How Football Began Brings Range, Precision and Sources to Bear on the Matter
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‘The origins of football’s many codes and their complex relationship to each other has been one of sporting history's great grey areas, dominated by hearsay and invention. No longer. Tony Collins’ cool and illuminating How Football Began brings range, precision and sources to bear on the matter. As is often the case, the truths that emerge are infinitely more interesting than the myths they dispel.’ David Goldblatt, Author of The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football and The Game of Our Lives HOW FOOTBALL BEGAN This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world. The book explores how the world’s football codes – soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic – developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses. Important reading for students of sports studies, history, sociology, development and management, this book is also a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football in all its forms, as well as an engrossing read for anyone interested in the early history of football. Tony Collins is Emeritus Professor of History in the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University, UK. His previous books include Rugby’s Great Split, Rugby League in Twentieth Century Britain, A Social History of English Rugby Union and The Oval World – each of which won the Lord Aberdare prize for sports history book of the year – as well as his global history Sport in Capitalist Society. HOW FOOTBALL BEGAN A Global History of How the World’s Football Codes Were Born Tony Collins First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Tony Collins The right of Tony Collins to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-03874-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-03875-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-17721-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC The cover of the paperback version of this book is based on the cover of the 1867 Routledge Handbook of Football. CONTENTS List of plates ix Introduction 1 1 The failure of the Football Association 4 2 Before the beginning: folk football 10 3 The gentleman’s game 17 4 Sheffield: football beyond the metropolis 24 5 The end of the universal game 31 6 From the classes to the masses 38 7 Glasgow: football capital of the nineteenth century 47 8 The coming of professionalism 53 9 Kicking against the pricks: women and football 65 10 Rugby football: a house divided 75 viii Contents 11 Melbourne: a city and its football 82 12 Australian Rules and the invention of football traditions 90 13 Ireland: creating Gaelic football 98 14 Football and nationalism in Ireland and beyond 109 15 American football: the old game in the new world 116 16 Canadian football: between scrum and snapback 127 17 Rugby league football: from people’s game to proletarian sport 139 18 The 1905–07 football crisis in North America 147 19 The 1905-07 football crisis in world rugby 154 20 Soccer: the modern game for the modern world 163 21 The global game 176 Bibliography 182 Index 200 PLATES 1 Folk football at Kingston-upon-Thames, Shrove Tuesday 1846 (Illustrated London News, 28 February 1846) 11 2 Sheffield F.C.’s rulebook, 1859 27 3 Soccer or Rugby? The 1872 England versus Scotland rugby international (The Graphic, 24 February 1872) 35 4 The Goal: launched in 1873 as probably the first dedicated football weekly 41 5 Football turned upside-down. Blackburn Olympic defeat Old Etonians to win the FA Cup in 1883 (Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 7 April 1883) 59 6 Women footballers defy the FA ban: match programme for Stoke versus Dick, Kerr’s in 1923 72 7 Rugby on the verge of split: cartoon satirising the RFU’s suspension of Huddersfield (Yorkshire Owl, 15 November 1893) 80 8 Scrummaging in early Australian Rules football (The Australasian Sketcher, 12 June 1875) 92 9 Kerry GAA great Dick Fitzgerald’s 1913 handbook for Gaelic footballers 106 10 Quarterback passing from the scrimmage during the 1889 Yale versus Princeton match (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 7 December 1889) 121 11 An 1892 guide to Canadian football (The Dominion Illustrated Monthly, February 1892) 128 12 A 1909 Australian amateur view of the threat of professionalism in rugby, with anti-Semitic overtones (Rugby Football League Archive, Huddersfield) 158 INTRODUCTION Football has got to do with everything. Arnold Bennett, 19111 How did football start? Why did the modern codes of football – Association, American, Australian, Canadian, Gaelic, Rugby League and Rugby Union – all emerge within barely a generation during the nineteenth century? And why did association football eclipse all of them to become a truly global game? These questions are the starting point for How Football Began. It charts the rise of football from its origins, through the creation of the first clubs, its emergence as a mass spectator sport to it becoming a world game on the eve of World War One. It explains why football divided into Association and rugby codes, and how the rugby code itself split into league and union, Australian, American, Canadian and Gaelic. It discusses the false starts of women’s football and the obstacles women faced to play the game. And it examines the ways in which soccer spread across Europe and Latin America before World War One. As the different varieties of the game expanded across the world they were shaped by the same fault-lines. Wherever it was played, football was haunted by divisions over amateurism and professionalism, and how to respond to the challenge of becoming a mass spectator sport. Nationalism, whether the unacknowledged everyday British nationalism of much of the game or the explicit nationalism of Gaelic football, was etched into DNA of 2 Introduction the sport. Myth-making and invented traditions were common to all forms of football, as the game developed a narrative that would give it legitimacy and a role in the cultural life of its nation. Moreover, the book aims to emphasise the incredible speed at which football emerged and became part of everyday life. In the space of two generations at the end of the Victorian era the sport went from a handful of clubs to become part of the lifeblood of millions of people around the world. No form of entertainment had ever risen so rapidly in such a short space of time. Football’s ‘shock of the new’ prefigured that of the cinema and pop music in the twentieth century. The sport had become an integral part of capitalism’s second industrial revolution, a mass entertainment spec- tacle that seemed to replicate the competition and vicissitudes of everyday life in the great industrial cities. How Football Began also takes a different perspective to most histories of the football codes, because it looks at football as the Victorians did: as a sin- gle game that was played under different rules. The huge differences we see today in the various types of football did not exist in Victorian times. Until around 1880 it was common for players and teams to switch between one set of rules and another, sometimes on a weekly basis. As a new social phe- nomenon that transformed the leisure lives of millions of men and women, football had the same cultural and economic impact on society regardless of the shape of the ball or the number of players in a team. It also offers a new approach by treating football as a transnational phe- nomenon, and in particular as a product of the British Empire and the wider Anglophone world. From its inception, football in the nineteenth century was part of an English-speaking world that was shrinking due to the inven- tion of the telegraph, the steam ship and the mass-circulation press. Discus- sions, reports and news about football circulated across national boundaries. In America, Walter Camp studied the rulebooks of the different codes of football around the world. Melbourne’s William Hammersley visited the Football Association in the 1880s to persuade them to try Australian Rules. Albert Baskerville corresponded with American football administrators before leading his pioneering New Zealand rugby league team to Britain in 1907. During World War One female Australian Rules players in Perth could read about women soccer players in Preston.