Article first published in issue 9 of The Football Pink
One
of the greatest things about football is that no one can claim to own it,
though many have tried. All you need to play some form of the game is the
ability to stay upright and a loose object to kick. It is probably as old as
language or music.
It was certainly played in Britain in a
relatively organised fashion throughout the Middle Ages by all classes. Then in
Victorian times there was a step change in the evolution of the game: what was
clearly a widespread, “folk” or children’s game in the early part of the
century started to be codified in several places at once. Several things led to
this.
One was the increase in demand for education
both in the public school system and for the masses. One of the dilemmas for
the advocates of “muscular Christianity” was what to do to keep adolescent boys
from their vices and in particular the scourge of “self-pollution,” something
which seems to have worried our forefathers inordinately. Vigorous outdoor
sport was seen as a means of teaching discipline, morality (through a sense of
fair play), and of tiring boys out physically so that when they went to bed
they would sleep. (For a more detailed exposition of these ideas see David
Winner’s Those Feet, 2005.) When the 1870 Education Act made education
universal, sport was taken up within Board schools as a means of improving the
health of the working classes, who were causing employers concern because
unhealthy slum living (and unhealthy acts) were creating physically incapable
workers for their mills.
A second factor was the increase in leisure time
created by improved standards of living. The middle classes had enough time for
regular pastimes and the working classes could afford to take time off to watch
if not play – unofficially through traditions like honouring “Saint Monday” in
Sheffield (unapproved absences from work on Mondays) or through the eventual
right, obtained through the 1850 Factories Act, to Saturday afternoons off
work, which slowly displaced the Monday habit.
Improved mobility through the railways meant
that teams not from the same district or institution could play each other –
and how would they do that if they had different rules?
Also a natural Victorian British desire to
impose order undoubtedly came into play.
The fact that different codes sprang up was one
of the seeds of a later class struggle sown in the early modern game. The
public schools in the south of England and Cambridge University played their
own versions of football and naturally, given their desire for order, imposed
rules. These men were the country’s elite and laid claim the game as of
birth-right. “The game of football, as originally played at the Wall at Eton,
was the author of every sort and condition of football now played throughout
the United Kingdom,” wrote someone in The Etonian in 1884. This myth
that football was handed down from the public schools persisted and infected
the game. (There is an ongoing, somewhat esoteric debate in academic circles as
to who can claim the birthright of the modern game – the public schools or ordinary
people (for example: Adrian Harvey: Football: the First Hundred Years, The
Untold Story, 2005, and Graham Curry and Eric Dunning: Association
Football: A Study in Figurational Sociology, 2015).
History is the account written by the powerful,
whereas the working class footballers of the time let their boots do the
talking, the fans doing theirs in the pubs afterwards. As a result their voices
are few and far between. The football played on village greens, and that in the
streets and backyards by generations of children would not have been written
about. There are some accounts of matches outside of the public schools, often
the newsworthy ones at holiday times and the traditional Shrove Tuesday games.
(For example, it was worthy of note in Derby in 1848, because of attempts to
ban it and the locals ignoring their betters: the military were called and the
Riot Act read.) In this sense the public schools can only be said to have
codified the popular game.
You also cannot ignore the fact that the first strong
footballing sub-culture took off in Sheffield following the establishment of
the Sheffield club of 1857. This club also drew up rules not long after those
in the public schools. Sheffield Club was set up by young men from Sheffield’s
higher classes: largely ex-pupils of Sheffield’s best school, the Collegiate
(now King Edward VII comprehensive school), who drew on their experiences of
versions of the game, probably those they grew up with in the district, as well
as drawing on what they knew of the public school games.
