries, migration and an enduring argument about how much violence a sport should tolerate.
The Welsh part of that history must be handled with care. Some connections are firmly documented; others depend on family tradition, clues in surnames or the influence of communities that is difficult to quantify. Wales did not “invent” American football, but Welsh people, Welsh institutions and the Welsh experience of rugby appear at striking moments in the game’s development.
Sutton is careful not to present this as a tale of Welsh ownership, but as one of ideas crossing borders and being transformed along the way. Rugby crossed the Atlantic and was remade on American campuses; in Wales, meanwhile, the sport became a powerful expression of national identity.
A game with deep roots
One of Britain’s earliest literary references to organised ball play appears in the ninth century Historia Brittonum, traditionally associated with the Welsh monk Nennius. Its description of boys playing at ball in Glywysing, in south-east Wales, cannot sensibly be called rugby or football. It does, however, place communal ball play deep in the Welsh past.
The more direct ancestor of American football emerged much later. Rugby School’s pupils produced written rules in 1845, helping to formalise a game in which the ball could be carried. Rugby spread through schools and clubs, but in Wales it took on a particular social force. Industrial towns and valley communities made the sport their own. Clubs became expressions of place, solidarity and pride.
By the end of the nineteenth century, rugby in Wales was no longer merely an imported recreation. It had become a national language, expressing communal identity as powerfully as physical skill and tactical intelligence. That cultural transformation matters to this story: American football inherited elements of rugby’s mechanics, while Wales demonstrated how deeply a sporting code could become woven into a nation’s sense of itself.
The Welsh name at the heart of Yale
As Sutton points out, the strongest Welsh connection sits in plain sight. Yale University was named in 1718 after Elihu Yale, born in Boston and raised in Britain, whose family had roots in north-east Wales. His gifts of books, a portrait and Indian textiles helped the struggling Collegiate School in Connecticut. The goods were sold and the proceeds supported a new college building; the institution adopted his name in recognition.
The source of that generosity tells a more troubling story though. Like many figures once celebrated for their philanthropy, Elihu Yale has come under renewed scrutiny as research has cast a different light on his past—and on how his wealth was accrued. He made his fortune through the East India Company and served as governor of Fort St George in Madras. Yale University’s own research has examined the institution’s early ties to slavery and the ways wealth extracted through empire supported its development. The Welsh connection is therefore not automatically a noble one: honest history cannot turn a colonial merchant into a harmless emblem of national pride.
Even so, Yale’s adoption of his name created an unforeseen Welsh association with the later history of American football. The university became one of the colleges in which a hybrid of association football and rugby was contested, codified and eventually transformed. It was there that Walter Camp, later called the “father of American football”, began to impose order on a game whose rules still varied from campus to campus.
When rugby became gridiron
In the 1870s, American colleges played incompatible versions of football. Harvard’s encounters with McGill University of Montreal drew it towards rugby, while Yale had favoured a more kicking-based game. A landmark Harvard–Yale contest in 1875 was played under compromise rules, and in 1876 Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia formed the Intercollegiate Football Association.
The game still looked recognisably like rugby: fifteen players ran with the ball, passed backwards and contested possession. Camp’s innovations transformed its logic. He replaced the rugby scrum with a fixed line of scrimmage, introduced the snap to control possession and limited each team to a series of downs in which it had to make measurable territorial progress. He also reduced the number of players from fifteen to eleven.
These were more than technical adjustments. Rugby’s continuous struggle for the ball became a sequence of planned operations. Space could be measured, plays rehearsed and responsibility allocated with increasing precision. The vocabulary remained partly inherited—touchdown, conversion, punt—but the grammar was becoming American.
By the 1880s, the child had begun to separate from its parent. Yet the new sport retained rugby’s physical danger and magnified it through mass formations. The same appetite for organisation that made American football tactically compelling also made collisions more deliberate.
Cardiff’s match of the century
While the American code was becoming more violent, Welsh rugby was entering its first golden age. On 16 December 1905, Wales met New Zealand at Cardiff Arms Park. The touring “Originals” had swept aside almost every opponent; Wales were unbeaten that year. The fixture was billed as the “Match of the Century” and an unofficial world championship.
