Salford () is a city and the main settlement of the wider City of Salford metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. In 2011, Salford had a population of 103,886. It is also the second and only other city in the county after neighbouring Manchester. Salford is located in a meander of the River Irwell which forms part of its boundary with Manchester. The former County Borough of Salford, which also included Broughton, Pendleton and Kersal, was granted city status in 1926. In 1974 the wider Metropolitan Borough of the City of Salford was established with responsibility for a significantly larger region.Historically in Lancashire, Salford was the judicial seat of the ancient hundred of Salfordshire. It was granted a charter by Ranulf de Blondeville, 6th Earl of Chester, in about 1230, making Salford a free borough of greater cultural and commercial importance than its neighbour Manchester. The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries reversed that relationship.Salford became a major cotton and silk spinning and weaving factory town in the 18th and 19th centuries and important inland port on the Manchester Ship Canal from 1894. Industries declined in the 20th century, causing economic depression, and Salford became a place of contrasts, with regenerated inner-city areas like Salford Quays next to some of the most socially deprived and violent areas in England.Salford is home to the University of Salford, and has seen several firsts, including the world's first free public library, and the first street to be lit by gas. Salford's MediaCityUK became the headquarters of CBBC and BBC Sport in 2011, joined by ITV Granada in 2013.

Salford is directly across the River Irwell opposite Manchester to the northwest and to the north of Old Trafford, southeast of Bolton and south of Bury.

Rugby football is a collective name for the family of team sports of rugby union and rugby league, as well as the earlier forms of football from which both games, as well as Australian rules football and gridiron football, evolved.

The two variants of gridiron football — Canadian football and, to a lesser extent, American football — were once considered forms of rugby football but are seldom now referred to as such. In fact, 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 the established rules of rugby union or league.Rugby football was thought to have been started about 1845 at Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, England although forms of football in which the ball was carried and tossed date to medieval times (see medieval football). Rugby split into two sports in 1895, when twenty-one clubs split from the Rugby Football Union to form the Northern Rugby Football Union (later renamed the Rugby Football League in 1922) in the George Hotel, Huddersfield, over payments to players who took time off from work to play the sport (known as "broken-time payments"), thus making rugby league the first code to turn professional and pay players. Rugby union turned professional one hundred years later in 1995, following the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa. The respective world governing bodies are World Rugby (rugby union) and the Rugby League International Federation (rugby league).

Rugby football was one of many versions of football played at English public schools in the 19th century. Although rugby league initially used rugby union rules, they are now wholly separate sports. In addition to these two codes, both American and Canadian football evolved from rugby football at the beginning of the 20th century.