How did football begin? This webpage explores eleven key questions about the birth of modern football in nineteenth century Britain, based on my book How Football Began: A Global History of How the World’s Football Codes Were Born. Of course, for comprehensive answers you will have to read the book.

You can buy How Football Began direct from the publishers Routledge here or downloaded it as an audiobook from Audible.com here. The answers here do not include footnotes, illustrations or any of the reference materials contained in the book, nor does this page include the book’s chapters on the emergence of American, Australian, Canadian, Gaelic and rugby league football.

1. Why was the Football Association created?

2. What was folk football?

3. How did elite English schools influence football?

4. Did Sheffield invent football?

5. Why did football split into Association and Rugby?

6. How did football become so popular?

7. What made Glasgow so important?

8. Why did women struggle to play football in the Victorian era?

9. How did professionalism emerge in football?

10. What were the origins of the Football League?

11. Why did soccer become the global game?

On 26 October 1863 representatives of eleven football clubs and schools in London answered an advertisement in the weekly Bell's Life in London and attended a meeting 'for the purpose of promoting the adoption of a general code of rules for football’ and creating a football association. 

Held at the Freemason's Tavern in central London's Great Queen Street, the meeting was intended to be the culmination of a discussion that started in the letters page of The Times at the beginning of October, when a pupil of Eton College called for 'the framing of set rules for the game of football to be played everywhere' and that the captains of the football teams of the elite private schools (known as ‘public’ schools in Britain), universities and 'one or two London clubs' should 'frame rules for one universal game'. An animated discussion ensued, with letters from current and former pupils of Harrow, Charterhouse, Winchester and Rugby schools, each largely agreeing with the sentiment but emphasising the superiority of their own school's code of rules.

Despite this, when the meeting finally convened at the Freemason’s Tavern none of the public schools were represented, with the exception of Charterhouse, whose football captain Benjamin Hartshorne told the delegates that his school wouldn't join the new organisation until the other public schools did. This boycott made the framing of a set of commonly accepted rules almost impossible. Each of the leading English public schools - Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Rugby, Winchester, Westminster and St Paul's - played football according to its own unique set of rules. 

Eton even had two codes. One for its 'Wall Game' played against a wall in a narrow strip of land five metres wide and 110 metres long, and another for the Field Game, played on a more familiar open pitch. Each school differed in its concept of offside, the extent to which the ball could be handled, the method of scoring, the shape and size of the ball, and much else besides. A school's method of playing football was a matter of intense pride to past and present pupils, and ideas about the rules of the game were a symbol of each school's sense of superiority. 

The formation of the FA was not the first attempt to design a single code of rules for football. In 1856 the Cambridge University Foot Ball Club, which appears to have been set up in 1846 by former pupils of Eton, Harrow, Rugby and Shrewsbury, had printed a set of rules based on the principle of taking the best of each school's rules. These 11 rules allowed any player to catch the ball and prescribed a liberal offside rule that put a player onside if there were three defenders between him and the goal. These rules gained no support outside of the university and did not deter students from forming separate university clubs devoted to the football rules of Eton (in 1856), Harrow (1863) and Rugby (1857). Other writers, such as the Uppingham School headmaster J.C. Thring, the journalist John Dyer Cartwright and a number of pseudonymous authors also campaigned for football to be played under a universal set of rules.

All of the men who gathered at the Freemason's Tavern had been educated in the traditions of public school football. Their aim was to find a way of framing the schoolboy games that would allow them to play as adults and popularise the sport among like-minded young middle-class men, thus ensuring that football became part of the social and business networks of the growing professional classes.

At least three of the ten clubs in attendance, Blackheath FC, Blackheath Proprietary School and the Blackheath-based Perceval House, were well-known adherents of Rugby's School's football rules. Barnes FC, the club of the FA's founding secretary, Hull-born solicitor Ebenezer Morley, regularly played under Rugby rules, as did the Civil Service club. Indeed, it was not unusual for adult clubs to play under different rules from week to week in order to have regular matches. 

Moreover, each delegate was committed to his own ideas about the best way to play football. So when they reconvened in November to discuss the rules they became embroiled in discussions about the efficacy of crossbars, the desirability of 'fair catching', and the dangers of unrestrained deliberate kicking of shins, otherwise known as hacking. Unable to agree, they decided to hold a further, third meeting the following week to arrive at the 'final settlement of the laws’.

But the next meeting settled nothing. The draft set of rules presented to it by Ebenezer Morley was something of a football Frankenstein's monster, hurriedly bolting together various features of the different public school codes. Rule 9 allowed players 'to run with the ball towards his adversaries' goal if he makes a fair catch or catches the ball on the first bound', while Rule 13 permitted a player catching the ball directly from a kick or on its first bounce to pass it by hand to another player. These were two of the key elements of football as played at Rugby School, as was Rule 10 which allowed defenders to 'be at liberty to charge, hold, trip or hack' the ball-carrier. Yet the very next rule stated that 'neither tripping nor hacking shall be allowed'. 

The meeting then plunged into further confusion when Morley informed the delegates that he had decided to repudiate his own draft rules. Instead, he proposed the FA should adopt a new code drawn up by students at Cambridge University. These rules made no mention of carrying the ball but did forbid tripping and hacking. In a state of bewilderment, the delegates voted both for Morley's original draft and the Cambridge rules.

A few days later the meeting re-convened yet again and amidst considerable acrimony voted to adopt a revised version of the Cambridge rules which removed any ambiguity about hacking or carrying the ball. Realising that it had been the victim of a coup, Blackheath resigned from the FA, little more than five weeks after being a founding member. Eight years later, the club would become a founder of the Rugby Football Union. 

Even so, the FA’s rules were something of a dead letter. When 'first match under the rules of the Football Association' took place on 19 December 1863, Barnes FC won it by scoring six tries to Richmond's nil. As with Blackheath, Richmond would also abandon the FA and become a founder of the RFU. As the Barnes' result shows, the FA's initial rules bore little resemblance to modern soccer. Their six tries were a consequence of FA rule 7, which allowed the attacking team to touch down the ball behind their opponents' goal line for the right for a free-kick at goal, just as in rugby. 

The FA's 1866 rules even allowed matches to be decided on the number of touchdowns scored if the goal score was equal (rugby did not allow tries to be counted in the score until 1886). The FA’s  rule 8 legislated for a'fair catch' where a player could catch the ball in the air before it had bounced and, again as in rugby, make a 'mark' to gain a free kick. Rule 6 also bore a strong resemblance to rugby in that any player in front of the ball was offside. Throw-ins had to be taken at right angles to the pitch, as in rugby's line-out, and there was no cross-bar on the goals.  Even the Royal Engineers’ club, which would appear in four of the first seven FA Cup finals, played under their own rules which allowed running with the ball. Handling the ball by outfield players was not completely outlawed by the FA until 1870. It would only be through a long process of trial and error that association football, as the FA’s version of football was called, came to resemble modern soccer.

Having failed in its mission to unite all football clubs under one set of rules, the FA's fortunes plummeted. At its first anniversary, the FA minute book noted that 'no business was conducted' and its committee did not meet again until February 1866. By 1867 membership numbered just 10 clubs, barely half the 19 that were members in December 1863. When Charles Alcock published the first edition of his Football Annual in 1868 he recorded 30 clubs using the FA's rules but 45 playing Rugby School rules, despite the fact that no governing body yet existed for rugby-playing clubs. To no-one's great surprise, or interest, at the FA's 1867 annual meeting Morley suggested that they ‘should seriously consider that night whether it were worthwhile to continue the association or dissolve it’. 

However, the other five delegates at the meeting were not quite as pessimistic as Morley and concluded that it would be worthwhile for the association to continue. Their judgement would shortly be proved to have been correct.

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For centuries before the formation of the FA, football in Britain was largely seen as plebeian entertainment, a folk practice that was played regularly on religious holidays and rural festivals. 

The first written reference to it in Britain appears to be William Fitzstephen's preface to his 1174 biography of Thomas à Becket, which describes a Shrovetide game of ball between London apprentices. In 1365 Edward III declared a national ban on football and handball because they distracted the population from archery practice. It was the same in Scotland, where the first four King James’s all banned the sport. Yet by Shakespeare's time, football had become such a part of national culture that references to it in literature were not uncommon, perhaps most notably in King Lear when the Earl of Kent taunts a servant as a 'base football player'. 

Britain was just one of many countries around the world that throughout history have played games we today would call football. In France, ‘soule’ occupied much the same place in popular culture as football did in Britain, while in Italy ‘Calcio Fiorentino’ became a major feature of life in Florence as part of the celebrations of Epiphany and Lent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 

The simple truth is that most cultures in most regions of the world have played games with a ball that is propelled by hand or foot towards some form of goal. From the Americas to Aboriginal Australia, humans have found limitless pleasure, unbounded fascination and deep satisfaction in playing and watching these games, which they may or may not have called football. In China, Cuju [‘kick ball’] emerged from a form of military training as a ceremonial game of the royal court under the Han Dynasty and survived in various forms for around 2,000 years. Women occasionally played and apparently in its later years professionals were engaged to play the game. Other ‘football’ games, like Ulama and the various ball games of Mesoamerica, had a religious or ritual significance. But none of these games were either a direct ancestor or an inspiration for the modern games of football; humanity’s endless desire to play with a ball has always been shaped by the social and economic characteristics of the society it created.

In Britain, traditional football was a product of the rhythm and structures of rural society. Matches were staged as local customs during the ebbs and flows of an agricultural economy. Festival games held across Britain and Ireland at Christmas or Shrovetide were often occasions for teams of hundreds to attempt to carry, kick and throw a ball to goals at either end of a village or town. Derby’s Shrovetide game reputedly involved a thousand men, the Sedgefield game 800, Diss Common in Norfolk 600, while at Alnwick in Northumberland 200 men lined up for the annual match. Goals were three miles apart for the Ashbourne game in Derbyshire, while Whitehaven's goals were set at the docks and a wall outside of the town.