The Football Association was founded in 1863
largely as an association of a handful of London clubs that set out to draw up
an agreed set of rules. They were not uniquely ex-public school men so felt no
strong bond of allegiance to any one set of rules. Also the Sheffield Club
appeared to have sent observers to inaugural meetings. There was communication
between Sheffield and London, and they played against each other. The strength
of the Sheffield game was certainly a key influence over the FA in those early
years, as was an increasingly critical mass of footballers in London (but
neither were playing according to the nascent FA rules). In 1877 a single set
of rules for the game was finally agreed, a synthesis of the Sheffield rules
and that grew out of Cambridge and the public school versions.
There remained, though, this tension: that the
game meant different things to different classes. This increased as the game
took off and got worse as football finances became important: money was needed
to run clubs, buy kit, develop grounds etc. Spectators with leisure time were
willing to pay to watch, but, to continue to draw in spectators, there was
competition to attract the best players. The issue of professionalism came to
the fore.
The “old boys” clubs saw paying players as
dirtying their sport – contaminating their moral purity. Beardshaw of
the Sheffield Club said that “Professionalism in football is an evil, and as
such should be suppressed” – little more than rank snobbery (though later he
had live with it as a Sheffield United committee member).
Some of the attitudes of the higher classes are
best revealed by looking at early fiction: literature being almost exclusively
their domain at the time. I recently published a collection called Historical
Football Stories taken in part from an earlier collection written at
the end of Victorian era. I believe these to be the oldest football stories in
existence. Fiction can provide better insights into some aspects of life than
factual accounts, particularly emotional life. The curse of professionalism is
a recurrent obsession in these stories. For example, in An International
Proxy we read: “He was an amateur to his finger-tips. The association
of money with sport was abhorrent to him. He was an opponent of the League
system because it drew an invidious distinction between “League matches” and
“friendly matches” — as if they were not all friendly!” Then in A
Matter of Luck: “ ‘I like you Jack,’ he said, ‘and Nell loves you, but
I can’t give my lass to one who makes his play his work. If you wish to win her
you must give up soccer… ’ ”
Amateurs saw money as distorting the game in
other ways. When penalties were introduced in 1891, it was claimed to be an
effect of professionalism — of those who had not “imbibed the sporting spirit
of the game at school” (i.e. public school). The famous amateur C B Fry said
“It is a standing insult to sportsmen to have to play under a rule which
assumes that players intend to trip, hack, and push their opponents and to behave
like cads of the most unscrupulous kind.”
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| Jack Kelly: ' yankee oik' |
The Amateur Rowing Association, custodians of a
sport even harder for oiks to break in to, kept a tighter hold: their rules
excluded, not only anyone in receipt of payment for rowing, but also anyone who
had been by trade or employment a “mechanic, artisan, or labourer or engaged in
any menial duty.” Even up to 1920 rowing banned Olympic gold medallist Jack
Kelly from Henley because he had once earned money as a bricklayer.
The middle and upper classes did not like their
loosening grip on power in the domain of football any more than they did in the
political one.
The rugby version of the early game had split
away following the codification by the FA over an argument over the legality of
“tripping and hacking.” The association game could have split again in 1884/5
over professionalism. The “old boys” at the FA initially tried to resist,
Canute-like, and threw Preston out of the Cup for fielding professionals – this
nearly led to a breakaway “British Football Association,” but to everyone’s
credit they drew back from the brink. Instead the FA tried to regulate
professionalism by placing additional restrictions on the ability of
professionals to participate in competitions, for example, based on two years
residence within six miles of the ground, and banning them from any football
administration role. The professionals were to be treated like servants to
their club committee masters. There was one rule for amateurs, one for
professionals. For example, when England faced Ireland in Belfast in 1888, the
amateurs Lindley and Walters refused either to travel on the same boat or stay
in the same hotel as the professionals.
The response of the gentleman-players was to
largely reject football and seek refuge in the unsullied game of rugby, and an
ultimately failed attempt to set up a rival Amateur FA. Another response was
the setting up of the Corinthians in 1883 – to try to uphold the ideals of
amateurism. It was in truth “sham amateurism” – they demanded and obtained financial
guarantees to play friendly matches, didn’t publish balance sheets, and handed
out lavish expenses to playing members who were believed to earn more than
professionals, in addition to their independent means. They competed for a
while because they had learnt and practised the game through school and
Oxbridge, were better fed, housed and protected by medical advice.
