Rochdale Hornets (rugby league), both play home games at the Spotland Stadium. Rochdale AFC were founded in 1907 and joined the Football League in 1921 when the new Football League Third Division (north) was created. The club has never played above the third tier of the English league divisional structure, and before its promotion at the end of the 2009/10 season (their first promotion since 1969), had played continuously in the Football League's lowest division since 1974. However, the club reached the Football League Cup Final in 1962, and lost to Norwich City. Rochdale Hornets is one of the original twenty-two
English public school football games the Cambridge Rules and the subsequent rules of association football, of which only one copy survives in the library of Shrewsbury. That ball games were probably played at English public schools from earliest times is suggested by early references to such games being played by students at university. In later centuries there is no doubt that football games played at school were taken by former students to university. The earliest reference to ball games at English Universities comes from 1303 when "Thomas of Salisbury, a student of Oxford University, found his brother Adam dead, and it was alleged that he