But this was not the only type of football to be played. Some were far more organised and based on clearly defined rules. In East Anglia from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century 'camp-ball' was played on dedicated pitches, known as 'camping closes' where ten or fifteen-a-side teams fought to carry the ball to their opponents' goal. 'Hurling to goals' was played in Cornwall between teams of fifteen to thirty players and, like camp-ball allowed forms of blocking (not unlike modern American football), and required a player to throw the ball to a team-mate when tackled. 

Nor was traditional football always entirely restricted to men. In October 1726 women played a six-a-side match on Bath's bowling green, married women played unmarried in Inveresk in Midlothian in the late 1700s, and as late as 1866 and 1888 women took part in the annual Uppies versus Doonies match at Kirkwall in Orkney Islands.

Although many of the larger matches required the support of the local landowners, the large numbers who gathered to play or watch often aroused suspicion or concern in the authorities. As early as 1480 villagers protested against the enclosure of land in Bethersden in Kent by occupying it and, as the enclosure of common lands intensified in the eighteenth century, football again became a pretext for crowds to gather in protest, such as at White Roding, Essex, in 1724, or at Kettering in 1740 when a match served as a pretext for the attempted destruction of a local mill. From its earliest times in Britain, football was always, as noted by the early chronicler of sport Joseph Strutt, 'much in vogue among the common people of England’.

By the time that Strutt wrote this in 1801 football was increasingly under attack from the economic and social forces that were transforming Britain from a rural agricultural society into an urban industrial power. Enclosures of what were previously regarded as common lands, led to more than six million acres of land taken into private ownership between 1750 and 1830, sweeping away many of the traditional customs and leisure activities of village life. In countless other towns and villages strenuous efforts were made by businessmen, religious evangelicals and moral reformers to stamp out football games that caused town centres to close or violated the Sabbatarian's sense of good order. This was formalised in 1835 when the Highways Act banned football being played on roads. 

Not all footballers went quietly. Attempts to stop Derby's Shrovetide football match being played were regularly frustrated by determined opposition before it was finally repressed in the 1850s. Football games continued to be played informally in streets, at festivals and during holiday times such as wakes. The 1842 Royal Commission on Children in Mines and Manufactories noted that football was played widely in the West Riding coal fields. These types of football were essentially traditional rural recreations, which persisted in a similar way to quoits, cudgels, and Maypole dancing. 

Occasionally semi-formal, organised football matches did take place in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1829 a fifteen-a-side match was played for praise money of six pounds between the Leicestershire villages of Wigston and Blaby. Rochdale staged games between teams dubbed the 'Body Guards' and the 'Fear Noughts' in the 1840s. On Good Friday 1852 a match between Enderby in Leicestershire and Holmfirth in West Yorkshire  was played for £20 at Sheffield's Hyde Park. But these were one-off events arranged for specific occasions - there were no organised competitions or nationally-agreed rules. 

Organised football matches were few and far between during the first half of the nineteenth century. Even the most assiduous researchers have been able to locate only fifty-eight organised matches played between 1830 and 1859. We have no way of measuring the extent to which the playing of football declined during the industrial revolution, because no records were kept and newspaper reports are too fragmentary, but the sheer weight of anecdotal evidence confirms the 1842 judgment of the Nottingham Review that 'the field games of old England have almost entirely passed away. Football, throwing the quoit, spell and knur, archery have become obsolete and forgotten, like an old fashion in apparel, or a custom known only by a name'. 

When the landlord of the Hare and Hounds Inn at Bolton organised a match in January 1847, it was intended 'to revive the old sport of foot ball'. The position of football before the 1850s can best be gauged by the fact that sports weeklies such as Bell's Life, The Field and dozens of local daily newspapers carried regular reports of cricket, boxing, horse racing and many other sports - but almost nothing on football. Newspaper coverage of the game was confined to short and highly irregular reports or advertisements. But that should not be surprising. Outside of the public schools, football was essentially an informal leisure practice or folk custom that had no connection to the highly organised sport of the late Victorian era. When football did emerge as a mass spectator sport in the last third of the nineteenth century it had been reinvented.

Why wasn’t football a major spectator sport before 1860 like cricket, boxing and horse-racing? Unlike these sports, football lacked the aristocratic patronage of the 'Fancy' - the leisured rich who provided the financial backing for sport in the Georgian era. Its low social status and reputation for violence stopped it developing like cricket because young aristocrats would simply not play alongside the common people. Its ephemeral nature made it unsuitable for gambling. Without aristocratic patronage or middle-class social networks, there was no force that could standardise the rules of football or impose a governing structure, as the MCC did in cricket or the Jockey Club in horse racing.

Moreover, the most commercialised sports of the Georgian era were based on individual professionals: the boxer, the jockey, the ‘pedestrian’ walker or runner, and the cricket professional. And even though cricket is a team game, its dominance by aristocratic amateurs on and off the field, together with the fact that no more than a handful of professionals were employed by teams, meant that it did not need a large market of regular paying spectators to financially sustain it. The economic basis for the development of the modern football codes - a large population with significant leisure time and disposable income, plus a national transport and communication network to facilitate playing and promoting the game - would not emerge in Britain until the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

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If football was was fading from popular culture, there was one section of British society where the game had become hugely popular during the first half of the nineteenth century: its elite private schools. 

By the time of the Great Reform Act of 1832, which gave the vote to the middle classes, football was on its way to becoming an essential part of the education of young men educated in Britain's public schools, as the elite private schools were known. Eton, Charterhouse, Harrow, Rugby, Westminster and Winchester each developed their own distinctive versions of the game. The undermining of football’s plebeian traditions by the industrial revolution allowed the public schools and the middle classes to embrace football as part of the new ideology of British imperial nationalism, ‘Muscular Christianity’. 

Freed from the physical and social dangers of playing football against those they saw as their social inferiors, upper-middle class school boys took up the game with gusto. Public schools were often located in places where folk football had a long history. In the town of Rugby in the English midlands, for example, football had been played every New Year's Day since the early 1700s and as late as 1845 'six tailors of Rugby' challenged teams in the area to a match for a prize of five pounds. For school authorities, the rough and tumble of football was welcomed as an outlet for the excess physical energies of adolescent youths.

But football was also important because the public schools imbued it with the ethos of Muscular Christianity, which placed vigorous and masculine physical activity at the centre of its character-building outlook. At root it was an expression of British nationalism, rendering the teachings of the Church of England into a credo that both justified and maintained the principles of the British Empire.Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1841, had popularised a Muscular Christian educational philosophy that sought to create 'healthy minds in healthy bodies' in which healthy minds were those seen as free of sin and moral weakness. 

Vigorous football was promoted as a reliable antidote to the great triangular fear of the Victorian public schools: masturbation, effeminacy and homosexuality. Football therefore came to be seen as a vital part of the training of the boys and young men who would grow up to lead the government, industry and empire.

Other than two teams, two goals and a ball, every school's football rules were unique. The ball was not uniform; Eton's ball was round but much smaller than a modern soccer ball, Harrow's resembled a large cushion and Rugby's was an irregular ovoid. When the ball went over the touchline, play at Eton and Winchester was restarted with a form of scrum, known as a 'bully' and a 'hot' respectively, at Harrow and Winchester by kick-in and at Rugby by a right-angled throw-in. All schools decided matches solely by goals, except for the Eton field game which also counted 'rouges', the equivalent of a try in the Rugby game. The rules of the Rugby School version of football were first printed in 1845 and those for the  Eton field game in 1847, but these had little influence on the spread of public school football into the wider population. 

The book that played a major role in expanding the popularity of football was not a rule book but a novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays. Written by Thomas Hughes, an old boy of Rugby School, it was published in 1857. Based on his own experiences of life at Rugby, Hughes' book depicted the values of Muscular Christianity as a boy's adventure yarn, and portrayed football as a school for moral education and character building through the simple technique of writing the most thrilling descriptions of a football match yet committed to print. 

It was a runaway best-seller and brought Rugby School and its version of football to a new, national audience. Football was now not only morally respectable but also fashionable. Its prestige was enhanced several-fold in 1864 when the Clarendon Commission published the report of its inquiry into the state of England's leading public schools. It lauded Rugby above all other schools declaring it as 'a national institution, as being a place of education and a source of influence for the whole Kingdom'. The Rugby version of football was now identified in the public mind with morality, education and excitement. 

This was the reason why Rugby School’s version of football alone survived and flourished as an adult sport. Although elements of Eton and Harrow's rules were incorporated into the rules of the FA, the FA's game was very different to any seen on a public school playing field. Rugby’s sense of separateness from other schools' football was heightened by the crusading moral certitude that the school imbued in its pupils, causing 'Old Rugbeians', as its former pupils were known, to disdain those who did not share its traditions. This was a not unimportant factor when it came to understanding the opposition to its football code. 

Between the publication of Tom Brown's Schooldays in 1857 and the formation of the FA at the end of 1863, numerous football clubs would be formed by privately-educated young men, including Edinburgh Academicals (1857) Sheffield (1857), Liverpool (1857), Blackheath (1858), Richmond (1861), Wanderers (1859), Manchester (1860) Crystal Palace (1861), Lincoln (1862) Bradford (1863), Royal Engineers (1863) and the Civil Service (1863).As with other male-only clubs, these new football clubs constituted an entirely masculine kingdom. They provided a respite from the new world of Victorian middle-class domesticity, offering young men a haven from women, children and family duty.

Although football fans debate which was the 'first' adult club to be formed, the reality was that the sudden creation of clubs to play football in the 1850s and 1860s was part of a growing new associational world of social and business networks of the Victorian middle classes. Between 1830 and 1870, fifteen of the most prestigious elite gentleman's clubs were formed in London, such as the Garrick Club (1831), East India Club (1849) and the Hurlingham Club (1869). Perhaps the earliest example of the new middle-class football club was that formed in Edinburgh by John Hope in 1824. He had played football at Edinburgh's High School and, on moving to what is now Edinburgh University formed his own 'Foot Ball' club. Composed largely of young Edinburgh solicitors, Hope's club lasted for 17 years playing internal matches against each other. 

