From Custom to Code. a Sociological Interpretation of the Making of Association Football

From Custom to Code From Custom to Code A Sociological Interpretation of the Making of Association Football Dominik Döllinger Dissertation presented at Uppsala University to be publicly examined in Humanistiska teatern, Engelska parken, Uppsala, Tuesday, 7 September 2021 at 13:15 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The examination will be conducted in English. Faculty examiner: Associate Professor Patrick McGovern (London School of Economics). Abstract Döllinger, D. 2021. From Custom to Code. A Sociological Interpretation of the Making of Association Football. 167 pp. Uppsala: Department of Sociology, Uppsala University. ISBN 978-91-506-2879-1. The present study is a sociological interpretation of the emergence of modern football between 1733 and 1864. It focuses on the decades leading up to the foundation of the Football Association in 1863 and observes how folk football gradually develops into a new form which expresses itself in written codes, clubs and associations. In order to uncover this transformation, I have collected and analyzed local and national newspaper reports about football playing which had been published between 1733 and 1864. I find that folk football customs, despite their great local variety, deserve a more thorough sociological interpretation, as they were highly emotional acts of collective self-affirmation and protest. At the same time, the data shows that folk and early association football were indeed distinct insofar as the latter explicitly opposed the evocation of passions, antagonistic tensions and collective effervescence which had been at the heart of the folk version. Keywords: historical sociology, football, custom, culture, community Dominik Döllinge r , D epartment of Sociology, Box 624, Uppsala University, SE-75126 Uppsala, Sweden. © Dominik Döllinger 2021 ISBN 978-91-506-2879-1 URN urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-441189 (http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-441189) Contents Acknowledgments...........................................................................................7 Chapter One. The Playing Field......................................................................9 Games People Play...................................................................................10 Origin Stories............................................................................................13 The Goals of this Study ............................................................................17 The Structure of the Book ........................................................................18 Chapter Two. The Historical Sociology of Football.....................................20 Football’s Historiography.........................................................................20 A Historical Sociology of Folk Football ..................................................26 Chapter Three. A History in Matches ...........................................................34 Pitches in Practice.....................................................................................35 Looking for a Match.................................................................................38 Critical Archival Research........................................................................43 Chapter Four. The End(s) of Folk Football...................................................49 Football Under Siege................................................................................49 The People’s Game...................................................................................59 Chapter Five. Enclosing a Rustic Game........................................................73 Enclosure Riots.........................................................................................74 The Theater of Deeds ...............................................................................76 Playful Paternalism...................................................................................83 Chapter Six. The Folk Football illusi o..........................................................90 Illusions and Institutions...........................................................................91 Wargame Sociability ..............................................................................101 Chapter Seven. Football’s Total Institutionalization...................................108 Dodo-Games and Barracks.....................................................................109 Playing and Pecking in England’s Public Schools.................................114 Public-School Football ...........................................................................117 Chapter Eight. Association Football ...........................................................127 The Struggles of the Football Association .............................................127 The Impact of Sheffield FC....................................................................132 The Spirit of Association Football..........................................................135 Chapter Nine. Conclusion ...........................................................................149 Summary of my Findings .......................................................................149 Forms and Contexts ...........................................................................149 From Custom to Cod e........................................................................150 Rational, Civilized, Apollonian..............................................................151 Bibliography................................................................................................157 Acknowledgments Dissertation projects are like the Old Testament: raw and rough around the edges and occasionally fatalistic. The writing of this monograph was no exception. It regularly confronted me with previous selves that had been less educated, quite