Before kick-off, the All Blacks performed the haka. The Welsh team and crowd answered with Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, often cited as the first singing of a national anthem before an international sporting contest. Then came an intense, tactical match decided by Teddy Morgan’s try. Wales won 3–0, handing New Zealand their only defeat in 35 tour matches.
Sutton does not overstate the game’s direct influence on American football: Wales did not write the reforms adopted in the United States. He argues, however, that the wider tour provides revealing context. New Zealand later played in America, displaying a faster, more open form of rugby as gridiron faced a crisis over injuries and deaths. For spectators familiar with British and Irish immigrant traditions, rugby offered a living comparison—another hard contact sport, but one organised around movement rather than massed collisions.
“War without rifles”
Contemporary newspapers reported the 1905 death toll differently, but at least 19 fatalities and 137 serious injuries were widely cited. Critics called the sport “war without rifles”, and some colleges considered abandoning it. President Theodore Roosevelt summoned representatives of Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the White House and pressed them to curb its brutality.
The resulting reform movement helped create the body that became the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Mass formations were restricted; a neutral zone separated the lines and ten yards rather than five were required for a first down. Most dramatically, the forward pass was legalised in 1906.
That innovation completed a decisive break with rugby’s prohibition on throwing the ball forwards. It also opened the field, rewarding speed and space as well as force. The change did not make American football safe, and the sport has continued to confront the consequences of collision ever since. But it altered what spectators could imagine the game to be.
For a time, two major Californian universities chose another answer. Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley abandoned American football for rugby in 1906, and their famous Big Game was played under rugby rules. The journey had come full circle: rugby had crossed the Atlantic, become American football, and then been readopted as an alternative to it.
One Welsh boot at Wembley
The two codes continued along different paths, but occasionally the old relationship surfaced. In 1987, Wales and Neath full-back Paul Thorburn suited up for the Los Angeles Rams against the Denver Broncos in the American Bowl at Wembley. It was a pre-season exhibition, not a regular-season NFL game, and his appearance amounted to a single kick-off.
The invitation made sense despite Thorburn’s one-kick cameo. The previous year, he had landed a 64.2-metre penalty against Scotland, commonly cited as the longest successful kick in international rugby, and in 1987 he converted the score that secured Wales third place at the inaugural Rugby World Cup.
Thorburn’s brief appearance showed both the appeal and the limits of moving between the two codes. His kicking power transferred easily, but the games had become too specialised for other skills to cross over so readily.
In Wales, connections are rarely far away. Thorburn is a relative through marriage, and I often refereed matches in which he played. Even in the heat of a close game, we might quietly exchange family news or wager a beer on whether his next kick would clear the posts.
A shared inheritance, not a simple claim
Sutton says that It is tempting to turn this history into a patriotic boast: “no Wales, no Yale; no Yale, no Walter Camp; no Camp, no American football.” History is rarely so obliging. Yale existed before Elihu Yale’s gift, Camp drew on a broad collegiate movement, and rugby’s development belonged to communities across Britain and beyond.
For Sutton, the more interesting truth is that nations build culture together, often without admitting it. Welsh migration carried names, Nonconformist traditions and sporting loyalties into American life. The Welsh name attached to Yale placed one connection at the centre of the collegiate world, while Wales’s 1905 rugby triumph offered a powerful image of disciplined, open play just as the American code was being forced to reform.
Today, rugby and American football look like distant relatives. One treasures continuity; the other turns possession into a sequence of set-piece dramas. One remained officially amateur until 1995; the other documented its first paid player in 1892 and grew into a vast commercial enterprise. Both still depend on courage, collective discipline, tactical intelligence and trust.
From Cardiff Arms Park to the Yale Bowl, the routes are indirect but real. Wales cannot claim to have invented the gridiron, but its people, institutions and sporting culture belong in the wider story of how the game emerged. Beneath even the most American of spectacles, echoes from across the Atlantic remain.
More from Robert G Davies
Bylines Network Gazette is out!
The latest Bylines Network Gazette is out now. Become a Friend of Bylines Network or upgrade to a paid Substack subscription, and you will get access to a vital collection of citizen articles and stories.
Journalism by the people, for the people.