This would be the initial pattern for all clubs of the mid-Victorian era. Bradford FC played Captain's side versus Secretary's side, and many clubs played fair versus dark, married against single, and when all else failed, A-M versus N-Z or some other alphabetical adversarial arrangement. Clubs made no effort to attract spectators and paid little attention to those who did watch. None of the 21 provincial football clubs listed in the 1868 Football Annual charged an entrance fee to watch a match. Indeed, admission to some of Sheffield FC's early matches was by invitation only.

The football that was played by these clubs was neither soccer nor rugby. The obvious modern differentiation between the two football codes - that football is a kicking game and rugby is largely a handling game - cannot be extended back to the 1850s or 1860s. Clear differentiation between the association and rugby codes did not emerge until the 1870s. Handling the ball was a minor part of the Rugby version of football. Play revolved around scrummaging, with forwards, who would usually comprise fifteen of what were twenty-a-side adult teams until 1877, aimed to break through their opponents by dribbling the ball with their feet through the scrum. Until 1886 a rugby match could only by won by the side scoring the most goals. Conversely, scrum-type struggles for the ball were common in Eton and Winchester schools' football games, and references to 'scrimmages' are not uncommon in reports of matches played under Sheffield Association rules.

Far from being a 'handling code’ at this time, Rugby School's football rules severely limited handling the ball. If the ball was caught on the full from a kick - a 'fair catch' - the catcher was allowed to kick the ball unhindered by the opposing side, as was the case in the early rules of both the FA and the Sheffield FA. But if the ball was was on the ground, it could not be picked up unless it was bouncing. A rolling or stationary ball could not be touched with the hand. Using the feet to propel the ball was a major feature of the football games that emerged from Rugby School, and, conversely, catching and handling the ball was also common among those games that would later become associated with soccer.  In fact, all forms of football that were played in the 1850s and 1860s had far more in common than that which set them apart. Rather than being two distinct codes, there was one football game with a spectrum of ways it could be played. 

Outside of a few public school partisans, rules were subordinate to the desire to play the game. William Hutchinson, one of the founders of the Hull club (today’s Hull FC rugby league side), recalled 'we played any mortal code possible with other clubs away from home so long as we could get a game of some sort’. Hull's first away match was under FA rules at Lincoln in 1866 and, despite being a rugby club, they regularly played against FA sides, so much that when the Nottinghamshire Guardian called for the formation of a Midlands football association, it included Hull alongside Nottingham, Lincoln and Newark as one of the leading clubs of the region. Stoke Ramblers, the forerunner of Stoke City, played Sheffield rules against clubs in Derbyshire and South Yorkshire, and rugby matches against the Congleton and Leek clubs in their first season. Manchester FC, arguably Lancashire’s most socially prestigious rugby club, played in the FA Cup in 1877. Clapham Rovers were so successful at both rugby and association that they were not only a founding member of the RFU in 1871 but also won the FA Cup in 1880.

Ultimately, the vast majority of footballers just wanted to play a game - and codes of rules were merely a means to this end. 

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It was this simple desire to play a game of football that animated Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest when they founded Sheffield FC in 1857. 

Creswick was a solicitor whose father owned a silver-plating business and Prest was a wine merchant. Both were members of Sheffield Cricket Club who thought that football would be a good way of keeping fit during the winter. Sheffield, like its rival and near-neighbour Nottingham, had developed a vibrant cricketing culture, and Crestwick and Prest’s Sheffield FC quickly outgrew informal agreements about how to play football and decided to design its own set of rules. 

Both founders had been educated in local private schools and the club saw itself as a socially elite institution. Emulation of their social superiors has long been a defining characteristic of the British middle classes and the Sheffield footballers were no exception. They wrote to all of the public schools asking for a copy of their football rulebooks. Having compared the rules of each school, the club picked out those elements it liked, combined them with its own ideas and in October 1858 voted to adopt what would become known as the Sheffield rules of football. 

The debt that Sheffield FC’s rules owed to the public schools can be seen by comparing the wording of the 1858 Sheffield rulebook to those of a leading English public school [in brackets]:

1. Kick off from the middle must be a place kick. [vi. Kick off from middle must be a place.]

2. Kick out must not be from more than twenty five yards out of goal. [vii. Kick out must not be from more than ten yards our of goal if a place-kick, not more than twenty-five yards if a punt, drop or knock on.]

3. Fair catch is a catch direct from the foot of the opposite side and entitles a free kick. [i. Fair catch is a catch direct from the foot.]

4. Charging is fair in case of a place kick, with the exception of kick off, as soon as a player offers to kick, but may always draw back unless he has actually touched the ball with his foot. [ix. Charging is fair in case of a place kick, as soon as the ball has touched the ground.]

The rules in brackets are direct quotations from the 1845 Laws of Football Played at Rugby School. 

The links between Sheffield and Rugby School rules go even deeper. Sheffield's rule eight forbade the ball from being picked up from the ground and also appears in the 1862 Rugby School rules. Sheffield rule three allowed catching with hands if the ball was caught on the full in what was known as a 'fair catch', a term still in use in American football and which became known as a 'mark' in rugby and Australian rules. Rule ten, 'No goal may be kicked from touch, nor by free kick from a fair catch,' is also based on rule five 1845 Rugby School rules, which also allow a goal to be scored from a fair catch. The eleventh of the Sheffield rules, defining when a ball is in touch and how it should be returned to play, uses the same wording as Rugby's 1862 rules, with the exception that a Rugby player was also allowed to throw the ball in to himself. Even Sheffield's rule six, prohibiting the ball being 'knocked on' with the hand and penalising it with a free kick, appears with slightly different wording in rule eleven of the 1862 Rugby rules. 

Only Sheffield's rules five and seven, forbidding pushing, hacking, tripping, holding or pulling a player over, have no link with Rugby School rules. This may possibly suggest that they objected to the roughness of the Rugby game, but this was also true of some adult Rugby clubs, many of whom banned hacking and tripping, as did the Rugby Football Union when it was formed in 1871. 

This is not to suggest that Sheffield football was a version of the Rugby School game. Like trying to appreciate the taste of food simply by reading a recipe book, it is impossible to understand how a game was played merely from its written rules. But the similarity of Sheffield and Rugby rules does highlight the fact that differences taken for granted today did not exist in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1864 Sheffield played home and away matches against Leeds rugby club using 'rules [that] were of a mongrel type, neither rugby nor association', according to Leeds' founder J.G Hudson. In 1868 they played against Manchester FC, then as now a rugby club, losing the rugby match by one goal and eight touchdowns to nil in Manchester but winning the home game by two rouges to nil. It was not until 1876 that Sheffield FC played its last rugby match, against Hull FC. 

From 1859 to 1868, the Sheffield game allowed players to score a 'rouge', a rule taken from Eton's field football game. A rouge was scored 'by the player who first touches the ball after it has been kicked between the rouge flags [which were placed twelve feet away at the side of each goalpost]’. The Youdan Cup - a Sheffield knock-out tournament that was only played in 1867 - was won by Hallam FC, who scored two rouges to Norfolk FC's nil in the final. Bell's Life described Hallam's first rouge: 'the ball was kicked by Elliott, not through the goal, but just over it, and was touched down by Ash in splendid style, after running round two opponents before getting to the ball, thus securing a rouge'. The touchdown was an important part of early Sheffield football and was sometimes the most important way of scoring, as in 1860 when Sheffield FC defeated the 58th Regiment club by a goal and ten rouges to a goal and five rouges. 

But the rules under which football was played did not determine its popularity. In 1867 twelve clubs - most of them based in local communities such as Broomhall, Hallam, Heeley, Norton and Pitsmoor - formed the Sheffield Football Association to organise regular fixtures. That same year the Youdan Cup final attracted a crowd of 3,000 people. The following year another knock-out competition, the Cromwell Cup, was played for by four sides and once again sponsored by a local theatrical entrepreneur, the incongruously-named Oliver Cromwell. This combination of regular competition between clubs representing local communities, the crowds that matches attracted, and the regular discussion of football matters in the press meant that Sheffield was the first city to develop something resembling a modern football culture. Within a generation, this was replicated in almost every town and city in Britain.

Why was Sheffield the first to develop a football culture? Partly because the economy of the city in the first half of the nineteenth century was based on small-scale, highly skilled metal manufacturing, which meant that the working classes had more leisure time and disposable income to watch and, albeit in a limited fashion at first, take part in sport. Sheffield also had a vibrant, pre-existing sporting culture based on cricket. Since the 1820s, it had been the stronghold of cricket in Yorkshire and second only to Nottingham as the most important cricketing centre outside of London. In 1821 George Steer and son-in-law cricketer William Woolhouse built and opened a cricket ground to the east of the city, which by August 1824 was reportedly attracting crowds of between 15,000 and 20,000 for major matches. As would be the case with soccer and rugby in the last decades of the nineteenth century, professional cricketers become local heroes, none more notably than the Sheffield-born all-rounder Tom Marsden, one of the first local professionals and one of the finest exponents of single-wicket cricket of his age, regularly attracting five-figure crowds to his matches. 

Many of Sheffield's early footballers were also cricketers and many clubs were also cricket clubs, such as Hallam FC. Sheffield’s football culture was built on this pre-existing cricket tradition. The same point can be made about Nottingham, where the strength of local cricket culture provided an infrastructure for the development of football in the early 1860s. When the newly-formed Nottingham FC hosted Sheffield FC at the start of 1865 its side included Richard Daft and George Parr, two of the greatest cricketers of the Victorian era and both well-known sporting entrepreneurs. The fact that the football club became known as the Nottinghamshire County FC underlines the extent to which it sought to follow the pattern of cricket. As the new-found enthusiasm for football slowly began to blossom from the late 1850s, Sheffield and Nottingham already had in place the customs and structures that would nourish the new football phenomenon.

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Sheffield’s football culture would prove to be the first cuckoo of a football spring that would soon blossom across all industrial towns and cities in Britain. 

A few miles north of Sheffield, football clubs were being formed by privately-educated young men in Bradford, Leeds, Hull and Huddersfield from 1863, and the popularity of the game among the middle classes became such that the first representative football match of any type was played in Leeds in 1870 when Yorkshire played Lancashire. Although played under rugby rules, the Yorkshire team included five players from Sheffield FC. 

