This is what we found on Wikipedia regarding the Saracens:

Rugby football is a type of football, a team sport which developed in the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom, and which later split into the modern sports of rugby union and rugby league.

Rugby football started at Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, England, where the rules were first put down in written (codified) form in 1845. The School's students had been playing football, with limited ball-handling allowed, since at least the early 1820s. Forms of football in which the ball was carried and tossed date to the Middle Ages (see medieval football). Rugby football spread to other English public schools in the 19th century and across the British Empire as former pupils continued to play it.

Rugby football split into two codes in 1895, when twenty-one clubs from the North of England left the Rugby Football Union to form the Northern Rugby Football Union (renamed the Rugby Football League in 1922) at the George Hotel, Huddersfield, over payments to players who took time off work to play ("broken-time payments"), thus making rugby league the first football code to turn professional and pay players. Rugby union allowed professional players one hundred years later, in 1995. The world governing bodies are World Rugby (rugby union) and the International Rugby League (rugby league).

Canadian football and American football were once considered forms of rugby football but, after significant rules changes, are not now. The governing body of Canadian football, Football Canada, was known as the Canadian Rugby Union as late as 1967, more than fifty years after the sport parted ways with rugby rules.The first rules of the Melbourne Football Club in 1859 (now Australian rules football) were devised from the footballers' experiences playing rugby football the previous winter.