page_title: Wigan Warriors
section_title: 1900s
hierarchical_section_title: Wigan Warriors / History / 1900s
caption_attribution_description: English: Team of Wigan Football Club.
context_page_description: Wigan Warriors Rugby League Football Club is a professional rugby league club in Wigan, England, which competes in the Super League.
  Formed in 1872 as Wigan Football Club, Wigan was a founding member of the Northern Rugby Football Union following the schism from the Rugby Football Union in 1895. Wigan have won 22 League Championships, 19 Challenge Cups and 4 World Club Challenges. Wigan are the most successful club in English rugby league and had a period of sustained success from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, winning eight successive Challenge Cups and seven successive League Championships.
  The club plays home matches at the DW Stadium, having played at Central Park between 1902 and 1999.
  The head coach is Adrian Lam; the club captain is Sean O'Loughlin.
context_section_description: In 1904, fourteen clubs resigned from the two county leagues to form a new Northern Rugby League for season 1901–02. Wigan however remained in the Lancashire Senior Competition.
  Wigan became sub-tenants of Springfield Park, which they shared with Wigan United AFC, playing their first game there on 14 September 1901. A crowd of 4,000 saw them beat Morecambe 12–0. During this season Wigan won the Lancashire Senior Competition.
  Wigan's record crowd at Springfield was 10,000 when they beat Widnes on 19 March 1902. The last game was on 28 April 1902 when Wigan beat the Rest of Lancashire Senior Competition. Two meetings were held by Wigan members during the season to discuss the possibility of turning the club into a Limited Company but the idea did not take off.
  On 6 September 1902, Wigan played at Central Park for the first time in the opening match of the newly formed First Division. An estimated crowd of 9,000 spectators saw Wigan beat Batley 14–8.
  In the 1905–06 season they won their first cup, in rugby league, the Lancashire County Cup. Between 1906 and 1923 Wigan won the Lancashire League another seven times and the Lancashire Cup another four times. Wigan were the first winners of the Lancashire cup.
  Wigan played New Zealand on 9 November 1907 and ran out winners by 12 points to 8 in front of a crowd of around 30,000.
  Great Britain, then known as the Northern Union, played their first ever test against New Zealand on 25 January 1908. James "Jim" Leytham, Bert Jenkins, and John "Johnny" Thomas of Wigan were in the home side and James "Jim" Leytham scored a try. Bert Jenkins, and John "Johnny" Thomas had previously played in the first Welsh game against New Zealand on 1 January 1908.
  On Saturday 28 October 1911, Wigan played a match against the Australasian team which visited England on the 1911–12 Kangaroo tour of Great Britain and won.
  On 12 May 1921, Wigan became a limited company.
  In June 1922 Jim Sullivan joined Wigan from Cardiff RFC when he was only 17. His cash value was put at £750, which was a staggering signing-on fee for an adolescent who had not yet played 13-a-side rugby (based on increases in average earnings, this would be approximately £137,700 in 2015). His first game was at home against Widnes on 27 August 1921, and he scored ten points in a 21–0 win. Almost inevitably, Jim Sullivan scored the first points in the first Challenge Cup Final to be played at Wembley Stadium, kicking a penalty after only three minutes of the inaugural Challenge Cup Final against Dewsbury in 1929 in which he led Wigan to a 13–2 victory. Sullivan became player-coach in 1932.
  Wigan won their first Challenge Cup in the 1923–24 season when they beat Oldham 21–4 in Rochdale.
  In 1933 the Prince of Wales attended Central Park, becoming the first royal to watch a rugby league match.
  On 25 October 1938 Australian Harry Sunderland arrived in Wigan to take up the duties of Secretary-Manager at Central Park. On 28 September the following year, Sunderland's contract was terminated and he and the club parted company.
  The outbreak of World War II disrupted the Rugby Football League Championship but Wigan continued to play in the Lancashire War League and the Emergency War League.
  During the war years the club went through the 1940–41 season unbeaten although they lost the Championship final. They lost the 1944 Challenge Cup Final over two games to Bradford Northern 8–3 but made up for it beating Dewsbury in the Championship Final.
caption: Team of Wigan FC, c. 1900
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