In Lancashire, former pupils of Eton and Rugby schools formed the first clubs in Liverpool and Manchester, to be followed by Sale in 1861, Swinton (1866) and Rochdale (1867), each one established by young business and professional men who were also members of existing cricket or athletic clubs. Slightly to their south, Stoke Ramblers were formed in 1868 by old boys of Charterhouse school who brought together the town's young accountants, solicitors and civil engineers to play football with their local peers.

The clubs formed in the industrial north invariably had a geographic name and quickly came to be seen as representatives of their locality. This was in contrast to many of the clubs formed at the same time in London which had no geographic connection at all, as can be seen in the names of many of the founder members of the FA and RFU, such as Wanderers, Crusaders, Harlequins, Flamingoes, Gipsies, Mohicans and even the No Names. This difference was not merely one of nomenclature. 

The mid-nineteenth century was the era of Victorian municipalism, where provincial civic pride and local rivalry inspired the erection of ever-more ornate and elaborate town halls and other municipal buildings. Leeds opened its huge neo-classical town hall in 1858, while Manchester began the nine-year construction of its own neo-Gothic town hall in 1868; almost every other town across the north sought to emulate them. This competitiveness reflected local trade rivalries between the cotton and woollen manufacturing towns on both sides of the Pennines. Football clubs in Bradford, Huddersfield, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester were all led by scions of textile manufacturers and merchants, and the game itself soon became a vehicle of municipal pride and civic rivalry. 

Almost all of these northern football clubs initially identified with the Rugby School tradition of football. As the Nottinghamshire Guardian, in a region where rugby rules were rarely played, conceded in 1870 'the Rugby rules, which allow carrying the ball, are the most commonly practised'. The popularity of  Rugby School football was a consequence of the desire of young men to play football of whatever code was available locally. Sam Duckitt recalled that when he and his friends set up the Halifax FC in 1873, 'we were absolutely unacquainted with the rules of either Rugby or Association. Of course, when we did commence to play, we fell in at once with the prevailing Rugby rules', because those were the rules played by all of the local sides. In much of the north, not to play rugby rules would mean not to play football. 

Football's growth in popularity among the provincial middle classes in the 1860s largely passed by the FA. The FA’s existential crisis of 1867 stimulated it to seek new members and bring its rules closer to the Eton and Harrow games. Sheffield FC delegate William Chesterman attended the FA's 1867 annual general meeting and proposed three amendments to the FA rules, one of which was in support of the rugby-style rouge, all of which were decisively voted down. Despite later claims by its supporters, Sheffield had very little influence over the FA. Over the next decade the Sheffield clubs were forced to accept the FA’s leadership and abandon almost all of their unique rules before being absorbed by the FA in 1878.

The late 1860s also saw the rise to prominence within the FA of Charles Alcock, who was appointed secretary and treasurer of the FA in February 1870. He was a talented footballer and cricketer, and was also secretary of Surrey County Cricket Club between 1872 and 1907, editor of the monthly Cricket magazine, and also editor of Lilywhite's Cricketers' Annual. No sooner had Alcock been appointed than the FA arranged an England versus Scotland match to take place on 5 March 1870 at the Kennington Oval cricket ground, the home of Alcock’s Surrey CCC. Although the match was not at all representative - the Scotland side fielded only one Scottish-born player and the entire side played for London clubs, not least because the FA version of football was barely played north of the border - it raised the FA's profile significantly. The 1-1 draw was sufficient for another match to be arranged in November, which England won 1-0 against a slightly more representative Scots team which this time fielded three native-born players.

These two matches not only raised the FA's profile but also gave it, in an era of rising imperial nationalism, the prestige of being able to represent England and Scotland. Its declaration of itself as the representative of nations came as a shock to the complacent disdain of rugby playing clubs. Especially in Scotland, where rugby was unquestionably the dominant code, the FA's internationals seemed to be an affront to the football status quo. Rugby, according to Loretto School headmaster H.H. Almond, was the 'parent code' and the FA had no right to claim to be representing the Scottish nation. Stung by the FA's impertinence, rugby clubs on both sides of the border began to organise. 

Two weeks after the second FA international, the captains of Scotland's five leading rugby clubs issued a challenge to rugby players in England to an international match to take place in Glasgow or Edinburgh. Soon after that, Benjamin Burns and Edwin Ash, the secretaries of the Blackheath and Richmond clubs respectively, published an appeal in Bell's Life to 'the supporters of Rugby Football' to meet and 'join with us in framing a code of rules to be generally adopted'. 

A month later, on 26 January 1871, 32 delegates representing 20 rugby-playing clubs met at the Pall Mall Restaurant in London's Charing Cross and in little more than two hours agreed a constitution and appointed a committee of three old Rugbeians to draft what they referred to with typical pomposity as 'the Laws of the Game'. The Rugby Football Union had been founded. Two months later, on 27 March, 8,000 people assembled at Edinburgh's Raeburn Place to watch Scotland defeat England in the first rugby international. The honour of the Scottish nation was upheld, and the position of the Rugby code as its most important code of football was re-established. Or so it seemed.

On 20 July 1871 the FA Committee met and backed Alcock’s proposal that 'a Challenge Cup should be established in connection with the Association, for which all clubs should be invited to compete'. Cup tournaments in public schools at this time were common, and the aim of the FA Cup was to stimulate interest in the game and increase the attractiveness of the FA to unaffiliated football clubs, and so the first round of the Football Association Challenge Cup kicked off with 15 teams on 11 November 1871. Alcock’s Wanderers eventually met the Royal Engineers in the final, dominating the game and running out 1-0 winners, thanks to a goal after 15 mins from Morton Betts, who like Alcock was an Old Harrovian. Scoring the winning goal was just about the only thing Alcock did not do, although he did have one effort disallowed. He not only captained the Wanderers side, but the final, like the England versus Scotland matches, was also staged at Surrey cricket club’s Kennington Oval. The FA Cup was truly his creation. 

It was now completely clear to all was that the Association and Rugby organisations were going their own separate ways. Football was now irrevocably split. There would never be a single, universal game.

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The 1870s saw football leave the world of exclusive gentleman's clubs to become, with startling rapidity, a sport played and watched by all classes; the 1880s saw it further transmogrify into a commercial juggernaut that commanded the attention of millions. 

And just when people thought it could not become any more popular, its appeal expanded yet further. Like the railways in the 1830s or the internet in the 2000s, the normally slow alchemy of historical change was compressed into a few short years, turning the rocks of public school football into the diamonds of mass spectator sport. 

This new football was a product of Britain’s second industrial revolution, the result of railways transforming travel and industry, and technologies like the telegraph making news almost instantaneous. Mass-market daily newspapers now brought everyday stories to a population that had become almost universally literate due to educational reforms like the 1870 Forster Act, and rising wages and shorter working hours brought new leisure opportunities for the working classes. This new, highly organised football had almost nothing in common with the old folk football games of custom and tradition. This was a modern sport for modern times, a scientific game for a scientific age, a mass entertainment for the era of the masses.

Football’s radical metamorphosis into a mass spectator sport was not the intention of its leaders. The football clubs of privately-educated young professional men were for their own recreation, places where one could relax and entertain oneself in the company of one's peers. The FA and the RFU wanted to extend the game horizontally across men of similar circumstance, not vertically down to the lower classes.

Throughout the 1870s, football was a self-consciously middle-class sport. In December 1872 the Sporting Gazette published a list of 24 'recognised gentleman's football clubs', including the FA's Barnes and Wanderers clubs, and the RFU's Harlequins and Wasps, with whom it advised that fixtures 'can generally be accepted with safety'. So that its readers might avoiding socially embarrassing fixtures in other sports, the magazine also provided similar lists of athletics, rowing and cricket clubs. 

In 1874 The Goal, a weekly founded in 1873 and probably the first publication devoted solely to football, pointed out that almost every cricket club now 'assembles its members in the winter months behind the goal posts, to supplement and utilise the muscle gained in their summer exercises’. Many football clubs - including Derby County, Preston North End, Halifax and Widnes - were the product of cricketers’ desire to continue playing sport after the summer had ended. 

The link with cricket also provided footballers with the administrative models with which to organise the sport. In 1874, Yorkshire’s five leading football clubs came together to form the Yorkshire County Football Club. Shortly after in 1875 the Birmingham District FA was founded to bring together ten local sides. It was followed within eighteen months by the creation of county associations in Shropshire, North Staffordshire and Walsall and District.

Most importantly, local administrators also took a lead from the FA and created local FA Cup-style knockout competitions. The 1876-77 season saw the start of the Birmingham Senior Cup in soccer and the Yorkshire Cup in rugby. In 1876 rugby clubs in Cheshire formed their own county union, which then launched its own cup competition in 1878. The Lancashire Football Association was also founded in 1878 and Darwen became the first winners of the Lancashire Cup the following year. 

In the same year, Darwen fought out a tumultuous battle with Old Etonians in the quarter-final stage of the  FA Cup drawing with them 5-5 and 2-2 before finally succumbing 6-2. It was a match that captured the national imagination, not simply because of its epic nature but also because it pitted representatives of the British ruling class against representatives of a northern working-class textile town. Such a meeting of the two classes was impossible in any other sphere of British life, and it gave soccer a social meaning that resonated far beyond a contest for a sporting trophy. ‘There was not a large amount of interest taken in [association] football so far as the North was concerned’ wrote ‘A Free Critic’ in 1892, ‘and it was not until Darwen made their journey to play the Old Etonians in the English cup ties that we in Lancashire commenced to think of popularising the game.’

In the industrial towns and cities of the English midlands and north, cup competitions had a revolutionary impact on football, rapidly and unexpectedly making it a focus for local pride and civic rivalries. From being private groups of select young men, football clubs quickly became representatives of a community, carrying the honour of their neighbourhood into battle on the football pitch. 

By the end of the 1870s, dozens of clubs were playing in cup competitions across the industrial regions of Britain, and their success spurred the creation of other even more localised tournaments. The Yorkshire Cup led to the establishment of local cups in every major town in West and East Yorkshire, while the success of the Birmingham Senior Cup inspired the Walsall Cup, the Staffordshire Cup, the Mayor's Charity Cup, the Campbell Rovers Cup, the Wednesbury Charity Cup, the Birmingham Junior Cup and the SH Strollers Cup in the West Midlands alone. By the early 1880s, a vast thicket of football cup tournaments had enveloped the expanding urban centres of industrial Britain, and these became the means by which football was transformed into a mass spectator sport.