confused, yet, surprisingly cocky. By finishing this dissertation, I will become the first person in my family to receive a doctorate. We are no academics. We are workers and farmers. We are vulgar, loud and we use cheap perfume. But what I learned in the course of this dissertation evoked a feeling of pride in me. A famous Swedish philosopher once said that you can take a boy out of his local community, but you can never take the community out of the boy. This presumably prolific reader of Bourdieu was right. I never thought much about my countryside upbringing until I entered academia. I never felt the peasant before an urban academic culture made me feel him. Shortly after I became a PhD student, I realized that I would have been better off as a former tennis or badminton player. Football didn’t resonate that well in the Bourgeois echo chamber. That I eventually turned to football as my object of study was perhaps not wise. But it was important. It allowed me to do what I had always done best: play, provoke and prosper. I would like to thank my first supervisor Patrik Aspers and my second supervisor Tora Holmberg for their continuous support and incredible patience on this journey. I know that every PhD student is different, but I do wonder if some may actually be more different than others? Daniel Ritter has been a fantastic commentator in my final seminar and his suggestions and critiques have helped me tremendously throughout this last year. I would also like to thank Mats Franzén for his great input at my halftime seminar and offer my condolences for what has happened to his favorite German football club (a name I refuse to write here). A special thanks goes to my double reader Hannah Bradby who has not only in this capacity provided incredibly valuable feedback and insightful suggestions that improved this dissertation. However, dropping an Elton John reference in written feedback must be punished with an enthusiastic interpretation of Tiny Dancer. The Uppsala Lab of Economic Sociology (ULES) and the Cultural Matters Group (CMG) gave me many opportunities to present papers and chapters. Our discussions were always encouraging and inspiring, and they made me think harder about every aspect of my work and thinking. This whole PhD-thing began in an office that was shared among five more or less chatty PhD students who started the program together. Had we remained there, who knows if any of us would have ever finished? But I am sure that not-finishing would have been a lot of fun, too, and for that, I thank you, Pernilla, Maricel, Marie and Phil. I also thank my colleagues and friends Christoffer, Alexander, Jonas, Tobias, Tom and many others for being with me on this journey. Lastly, I would like to thank my parents Roland and Sabine who have always trusted and supported me. My wife Lillian has been the most encouraging, supportive and forgiving partner one can imagine. And my wonderful son River has constantly reminded me of what really matters in life. I dedicate this book to George Young who drowned in the river Derwent as he tried to recover a foot-ball in 1828, to the son of Mr. Horax, blacksmith, who died suddenly during a football game at Hockham, near Thetford in 1794, to the eight-year old boy who was trod to death in a fight that ensued during a football match upon Heath Common, and to the many lives that were lost after the police interfered in a football game in Dublin in 1811. You are the soul of football. Chapter One. The Playing Field Football is inscribed into the everyday life of billions of people. One will most likely encounter people playing football in city parks and streets all over the world. In The Ball Is Round (2008, xiv), sociologist David Goldblatt asks “Is there any cultural practice more global than football?” and one is hard pressed to prove him wrong. At the same time, Kuper (1996, 1) points out that “[f]ootball is never just football: it helps make wars and revolutions, and it fascinates mafias and dictators.” When we think of football today, we think of huge transfer sums, big stadiums, superstar players and corrupt officials. We see a successful entertainment industry and big business, even though the latter characterization is questionable from an economic point of view (Buraimo, Simmons and Szymanski 2006; Goldblatt 2015; Kuper and Szymanski 2012; Vamplew 2016). Yet, football is, first of all, a simple game, played and beloved by people all over the world. Thinking about football without thinking about footballplaying is like a walk through a gallery without artworks. Nevertheless, sociologists have managed to do exactly that and presented research which frequently decouples cultural fields from the inherent qualities of their cultural products and practices. I have demonstrated the shortcomings of such analytic decoupling in my studies about Jean-Luc Godard and the French Nouvelle Vague (Döllinger 2017) and I will continue these efforts in this study about (folk) football, thereby joining Maguire’s efforts to approach the sociology of sport like the sociology of art (Maguire 2011; 2002).1 In my case, this amounts to conceptualizing football as a social practice. While the power of football organizations like FIFA and UEFA2 in the world of football can hardly be denied, one must not forget that the game of football is bigger and older than any of its organizing bodies. Football is, proverbially and historically speaking, the people’s game and even though it has become harder to separate the game from its most dominant organizational bodies, this study will bring the reader back to a historical period in which its present shape was not yet to be anticipated, in which the teams facing each 1Bourdieu even holds that the (original) values of sport “are very like the values of art and science (Bourdieu, Dauncey and Hare 1998, 21).” 2FIFA (lit.: Fédération Internationale de Football Association) is the international federation of association football, UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) its European counterpart. 