Radcliffe RFC
rugby league club in Bury, England

Radcliffe was a semi-professional rugby league club based in Radcliffe, a town within the Metropolitan Borough of Bury, in Greater Manchester, England.
The club joined the Northern Union in 1901–02 and played for the single season in the Lancashire Senior Competition, which was effectively Division 2 (West).
History
The club had been founded in 1875 as Radcliffe Close Wesleyan FC. In 1896 the club joined the Northern Union playing in the Lancashire Second Competition . The club played in the inaugural Challenge Cup competition losing 3–0 away to Wigan in the first round. The following year they entered the second Challenge Cup competition and lost again in the first round, this time away to Hull F.C. at the Boulevard by 19 points to nil.
At the end of the 1900–01 season the club was promoted to the Lancashire Senior Competition but finished bottom on the competition and were not elected to the new second division of the Northern Rugby League at which time the club left the Northern Union.
Colours
The club's colours were amber and black.
Club league record
In the single season in which Radcliffe played semi-professional rugby league, 1901–02, the team only managed two wins and a draw out of 24 games played.
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This entry incorporates text from “Radcliffe RFC” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.