The appeal of playing in the FA Cup and the regional competitions of both codes led to clubs having to choose FA or RFU rules. Clubs had to specialise in one code or the other to maximise their chances of winning. One consequence was the Sheffield FA found itself squeezed. Sheffield joined the FA with hopes of converting it to their own rules but the FA proved impervious. For Sheffield, games against London and Glasgow were the highlight of the local season, but differences in the rules left these matches unsatisfactory as a true test of inter-city pride. Sheffield’s insistence on only one defender - who could be the goalkeeper - between the goal and the attacking players, as opposed to London and Glasgow's three defenders, essentially meant its game had no offside rule. Eventually in 1877, the Sheffield FA abandoned its own rulebook and adopted the FA’s rules. Football had discarded the last of its local variations and was now consolidated around the twin poles of the FA and RFU.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, people flocked to industrial towns in search of work, and an entertainment industry emerged to provide amusement outside of work. Music halls dominated the leisure landscape by the 1880s, by which time every major town and city had at least one 'palace of varieties'. The brewing industry also expanded rapidly, building new pubs of unprecedented size and luxury. Mass literacy boosted the popularity of local and regional newspapers, which responded by publishing Saturday night entertainment specials - one of the earliest being Birmingham's Saturday Night, which first appeared in  1882 - that soon became devoted to sport and especially to the afternoon’s local and national football results.

This explosion of interest in the game was made possible by the increased leisure time and rising standard of living of the industrial working class. Textile workers in northern England, such as in the future cradles of football in the cotton towns of Lancashire and the woollen producers of West Yorkshire, had secured a two o'clock end to work on Saturdays in 1850, and in 1874 parliament passed another Factory Act that made the one o'clock end to work on Saturdays the norm. From the early 1870s, wages also began to rise. 

But this increased spending power and leisure time did not automatically mean that football would become the sport of the working class. Although residual enthusiasm for football did undoubtedly exist in certain regions, the great mass of working class participants did not spontaneously take up the game in the second-half of the nineteenth century but came to it through the institutions of the church, the workplace and the pub. 

By the last third of the Victorian era, Muscular Christianity had come to be seen not merely as a means of inculcating masculine nationalist values in the future masters of the British Empire, but also into its servants. Moreover, the relative harmony between the classes that existed in Britain from the defeat of the Chartists in the 1840s to the emergence of 'new unionism' in the late 1880s - what Engels called the 'forty years of hibernation' of class conflict - meant that sport across the classes was not impossible. 

Thus Lancashire’s Turton FC in the early 1870s could field teams with Old Harrovians and manual workers playing Harrow School rules, while the Pilkington works rugby team in St Helens on Merseyside contained both shop-floor workers and the heirs to the Pilkington fortune. Such workplace-based teams were created by employers as an early form of what became known as 'welfare capitalism', using sport to foster a sense of corporate unity and esprit de corps. 

In a similar way, the Anglican church viewed football as the apple to tempt working-class youths away from idleness, crime and immorality, and towards Christian duty. The list of football clubs that emerged from church organisations is a roll-call of subsequently famous clubs of all codes: Aston Villa, Bolton Wanderers, Everton, Northampton Saints, Leeds Rhinos, and  Wakefield Trinity, to name just a handful. The vast majority of these new working class footballers remained steadfastly inured to the church's appeal to piety, and church clubs usually succumbed eventually to the exigencies of competitive football and abandoned their evangelical mission. Not even the spiritual power of the Anglican church could now stand in the way of football.

However, there was one, ultimately crucial, difference between football’s two governing bodies: the Rugby Football Union refused to organise a national cup tournament like the FA Cup. In 1877 Calcutta FC disbanded and donated a trophy to the RFU to use as ‘a challenge cup to be annually competed for by all rugby union clubs’ on the lines of the FA Cup. The RFU declined the suggestion because of ‘difficulties of all clubs playing together’, and instead awarded the ‘Calcutta Cup’ to the winners of the annual England versus Scotland match. It was a decision that would play no small part in rugby’s reversal of fortune. In January 1871, Bell's Life had written that 'every year has increased the superiority in point of numbers and popularity of the rugby clubs over those who are subject to the rule of the [Football] Association'. But by 1895, rugby’s clubs still numbered in the hundreds and with few exceptions its crowds could not compare with those of soccer. Worst of all, there were now two rugby unions - the RFU and the Northern Union (which would become known as rugby league) - the result of a bloody decade-long battle fought over the legalisation of payments to players that shattered the game into separate middle- and working-class constituencies.

Within fifteen years of the first FA Cup final, soccer would be dominated by clubs that drew their players and supporters from the industrial proletariat. In rugby, the very same process would break the game into two hostile camps. In both soccer and northern rugby, the game’s tactics, rules and culture were transformed by the invention and enthusiasm of working-class people.

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Nowhere could the face of modern football be seen more clearly than in Glasgow, where from the 1870s its football culture blossomed into the most glorious summer to create the archetypal football city. 

Its population doubled to over 760,000 between 1851 and 1901, and it became home to almost 20 per cent of Scotland's entire population. The rapid growth of the shipbuilding industry and other engineering trades saw working-class living standards rise between a third and a half. 

Organised football was probably first played in the city in 1864 under rugby rules at Glasgow Academy, the city's elite private school. In 1866, the school’s old boys formed the Glasgow Academicals club, following the creation of the West of Scotland club the previous year. Both sides yet again emerged from cricket clubs. Association rules were brought to the city in 1867 when Queen's Park FC was founded, again by privately-educated young professional men. In 1871 Queen's Park joined the FA and in 1872 organised the first official Scotland versus England soccer match at Glasgow's Hamilton Crescent cricket ground. This was to prove the catalyst for soccer's immense popularity in the city.

Over the next 15 years, Scotland won nine and England just two of their encounters. Between 1876 and 1882, the scorelines read 3-0, 3-1, 7-2, 4-5, 5-4, 6-1, 5-1. It wasn't until 1888 that England managed their first win in Glasgow. From 1906 onwards, there would never be less than 100,000 people attending Scotland versus England matches, none of which would be lost by Scotland. In contrast, with the exception of a rain-sodden 0-0 draw with England in 1873, the Scottish rugby union team kept itself to its Edinburgh heartland, with the result that rugby in Glasgow stood loftily aloof from the explosion of interest in football in the city; a mere eleven rugby clubs were formed in the city between 1874 and 1900.

Yet by 1890 there were hundreds of soccer clubs playing in every corner of Glasgow, with major club matches regular attracting crowds in excess of 10,000, and many more for important cup matches. By the early 1900s, Glasgow’s three major football stadia, Hampden, Ibrox and Parkhead, could together accommodate over 300,000 spectators, almost half of the city’s population. Nor was it just as spectators that football captured the imagination of the population. Matthew McDowell has calculated that by 1900 a soccer club existed for every 160 males aged between 15 and 29 living in central Scotland. 

The passion that gripped urban Scots for soccer was facilitated by the works of the municipal age. The trams that had been introduced to the city in 1871 allowed players and spectators to travel across the city to play and support their teams. The public parks that had been created provided ample space for the playing of football, not to mention the name for Queen's Park FC. And the local press provided the daily sustenance for the unending conversations about the game throughout the workshops and offices of the city. In 1884 the Scottish Athletic Journal claimed sales of 20,000 a week.

Other industrial regions could boast similar levels of interest to that in Glasgow, but none could match the completeness with which football enveloped the city. In 1886 20,000 people crammed themselves into the Yorkshire Cup semi-final between Halifax and Batley, larger than any FA or Scottish FA Cup final crowd thus far. In Birmingham, its Saturday Night newspaper in 1883 could list 107 local clubs of sufficient standing to warrant a place in its unofficial merit tables, alongside seven local cup competitions.

But Glasgow was unique in its huge number of clubs, the immensity of its crowds and the complete identification of the city with soccer. National, local and, given soccer’s dominance by working-class players and spectators by the 1880s, class pride, became intertwined so much so that Glasgow was Scottish football. If Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century, as Walter Benjamin described it, Glasgow stood alongside it as the football capital of the age, providing the archetype for the modern relationship between football and the city.

Glasgow also underlined a deeper truth about football's appeal. It was a city of immigrants, from Ireland, England, and the Scottish countryside. In 1881 almost half of its population had been born outside of the city. As people poured into Glasgow's tenement blocks, football provided Saturday afternoon entertainment they could share with their neighbours and workmates, strengthening the collective bonds of local solidarity. Local patriotism and civic pride could be expressed on an almost continual basis through football.

But football also brought something that was new. For perhaps the first time in human history since the age of the Roman colosseum, people could pay a small amount of money to experience extremes of emotion. For two hours or so, the world of work and daily life could be set aside while the spectator rode a collective roller-coaster of intense highs and lows, joy and despair, exultation and frustration. The football crowd offered the opportunity to be part of a huge collective throng, with its unconscious rhythms, spontaneous flows, and sense of belonging, every other week. 

Such a level of personal involvement was something that no other form of entertainment could provide. People did not merely watch football from the terraces, they experienced it alongside thousands of other people. Unlike the theatre, the concert or the music hall, football allowed participation for both the player and the audience. The spectator chose a side and then, through shouting, singing, chanting, cheering and booing with their fellow fans, sought to affect the outcome of the match. The win or loss was felt as intensely by the fan as it was the player. 

Although the game offered the most visceral experience, this 'commodification' of the emotions was not unique to football and could also be seen in many of the newly commercialised forms of leisure of the late nineteenth century. The 'sensation novel', in which the reader was drawn into worlds of sex, murder and insanity, sought to stimulate the emotions, a phenomenon given additional impetus with the rise of the horror novel, such as Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897. But until the rise of the cinema and popular music in the twentieth century, nothing could compete with the ability of football to offer a capsule moment of intense emotion without consequence.

