Is soccer the original form of football that was played in pre-industrial times? But modern soccer looks nothing like the ancient forms of folk football - and for its first few years it was barely distinguishable from rugby. So how did it become the most popular type of football?

This week's episode examines the ‘Football Historian’s Fallacy’; the idea that it was soccer's rules that made it popular. Instead, it argues that the incredible growth of the sport in the last three decades of the nineteenth century was due to factors far more important than than what appeared in the FA’s rulebook.

For further reading, this ‘Rugby Reloaded’ blogpost from 2016 puts the debate into the wider context of the growth of soccer as the global game.

Adrian Harvey’s key book, Football, the First Hundred Years, can be found here.

The recent debate on the origins of Crystal Palace is summarised at the ‘Fred Spiksley’ website here.