9other could be made up of several hundred or no more than six players. This is the era of folk football and this study traces the transformation of this popular pastime into its association form. Games People Play There are reports that in 1850 a game of football was played inside the Arctic Circle between the crew of a British survey ship and a team of Inuit which the English crew appears to have lost (Brown 2013). The Inuit seemed to be skilled footballers, which was not only due to them being used to the conditions but also because they themselves played a form of football called akraurak since at least the Middle Ages. But that is far from being the oldest football game known today. The Ancient Greeks referred to their ball game called episkyros (battle ball) already around 350 BC and the Han Dynasty in China played a game called tsu’ chu or cuju around 250 BC. Evidence of ball games in Ancient Rome can be traced back to around 100 BC, whereas the first reference to football in Britain stems from 828 AD and is, thus, relatively recent in comparison. Yet, it is the history of football in England and Scotland between 1733 and 1864 that will be the focus of attention in this study. With regard to this period, Sheard and Dunning (2005 [1979], 16) correctly point out that the “the origins of these games remain obscure.” In a similar manner, Walvin (1994 [1975], 11) states that “[t]he origins of the game (or games) are shrouded in mystery” and concludes that looking for its roots is “unrealistic and unrewarding.” What we do know is that football was a popular pastime in England and Scotland since at least the Middle Ages (Magoun 1931; 1929). A letter to the editor of the Derby Mercury on February 19, 1823, mentions that already in the twelfth century the English cleric Fitzstephen was aware of the fact that on Shrove Tuesday, all the youths of London go into the fields to play at football. The scholars of every school have their ball in their hands. The ancient and wealthy men of the city, come forth on horseback, to see the sport of the young men, and to take part of the pleasure, in beholding their agility. Moreover, as this study will make clear, were both folk and modern football highly emotional practices. Due to its emotional content, many people today would go as far as to call football a religion, and there are good reasons for this. Thinking back to my childhood in the Bavarian countryside in Germany, I cannot recall many villages I could drive through without passing a church and a football field; or at least a football field, as a Brazilian proverb has it. Looking at the pictures from the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, one can 10 understand why this proverb sees football as more important than the church. Brazil’s devastating loss to Germany in the semi-final in Belo Horizonte left the entire country in a state of shock. If there was any more need for more evidence that football is a highly emotional experience, a look at the images of thousands of crying fans will show. But most football supporters would probably not need one. Fans pray before penalty shootouts and players go down on their knees when they have scored a goal or won a match, and the experience of football playing (and watching) creates collective emotional arousal. The sociologists which I refer to in this study call this collective effervescence (Durkheim 2008 [1912]; R. Collins 2004) and it will be a central element throughout my analysis. Bromberger (1995) identifies no less than seven characteristics that football shares with religious ceremonies. Fans worship stadiums, jerseys and, of course, legendary players, and matchdays are celebrated through rituals. The trips and walks to the stadium, “the new churches of this religion (McLellan 2008),” are celebrated like a pilgrimage. Popular books like Duncan Hamil- ton’s Going To The Match (2019) or Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (1992) are describing these rituals in oftentimes passionate and nostalgic ways. But modern football is not only ripe with religious practices, it was also literally created on the basis of a Protestant value system that shapes it to this day (Overman 2011; Parker and Weir 2012; Watson and Parker 2012). In Britain, the ideology of the muscular Christian has left its mark on football and modern sports and gave it a prominent place in Britain’s moral education throughout the nineteenth century (Holt 1989; McIntosh 1979). Closely related to this ideological coinage and religious qualities, lies football’s contribution to identity making. Walvin (1994 [1975], 7) reminds us that [i]ndeed it would be hard to think of any modern society where sport does not occupy a central and influential role, not merely in the way local people seek their pleasures, but more especially how they see and define themselves. This identity-making-function is one of its most recognized and debated aspects, especially with regard to nationalism (Mangan 1996). But it also shows in the seriousness of conflicts between football supporters of different teams. Bromberger (1995, 302) describes: Every match between rival towns, regions and countries takes the form of a ritualized war, complete with anthems, military fanfares and banners wielded by fans who make up the support divisions and who even call themselves ’brigades’, ’commandos’, ’legions’ and ’assault troops.’ It is easy to see that the world of football is a world of conflicts and struggles where two teams and their fans are facing each other in a quest for victory and honor. For Randall Collins (2008, 285), spectators “attend for the collective 11 effervescence, the flow of dramatic emotions building up tension into group energy and solidarity.” The audience joins the battle and is immersed in its dynamics, it supports its respective sides, and starts its own fights; mostly playful though not rarely vulgar. At other times, this escalates into violent outbursts between supporter and hooligan groups with serious consequences. In their darkest moments, football supporters violently attack people. The French policeman Daniel Nivel was so fiercely beaten by German hooligans during the 1998 World Cup in France that he spent weeks in a coma. A substantial amount of research has been dedicated to the understanding of this violent and oftentimes irritating culture of hooliganism already decades before these horrific events (Armstrong 1998; Giulianotti and Armstrong 2002; Harrington 1968; Williams, Dunning and Murphy 1986). This goes to show that football is a highly emotional sport that unites people in collective effervescence and antagonizes them in more or less severe conflicts. Moreover, and in line with football’s religious character, many journalistic and popular scientific books present themselves as searches for football’s soul. Jon Henderson’s When Footballers Were Skint: A Journey in Search of the Soul of Football (2018) is a recent example of this. The most prominent example, however, is David Conn’s The Beautiful Game? Search- ing for the Soul of Football (2005). Deeply concerned about football’s increasing economization and commercialization since the early 1990s (Dobson and Goddard 2001; Giulianotti 1999; Goldblatt 2015), Conn shows his readers how the people’s game of football had systematically been corrupted by these developments. Such depictions of the corruption of football’s soul are at the center of many academic and popular scientific books and articles which have been published in recent years; and many authors side with the opposition to football’s continuous commercialization. The struggle between traditionalists and the powerful national and global football associations does not only take place in books. More recently was the usually very divided German fan scene able to orchestrate a collective protest against a decision by the German football league (DFL) to schedule league matches on Mondays. To the astonishment of the international football community the protest was successful and led the DFL to revoke its decision. Just two years before, similar protests had led the German Football Association (DFB) to do away with their half-time show in the national Cup final. Following the example of the Super Bowl the German Football Association hired one of Germany’s most popular singers to perform during the half-time. However, contrary to their expectation, the fans in the stadium reacted with loud and constant booing throughout the entire show and followed this up with more protests in the aftermath of the game. These examples show that the traditionalists have not given up their fight against football’s commercialization which they perceive as an immediate threat to its very soul. Consequently, did the international protest movement ‘Against modern football’ (AMF) receive increasing scholarly attention from 12 social scientists in recent years (Gonda 2013; Kennedy and Kennedy 2012; Numerato 2015; Perasović and Mustapić 2018; Webber 2017). In short, football’s increasing economization and commercialization as well as national and international associations like FIFA and UEFA that are allowing or even actively supporting it, have been subject to critique from football supporters for many decades. Football’s soul seekers frequently turn to the past where they seem to find football’s soul in an unspoiled state. Webber’s (2017) use of Polanyi (Polanyi 2001 [1944]) in the analysis of AMF, furthermore, indicates that objectives of this movement may speak to a problem that may be rooted in football’s great transformation from a folk to an association game in the middle of the nineteenth century. The present study invites the reader to a sociological journey that begins exactly there: on the fields of the English and Scottish peasants and the streets of the poor urban workers in a rapidly transforming society. Origin Stories Football sociologists and historians continue to remain relatively silent in the aforementioned struggles for football’s soul. Some consider this to be a problem or, at least, a missed opportunity. James (2017) and Johnes (2013), for example, have expressed the need for sport historians to engage more in public debates, not only to become more visible and gain reputation, but also because the public as well as the football clubs and organizations could greatly benefit from academic guidance. Such calls For Public Sociology (Burawoy 2005) have, so far, borne some fruits. Projects like the CIES Football Observatory in Switzerland in which researchers and journalists collect and exchange information and provide statistical analyses which they publish in regular reports is a step in this direction. Football’s public history as it is exhibited in dedicated football museums or shown in documentaries and podcasts has greatly benefitted from the work of football historians. At the same time, history is always a delicate subject in public discourses and often used to support claims and arguments which are based on historical distortion, reduction and simplicity. In football’s historiography, the historical importance of the Football Association (FA) in the creation of modern sports, is a great example of this. The FA celebrates itself as the creator of modern football and prints its original rules in books that can be bought in the gift shop of the Football Museum in Manchester in which it exhibits its – that is, association football’s – history. The former president of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, at one point, decided that China will from now on be considered to be the inventors of football, even though scholars have not been able to confirm this. But it does show that the dominant players of the field have the power over history and can to some extent create it by means of symbolic authority. But football historians are not

From Custom to Code. a Sociological Interpretation of the Making of Association Football

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