The unique and multi-faceted appeal of football of whatever code led to an exponential growth in the numbers of people attending matches in the last two decades of the Victorian era. Barely 2,000 people watched Wanderers' victory over the Royal Engineers in the 1872 FA Cup Final. The crowd wouldn't reach five figures until Blackburn Rovers’ second successive win in 1885. But from then on attendances ballooned, reaching 45,000 in 1893 and 101,000 in 1901. Scottish crowds reached five figures as early as 1877, when Vale of Leven prevailed over Rangers in an epic final that was drawn twice, and expanded to over 40,000 for the first time in 1892.

Glasgow’s impact on the game was as great on the field as it was off it. The intensity of  its competitions had forged highly-skilled players and created a style of play based on team-work, combination and close passing that became known as the ‘scientific’ game. Reflecting everyday life in the factories, shipyards and working-class communities of the region, collectivity underpinned the Scottish way of football. As the regular victories over England demonstrated, Scottish players and tactics were far more advanced than the individual play of the English public schools or the long-ball game of the Sheffield clubs. 

Such skills did not go unnoticed by the ambitious soccer clubs of Lancashire. In January 1878, Glasgow’s Partick FC travelled down to play Darwen in Lancashire, the third match that the two sides had played over the previous two years. A few months later, at the start of the following season, Partick’s Fergus Suter and James Love joined the Lancastrians. It was widely suspected that both were being paid by the club. When Suter then transferred to Blackburn Rovers at the end of the 1879-80 season, no-one was in any doubt. 

Football was on the cusp of another revolution.

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Throughout history, women have been involved in football to varying degrees, and it should come as no surprise that it was the Scottish cauldron of football that produced the first recorded examples of women playing organised soccer. 

In May 1881 two teams of women from Glasgow began a series of Scotland versus England matches. The first attracted 1,000 people to the Easter Road ground in Edinburgh while the following week 5,000 saw the teams at Shawfields in Glasgow. This was a purely commercial venture designed to profit from the novelty of women playing what was perceived as a ‘man’s game’ and the male organisers made no attempt to disguise its nature. 

According to press reports, there were almost no women spectators at the Glasgow match, in contrast to the large numbers of women watching men’s matches, and it was abandoned after 55 minutes due to a pitch invasion when the women players were attacked. The organisers’ aim was not to encourage women to play football but to make money from the mockery and misogyny of the crowd. Five further matches were played in the football heartlands of Blackburn, Manchester, where the match was ended after another pitch invasion, and Liverpool, where the sides appear to have switched to rugby rules. Having failed to make money the venture folded less than two months after it started, leaving the male chauvinism of football as strong as it had ever been.

Although women were firmly excluded from all versions of the game on the pitch, they were still a significant presence off the pitch. Few reports of major matches failed to note the significant presence of ‘ladies’. As early as the first Yorkshire versus Lancashire match in 1870 the press had noted the ‘large number of the fair sex’ in attendance, and as the sport’s popularity exploded, women were an integral part of football crowds. ‘Don’t imagine that all the spectators were men, for they were not. Indeed, the female element was very largely represented and the comments from this portion of the gathering were as numerous and as critical as those of their brothers, husbands and fathers,’ commented The Yorkshireman about the 1883 Yorkshire versus Cheshire rugby match. 

As with men, football was an opportunity for women to step out of their traditional roles for a couple of hours each week. In 1888 the chairman of Swinton criticised the side’s female supporters for their ‘bad manners and rowdiness,’ and in 1884, the victorious Batley team found themselves being pelted with red hot coals by a woman as they left the vanquished Horbury team’s ground.

In 1887, as part of the football boom that followed in the wake of the legalisation of professionalism, another attempt was made to profit from women playing soccer. Madame Well’s Grimsby Town Team and Madame Kenny’s Famous Edinboro’ Team played each other for a silver cup during Easter 1887 in Hull. Organised by the manager of Alhambra Palace Music Hall, the match was abandoned after a pitch invasion and assaults on the players. It was most definitely not an attempt to promote football for women or to encourage them to take up the sport. Once again, the idea was to make money from titillation and mockery. 

Rather than challenge gender stereotypes, these commercial matches of the 1880s reinforced them. It is also quite possible that such events discouraged women from playing football. As Patrick Brennan has discovered, when the Southwick Lilies’ young women’s side in Sunderland advertised for opponents they received two replies from other women’s teams but could not organise a match due to parental opposition. Eventually, in February 1889 two women’s sides from a local glass factory - Greener’s Violets and Greener's Cutters - played a six-a-side game that was won 8-2 by the Violets. Almost thirty years were to pass before working-class women once again played organised football.

It would be middle-class women who made the most sustained attempt to play soccer in the Victorian era. In late 1894 the British Ladies’ Football Club was created by Nettie Honeyball, and its president was Lady Florence Dixie, an aristocrat who was a prominent advocate of the rational dress movement, which sought to make women’s clothing less restrictive and more practical. She was also the sister of the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, the sports enthusiast who infamously brought about jailing of Oscar Wilde. 

Thirty women responded to an advertisement for players, all of whom were, as Honeyball informed the press, ‘educated ladies and belong to what I term the upper middle-class’. Indeed, Honeyball openly refused applications from working-class women: ‘if I accepted all the girls from the masses that made application to join us, why our list would have been filled long ago’, inadvertently demonstrating the pent-up demand for the game among working-class women. On 23 March 1895 the club divided its players into North and South teams to play its first match in front of 10,000 spectators at London's Crouch End. Although the club had been formed to capitalise on the ever-increasing national obsession with football, its business model was the touring All England cricket elevens of the 1860s.

The British Ladies played 43 matches across Britain in the next three months as North v South, or more usually Reds v Blues. By the time the following season had kicked off, the club had split in two, with both factions claiming to be the Original Lady Footballers. Nevertheless, the two sides played 101 matches in the 1895-96 season, and a further 19 the next season as interest, both from players and public, waned. 

Although Honeyball’s teams were nothing like the music hall-inspired sides of the 1880s - they trained seriously and when confronted with chauvinist opposition in the press responded with a resolute defence of soccer’s value to the health of women - the British Ladies was primarily a money-making exercise that sought to capitalise on the novelty of watching women playing football. Although its leaders were vocal in their belief that football was a game for women as much as it was for men, they did little to encourage other women to take it up and left behind no legacy.

The phenomenon of the ‘New Woman’ was a transnational movement and moves to organise women’s football were not confined to Britain. In San Francisco, businessmen sought to profit from the popularity of football and the growing awareness of women’s rights by organising two women’s soccer matches in December 1893. Part of an attempt to bring crowds to the newly opened Central Park stadium, the two matches did not attract enough spectators and the experiment failed. In 1897 two matches of women playing modified American football were also commercial failures and women’s football was abandoned. 

In New Zealand, where women won the right to vote in 1893, an attempt was made to establish two women’s rugby teams in 1891. As would be the case with the British Lady Footballers, Mrs Nita Webbe sought to combine the campaign for women’s rights among middle-class women with the commercial popularity of football by setting up two women’s sides to tour New Zealand. ‘In this age are not my sex coming to the front in every line? As doctors, lawyers, scholars, are they not successful?’ she asked. ‘Yet it is only after years of bitter opposition that their right to the professions has been acknowledged. In athletics a similar prejudice used to prevail in even a stronger degree, but is not that rapidly dying out?’ Sadly, it was not dead and Nita Webbe’s plans never left the drawing board.

Football’s hostility to women playing the game was not simply based on the personal misogyny of the male leaders of soccer and rugby. It was structurally embedded in the DNA of all forms of the sport. The modern game had emerged in the public schools not merely as a means of instilling masculinity into young men, but also as a way to inure them against femininity, and especially effeminacy and homosexuality. The Reverend Frank Marshall, president of the Yorkshire Rugby Union in the 1880s, was speaking for more than himself when he roared at a committee meeting that ‘we have no dealings with women here!’ 

Arthur Kinnaird, who played in nine FA Cup Finals between 1873 and 1883, and served a 33-year stint as FA president, was also a High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland, an enthusiastic supporter of organisations such as the National Vigilance Society - which was behind the jailing of an English publisher for publishing 'obscene' works by Zola and Flaubert in 1889 - and a cheerleader for the persecution of Oscar Wilde in 1895. 

He was not alone in his prejudices. Football had been established to be a resolutely male sphere with the explicit intention of excluding women. The very fact that on the rare occasions that women did play the game it was in segregated games - an arbitrary division derived from the sport’s origins in all-male schools that was unquestioningly accepted as the norm - underlined the role that football played in upholding and reinforcing the gender-segregated order of capitalist society. 

It would not be until World War One that football would became a mass participation sport for women.

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As Glasgow showed, the explosion of public interest in football across all sections in society from the late 1870s brought one hitherto unknown element into the sport: money. 

The importance that cup competitions now assumed for both national and local pride also injected a competitive imperative into the sport. Money and the desire to win became the twin engines that would propel football into a completely new era. 

Fergus Suter and James Love’s move to Lancashire laid down a path that would be followed by thousands of other Scottish footballers over the next decades. No northern soccer club was complete without at least a Scottish leavening. In December 1884 the Scottish FA wrote to 58 players then playing with English clubs, informing them they would not be eligible to be picked for Scotland as they were classed as professionals. Eleven of them played for Preston North End, nine for Burnley and the rest, with the exception of Aston Villa's Archie Hunter, all played for clubs in Lancashire cotton towns. When Liverpool kicked-off their first season in 1892, every member of their inaugural side was a Scot.

Professionalism was also emerging in rugby. When Suter and Love were on their way to Darwen, Harrogate rugby player and professional cricketer Teddy Bartram was joining Wakefield Trinity in exchange for a job as the assistant secretary of the club at £52 per annum. The role of 'assistant secretary' was a common ruse of cricket clubs to enable amateurs to be paid without being classed as professionals. Other players followed, tempted to change clubs for payments and also for jobs, at first in the cotton and woollen factories that speckled both sides of the Pennines, and then increasingly by the prospects of becoming a pub landlord. 

A migration of footballers to northern England was also seen in rugby, although instead moving south from Scotland it was from industrial south Wales that players 'went north' to play in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Although this began slightly later than in Scotland - the first recorded player to play for a northern club was future Welsh international Harry Bowen in 1884 - it also highlighted the rapid development of football beyond England. 