Professionals soon overtook them, but nevertheless, the FA continued to give
them a bye to the third round of the FA Cup as late as the 1930s.
 |
| Needham |
The other side of the story, that of the working
class footballer is rare for the reasons previously stated. One exception was
Ernest Needham of Sheffield United and England – one of the few working class
men whose voice was heard: he wrote a book in 1901, simply entitled, Association
Football. He strongly defended the right to earn a living from the game:
“Would that all could play for love, and be the perfect gentleman on and off
the field, as so many of my amateur friends are.” He talked of: “the advantage
to the style of the game, and the necessity for paying those who devote
themselves to its improvement. I might claim for payment of players all the
arguments in favour of the payment of Members of Parliament. To play the game
scientifically a man must bring to it a mind free from fear of personal or
family difficulty in case of disablement or retirement and only substantial pay
will guarantee this.” (Needham earned about £5 per week at that time, just over
twice the pay of an ordinary working man — which gives you an idea what he
meant by substantial.)
Another obsession of the middle classes comes
through in Historical Football Stories – that of gambling. The Victorian
amateurs often raised this demon in arguments against professionalism. The
middle classes were in fear of the depraved lower classes, their lack of
morality, and this leading to riotous behaviour and a threat to order and
security of property. Sport was encouraged as a way of counteracting vice. So
to see money as the motivator was anathema — and then to see large riotous
crowds assembling and betting on the outcome was abhorrent. Needham dismisses
this. He says: “We hear a lot of talk about betting at football matches. Some
people given over strongly to romancing have likened the game to the racecourse
— with bookmakers and all their paraphernalia. Such highly spiced tales are
nonsense. Betting there is, but it is done more or less secretly; and once let
the delinquents come within the clutches of the officials of any club, let
alone the police, and I will vouchsafe a bad quarter of an hour for them. Any
sane person who attends matches knows that betting is not allowed openly and it
is only so asserted by those who decry the pastime.”
Another aspect of the early game shown by Historical
Football Stories is its physicality. Early football was far more brutal and
dangerous than the modern game. By the late 1890s, ten years into the League
structuring of the game, the rules were largely as they are now, partly in
response to an understanding that the game needed to improve its safety record.
Hacking, tripping, jumping at a player and charging from behind were not
allowed. The main differences in risk were probably down to factors such as
interpretation by referees, equipment and condition of pitches: matches were
almost never abandoned unless fog was so dense that neither the spectators nor,
more to the point, referees could see whether the ball had gone in the net.
Frozen pitches, mud, hale, snow etc, were not reasons to call games off.
There
are arguments that these class prejudices continue to afflict British football
right through to the modern era. This amateur belief that talent is inherent,
and that learning of skills from an early age, techniques, and all the myriad
of minor improvements that go towards building success (diet, kinetics etc.)
are somehow akin to cheating or an excuse for insufficient pluck, and best left
to “Johnny Foreigner.” An approach that has clearly worked well…
Bibliography
David
Winner, Those Feet, 2005
Richard
Sanders, Beastly Fury, 2009
Adrian
Harvey, Football The First Hundred Years, 2005
Graham
Curry and Eric Dunning, Association Football: A Study in Figurational
Sociology, 2015
Ernest
Needham, Association Football, 1901
Frederick
Wall, 50 Years of Football, 1884-1934, 1934
JAH
Catton, The Story of Association Football, 1926
Percy
M Young, Football in Sheffield, 1981
Percy
M Young, A History of British Football, 1973
James
Walvin, The People’s Game, 1994
Graham
Curry, Football Spectatorship in mid-to-late Victorian Sheffield, Soccer
and Society, Vol 8, No.2/3 2007
Steven Kay, ed., Historical Football Stories,
2015
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