As with Glasgow and the English industrial cities, Cardiff, Swansea and industrial South Wales had experienced exponential population growth. Cardiff grew from 20,000 people in 1851 to 182,000 by 1911. In 1878 the South Wales Cup tournament began and, as was the case everywhere else a cup competition took hold, the game spread like wildfire, with Cardiff alone having 220 teams playing by 1890. By then, Welsh players in northern English rugby sides were a common sight, attracted by the jobs and money that could be provided by cash-rich northern sides.

It wasn't only imported players from Scotland and Wales that benefited from football's commercial success. As the case of Teddy Bertram demonstrated, skilled footballers could receive substantial rewards from clubs seeking cup success, regardless of their origins. In the 1882-83 season Bolton Wanderers' outgoings were almost £1,100. Where, wondered the Athletic News, had this money been spent? Eighteen months later, The Yorkshireman weekly magazine could report that 'I could mention some dozen players who (if report is to be believed) all receive money over and above their actual expenses'. It wasn't only cash that players received. Gifts of legs of mutton, bottles of port, cloth for suits were all made to players and teams for outstanding individual performances or simple victories in cup ties. 

Such practices were viewed with disquiet by those who governed football. Educated in the public school tradition that sport was a source of moral education, they instinctively believed professionalism led to the corruption of sport by gambling and match-fixing. They feared that professionalism would undermine the structure of football, and allow working-class athletes to dominate the sport. This had almost been the case in cricket, when the popularity of professional touring sides such as William Clarke's All-England Eleven had briefly threatened the MCC’s authority over the game in the mid-nineteenth century. Underlying these fears was an acute desire to use sport to reinforce the status quo between the classes.

The sudden popularity of cup competitions in the late 1870s brought these concerns to the fore. Defeating local rivals and winning cups now had a wider social importance, causing clubs to seek out players who could bring cup glory to their communities, regardless of whether the player came from that community. Knock-out tournaments also meant that a club could now find itself playing a team that it considered to be socially inferior, and that it could quite possibly lose to them. For many this was unacceptable. Cup competitions therefore tended to undermine the informal social codes that had previously governed the sport.

When the first reports of men being paid or offered employment to play football appeared in the late 1870s, the leaders of both codes felt something had to be done. To counteract the threat of paid players, the initial impulse of both codes of football was, once again, to follow the lead of cricket.

In late November 1879 the Yorkshire Rugby Union committee decided that ‘no player who is not strictly an amateur shall be allowed to play in the Challenge Cup ties, or in any match under the direct control of the County Football Committee; the definition of the term 'amateur' shall be the same as that adopted by the MCC’. But the MCC’s definition of an amateur was simply a player who took ‘no more than his expenses for a match’. This was deliberately vague and did nothing to resolve the issue. In 1882 the Lancashire FA adopted cricket’s County Championship qualification criteria and ruled that players born outside of Lancashire were not eligible to play in the Lancashire Cup until they had lived in the county for two years. 

Initially soccer’s leaders were more determined to fight professionalism than the RFU. Only in Yorkshire, where the cup tournament had become widely popular, did the rugby authorities take measures to combat the problem. The RFU itself did not seriously debate the issue until 1886, whereas the FA passed a resolution in 1882 declaring that:

Any member of a club receiving remuneration or consideration of any sort above his actual expenses and any wages actually lost by any such player taking part in any match, shall be debarred from taking part in either cup, inter-Association or International contests, and any club employing such a player shall be excluded from this Association.

It was already too late. Barely eighteen months later, Upton Park, a London gentlemen’s club, drew 1-1 with Preston North End in the fourth round of the FA Cup. It appealed against the result, claiming that Preston had fielded paid players. When confronted with the charges, Preston’s secretary William Sudell cheerfully admitted that they had found jobs for their players and that this was standard practice in Lancashire. The class element behind the dispute was illustrated by the Preston Guardian, which pointed that 'no working man can be an amateur football player. A working man cannot afford to absent himself from work in order to take part in a game without remuneration’. 

Preston were suspended from the FA but, seeing the writing on the wall, Alcock proposed that the FA legalise professionalism along the lines of cricket. He was in a minority so, at the urging of the FA’s assistant secretary N.L. Jackson, a journalist like Alcock and the founder of Corinthian FC, a committee was set up to consider the matter. The urgency of the issue was underlined shortly after when the FA suspended Burnley for exactly the same offence. 

The committee reported back in June 1884 and recommended that payments be allowed to players who took time off work to play, known as ‘broken-time payments’, but all other forms of payment should be banned. Just as drastically, it also suggested that only English players should be allowed to play in the FA Cup.

However, as William Sudell’s comments demonstrated, the Lancashire clubs were not passively prepared to accept the strictures of the FA. News of Preston’s suspension was met by Lancashire clubs voting that ‘a northern association be formed which will promote the interest of football generally in the northern districts’. When the FA announced it would bar clubs from the FA Cup if they fielded or played against a club fielding an ineligible imported player, the northern network immediately sprang into life, and on 23 October the British Football Association (BFA) was founded by 17 clubs.

The new FA rules were an existential threat to the top Lancashire clubs. If they were barred from playing clubs with imported players, their fixture lists would quickly dry up and their income shrivel. Football for them was a commercial business and the loss of attractive fixtures against leading clubs with star players would bring financial ruin. The BFA meeting in Manchester on 30 October was an impressive display of club power, attracting 70 delegates representing 37 clubs. Four days after the BFA meeting, the FA backed down and dropped the proposed ban on imported players and called a special general meeting to discuss professionalism. Eight days later, Alcock and Jackson’s proposal that it was ‘now expedient to legalise professionalism under stringent conditions’, was endorsed by the full FA committee. 

However, the vote for professionalism at the FA’s special general meeting in January 1885 failed to reach the necessary two-thirds majority, as did another special meeting was held in March. But the tide had clearly turned, and by the time a third special meeting convened on 20 July 1885, the inevitability of professionalism had been accepted and the two-thirds majority was comfortably achieved. 

As in cricket, the role of the professional soccer player was stringently controlled. All professional players had to be registered by the FA, they could not change clubs without permission and they were subject to a residential qualification before they could play in the FA Cup. Professionals could not sit on FA committees nor could they be a club representative to the FA. In short, players would be paid to play football, and that was all they would be allowed to do. 

But if professionalism removed any danger that working-class professionals could dominate football administration, it meant precisely the opposite on the field. In April 1885 Queen’s Park lost 2-0 to Blackburn Rovers in that season’s FA Cup final. It would be the last time that a gentleman’s club would ever play in the final. Indeed, with the exception of the Slough-based Swifts club the following year, they would be the last such club to appear even in the semi-finals. 

This was the culmination of a trend that had emerged in 1882 when Blackburn Rovers became the first northern side to appear in the final. They lost 1-0 to Old Etonians but the following season their local rivals, Blackburn Olympic, upheld the pride of the town with an extra-time 2-1 win over the Etonians, and the cup stayed in Blackburn for the next four years as Rovers completed a hat-trick of wins. The age of the professional had arrived, and there would be no turning back.

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If cup competitions were the launchpad for football's popularity, professionalism was the rocket fuel that propelled soccer into the stratosphere.

Although the quest for cup glory had caused clubs to import and pay players, it soon became apparent that knock-out tournaments were not enough to support the financial burden that they had brought. Players’ wages had to be met and the huge increase in spectators also meant constructing grandstands, laying down terraces and installing turnstiles. The administrative responsibilities of running what were now sports businesses also meant a club had to employ at least a paid secretary. 

A good cup run would bring cash flooding into a club, but it could just as easily find itself knocked-out in its first match and having to rely on friendly matches for its income. This was rarely enough. One of the reasons for Blackburn Olympic’s abrupt demise in 1889 was the simple fact that, after the legalisation of professionalism in 1885, they never won another FA Cup tie, let alone final. As Stoke-born novelist Arnold Bennett noted about the football crowd in 1911, ‘if it could see victories it would pay sixpence, but it would not pay sixpence to assist at defeats’.

The only way to avoid the same fate as the Olympic was to have regular high-quality fixtures that would be consistently attractive to spectators. Once again, cricket provided part of the answer. Since the 1860s there had been an unofficial county championship, largely tabulated by the cricket press, although the official MCC county championship began in 1890. This was advocated by some professional soccer administrators as a useful model. It is also likely, as Stefan Szymanski has pointed out, that they were influenced by the success of baseball’s National League, founded in 1876 by America’s leading professional clubs. 

On 2 March 1888 Aston Villa director William MacGregor proposed the formation of a league competition based on home and away fixtures. Matters moved quickly and on April 12 teams from Lancashire and the Midlands met to establish the Football League. Selection of teams for the new league was made using strict business criteria. There was to be only one team in each town (another contributory factor in the downfall of Blackburn Olympic who lost out to Rovers) and stadia had to be easily accessible to ensure good crowds (Nottingham Forest seemingly lost out to Notts County because the latter had a better tram service from the city centre).

The new league kicked off on 8 September 1888 and proved to be as successful as its founders had hoped. Preston carried off the first championship and also won the FA Cup. Most importantly, the league fulfilled the financial hopes of its founders, attracting 602,000 spectators. As had been the case with cup competitions a decade previously, the Football League’s successful proof of concept immediately led to emulation, and a plethora of leagues sprang up across the country. 

In 1892 the Football League merged with one of these, the Football Alliance, which became its second division. In 1894 the Southern League was formed. Although Woolwich Arsenal, the first professional side in the south of England, joined the Football League’s second division in 1893, football in the south of England remained dominated by amateur clubs, restricting the development of the game as a mass spectator sport. The Southern League initially combined both amateur and professional sides but quickly became an incubator for the spread of professional soccer below its traditional heartlands in the north and midlands.

The impetus that professionalism and the league system had given soccer can be gauged by the huge growth in attendances. By 1895 aggregate attendances at Football League matches had more than doubled to 1.5 million and a decade later had ballooned to 5 million. Just as strikingly, crowds at FA Cup finals rocketed from 22,000 in Preston North End’s double-winning season of 1888-89 to 73,000 ten years later, reaching a previously unimaginable 110,820 that saw Spurs draw 2-2 with Sheffield United in 1901.

Outside of the gentlemen’s clubs for whom amateurism was a rationale for social exclusivity, soccer clubs which hesitated about embracing professionalism were thrown into turmoil. For a sport whose popularity was based on civic pride, the competitive imperative made professionalism inescapable. Supporters, whether working-class or middle-class, often demanded that their sides turn professional to remain competitive and uphold local honour. ‘If we cannot depend upon native talent, then by all means let us have some of these stray Scotchmen who can be picked up so easily by our neighbours, wrote one Middlesbrough supporter in 1889. Such was the clamour for professionalism that a new professional club, Middlesbrough Ironopolis, was created in opposition to the hesitancy of the Middlesbrough FC. 

Some clubs found the financial pressures of professionalism too much to bear. In the 1892-93 season Everton paid £3,529 and Blackburn Rovers £2,156 in wages alone, figures way beyond the reach of sides outside the successful elite. In Manchester, both its Football League sides, Ardwick and Newton Heath, collapsed under extensive debts in 1894 and 1902 respectively, leading to them being reformed as Manchester City and Manchester United respectively. Newton Heath was bought by local brewing magnate J.H. Davies for £500 and effectively became a subsidiary of his Manchester Breweries company, perhaps the most prominent example of the close relationship between professional football and the brewing industry.

For many, professionalism brought untold sums of money into the club’s coffers. Everton made a profit in every season bar one between 1891 and 1914. Liverpool, the side created when Everton split into two in 1892 over a financial dispute, also recorded a profit every season from 1900. In London, its belated football boom led to the creation of Chelsea by sporting entrepreneur Gus Mears, a purely business proposition that returned profitable seasons from 1908 to 1915, including a gargantuan £22,826 in 1908. No-one could now be in any doubt that football was now a business.

But the adoption of professionalism had also led to a subtle but fundamental change to soccer. Amateur sport was based on status, hierarchy and deference. The authority of governing bodies like cricket’s MCC, rugby’s RFU and soccer’s FA rested ultimately on their social status - they had appointed themselves the governing bodies of their respective sports. Cup competitions undermined the social distinctions on which this authority was based, because clubs could not choose their cup-tie opponents. And players were also judged on status as well as merit. Under amateurism, sport operated according to social codes that were unwritten and understandable only to those who shared the same social background.

Professionalism dissolved these unspoken structures of understanding. The contract system placed soccer on a legal basis that was ultimately beyond the authority of the governing body. The payment of wages meant that players were assessed solely on merit. The introduction of leagues meant that fixtures were arranged by strictly objective criteria rather than social connection. And as commercial enterprises, clubs had legal obligations beyond the requirements of the governing body. Professionalism and the league system gave soccer the appearance of being meritocratic. As the creation of the Football League and countless other league competitions demonstrated, soccer no longer belonged to the FA. 

In little more than a decade, association football had undergone a social and economic revolution. It had thrown off the straightjacket of gentlemanly amateurism to become a commercial juggernaut that engaged the passions of millions of men and women. This allowed it to conquer nineteenth century Britain, and laid the basis for its for its subsequent conquest of the planet.

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How was it that soccer became the world game? Most explanations focus on soccer’s intrinsic qualities as the ‘beautiful game’. But supporters of other codes of football offer similar arguments for their own game. Like beauty, the aesthetics of sport must always be in the eye of the beholder. 

Nor did soccer expand globally because kicking a ball is simpler and more natural than handling the ball.The game appears to be natural only because it is so ubiquitous today. Its kicking game is due as much to the preferences of nineteenth century British men as is rugby’s handling. What’s more, soccer’s insistence on using only the feet was often viewed as a novelty when it was first seen by many people.

Perhaps surprisingly to modern eyes, nor was soccer considered less dangerous to play than the rugby-based codes. In 1894, the Lancet, the British Medical Association journal, compared soccer and rugby injuries. It concluded that ‘Association, at first sight a tame game compared with the other, is possibly more perilous than Rugby Union’. It revisited the issue in 1907 and drew exactly the same conclusion’.

The explanation for soccer’s rise to globalism is not to be found in how the game was played but in how it was administered. Its transformation into a world game was made possible because of its acceptance of professionalism in 1885. The decision opened the way for league competitions to be created and, together, professionalism and the league system gave the game the appearance of a meritocracy. It could now claim to be - and more importantly, was perceived as being - a ‘career open to talent’, regardless of a player’s social or educational background. 

Leagues also meant that teams could be assessed objectively by their playing record rather than their social status. Soccer had become a system of continuous competition, legal regulation and the supplanting of personal relationships by the exigencies of the commercial market. In contrast, rugby union’s amateurism represented a world of deference and hierarchy.

Moreover, RFU’s leaders also had little interest in seeing rugby develop beyond the middle classes of the British Empire. Indeed, it was not until 1978 that France was admitted as a full member of the International Rugby Board (IRB), the sport’s world governing body. Rugby was a symbol of Britishness almost everywhere it was played. Even in France it was the desire to emulate the success of the British Empire that led to rugby’s adoption, and in Afrikaans-speaking white South Africa, it offered the opportunity to avenge the iniquities of the Boer War.

The men who led professional soccer were no less patriotic or parochial than the men who ran rugby. But there was one major difference between soccer and rugby. The leaders of British soccer no longer had arbitrary or unconditional control of the game. Its transformation by professionalism laid the basis for it to become independent from its British administrators. 

Professionalism necessitated an external, objective set of rules for the governance of the game. British soccer was still led by the same people, but professionalism eroded their direct control over the game. Soccer was no longer based on social status and networks, but ultimately controlled by rules that were independent of whoever led the sport. Unlike rugby, there was now no inherent reason why soccer could not be led by those who owed no allegiance to Britain or the British Empire. Soccer’s relationship to Britain had become a conditional one.

That meant the men representing the seven European soccer nations who met in Paris in May 1904 to establish the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) did not need the approval of British football for their legitimacy. Because soccer now existed independently of its British administrators, British officials could do nothing to prevent FIFA’s formation even if they had wanted to. As FIFA’s founding president Robert Guérin explained, the European footballers simply ignored the British and took matters into their own hands:  ‘Tiring of the struggle [with the FA], and recognising that the Englishmen, true to tradition, wanted to watch and wait, I undertook to unite delegates from various nations myself’.

Men like Guérin fell in love with soccer not simply for what it was, but also for what it represented. In Europe, the decade before World War One saw soccer become identified with a new sense of cosmopolitan modernity, the idea the world was entering a new era of speed, technology and urban life unlike anything experienced before. This link between football and modernity was expressed by modernist works of art such as Kasimir Malevich’s Painterly Realism of A Football Player. Colour Masses int he Fourth Dimension (1915) or Picasso’s Footballers on the Beach (1928). The cosmopolitan, liberal ideals of the early pioneers of international soccer can be seen in FIFA’s self-consciously universalist philosophy. As Jules Rimet, FIFA president from 1921 to 1954, would later write, they believed that football ‘draws men together and makes them equal’.

The meritocratic culture of soccer also undermined the appeal of amateurism. Although most of soccer’s early national federations paid lip service to the principle of amateurism, their practice differed qualitatively from its British adherents. Most federations allowed ‘broken time’ compensation to be paid to players who lost wages to play the game, the issue over which English rugby split in 1895. Unlike in Britain, where amateurs refused to allow leagues because they saw them as a step towards professionalism, league tournaments were quickly set up in every country where soccer was established. Moreover, British professional clubs regularly toured Europe and Latin America in the decade or so before World War One, attracting huge crowds and helping to popularise soccer beyond its original elite and middle-class constituency.  

Amateurism still retained its attraction for some members of the European middle classes who saw football as a social recreation for well-to-do young men. In 1913 the Dutch football federation, the NVB, turned down a motion from clubs who believed that the social status of teams should not play role in the organisation of tournaments, and the NVB ensured that Dutch soccer remained a formally amateur sport until 1954. 

The desire to preserve soccer’s respectability, especially in countries where its rivals were strong - such as rugby in France and Argentina, or the Turnen and similar gymnastics movements in Germany and central Europe - was also a factor in the attachment to amateurism of some football federations. In Germany, the official acceptance of professionalism did not take place until 1963, although it was an open secret that players had received monetary and other benefits since the 1920s.

But in general, as soccer became a commercial mass spectator sport in interwar Europe and Latin America, amateurism dissolved. Professionalism was allowed in Italian football in 1926 and in Argentina in 1931, although covert payments and the provision of easy jobs was commonplace long before this. Uruguay followed suit in 1933. And even those national federations that remained nominally amateur did not carry out systematic campaigns against professionals in the same way as Anglo-Saxon amateur sports' administrators. 

The elaborate systems of discipline and punishment that some British sports erected to defend amateur principles were not repeated outside of the British world. Conversely, where British amateur ideology remained strong, soccer struggled. In Canada, the grassroots popularity of soccer (and its ability to compete with football and hockey) was undermined by a split over whether to support the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada’s draconian anti-professional regulations.

The incompatibility of amateurism with soccer’s growing popularity around the world eventually led to FIFA’s decision to organise its own world cup in 1930. The amateurism of the Olympic Games, which in the 1920s was briefly the stage for soccer’s most important international tournament, excluded a growing number of soccer-playing nations that had embraced professionalism, leading FIFA secretary Henri Delauney to break the link with amateurism and declare in 1926 that ‘today international football can no longer be held within the confines of the Olympics’.

Soccer’s rise to globalism was not, as it might seem from the perspective of today, inevitable or automatic. Its ascension to become the world’s most popular sport was not an unimpeded arc of progress. Its success was based on the defeat of its rugby rival and the eclipse of its British leaders by European and South American administrators. Neither would have been possible without soccer’s adoption of professionalism in 1885. This provided the basis for the meritocratic and modern outlook that would free the sport from the suffocating grip of British Muscular Christianity and abandon the Anglo-Saxon attitudes upon which football had been founded. Soccer could now become the modern game for the modern world.

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