Some teams did not even have the organization that pub support provided: they were established simply by groups who played in the street together, and they tended to take their names from their neighbourhoods: in Blackburn there were the Red Row Stars, the Gibraltar Street Rovers, the Cleaver Street Rovers and the George Street West Rovers. In Stirling, of the sixty-eight teams known to have existed between 1876 and 1895, forty-two had neighbourhood or street names.58 Many of those who supported football came from Methodist or other Nonconformist backgrounds: they saw football as a substitute for attending sports such as racing and pugilism, where there was a heavy betting and drinking element. Other teams were therefore formed by schools, churches or chapels, as a way of keeping the local boys occupied and out of trouble: the Droop Street Board School, in Kentish Town in London, was the starting point for Queen’s Park Rangers.59 Yet even these teams often had links with groups like pubs or clubs. A Church of England school team from Wolverhampton (later the Wolverhampton Wanderers) was based only geographically in a church group: its financial support came not from the school itself, but from the father of one of the players, who was a publican, and a local businessman. The Christ Church Football Club, in Bolton, was established by the Revd J. F. Wright, but after four years the team gave up his schoolroom as their meeting place and moved to the Gladstone Hotel, renaming themselves the Bolton Wanderers.
Aston Villa’s beginnings show how complex the ‘origins’ of a team could be. Aston Villa is usually referred to as a church team, and it did have links to the Bible class of the Aston Villa Wesleyan Chapel in Lozells, Birmingham, but the field the team played on belonged to a butcher, and the changing-room facilities were provided courtesy of a publican. Furthermore, in 1870 Aston Villa was still functioning as much as a social club as as a football team: it held regular meetings on Monday evenings at a coffee house in Aston High Street, and in 1883 the members continued to enjoy music on ‘quiet social evening[s]’. Equally, Tottenham Hotspur could be said to have had pub origins, as it was supported by the brewery that owned the White Hart pub, which gave it access to the land near the lane the pub was situated on. Yet the team also received support from the local YMCA.60
Other teams were more straightforwardly formed in the workplace, either by a group of like-minded men (such as the employees of the Woolwich Arsenal) or with the encouragement of their employers, who thought team sports were character-forming. West Ham was originally named Thames Ironworks, drawing its men from the A. F. Hills shipyard; West Bromwich Albion was the team from Salter’s Spring Works; Stoke City was a railway team (as late as 1912 twenty-seven out of the thirtyeight clubs in the Crewe and District League were railway sponsored).61 In Birmingham, of the 218 teams mentioned in the local press between 1876 and 1884, 84 were linked in some way to religious groups, 13 were named after pubs, and 20 were formed at or by local works or factories.62
Sporting clubs in general did much to make football a coherent force, and it was often at a cricket club, whose members wanted some winter sport, that football began to raise its profile beyond the working classes and schoolboys. Between 1840 and 1850 two county cricket clubs, Leicestershire and Surrey, had football matches in the winter, with Leicestershire changing its name as early as 1840 to the Leicestershire Cricket and Football Club. In 1849 the Surrey Football Club was formed within the Surrey County Cricket Club, which had been set up at Kennington Oval in 1845. Football teams that grew out of cricket clubs included Sheffield, Sheffield Wednesday, Accrington, Darwen, Preston North End and Sheffield United.63
Other clubs were formed when former schoolboys met to continue playing the game they had enjoyed at school. The Sheffield club, founded in 1857 and possibly the first purely football club to be established, was set up by ex-students of the Sheffield Collegiate School. It was, noted the Sheffield Daily Telegraph in 1867, a more prestigious club than many, ‘due to the character of the members…[who] are almost exclusively of the middle class’.64 The Forest Club was started c. 1859 by a group of boys who had played together at Harrow, and in Scotland the Edinburgh Academicals was founded in 1857-8 by members of the Edinburgh Academy.
The main impediment to football being played throughout the country was the lack of a single set of rules. Racing had had rules imposed on it from the top by the Jockey Club, but there was no overall body to do the same for this more working- and middle-class game. Football was played at many schools, but each school had its own version of the game, with its own rules. When the various clubs played, be they pub, works, church or socially based, for the most part the rules had to be agreed between the teams before each match, including establishing how many would play on each side. In the early days of the game, that number was part of the announced challenge that appeared in the newspaper. In 1838, in one of the many advertisements of this type, Bell’s Life printed the challenge: ‘A match at football will be played at the cricket ground, Leicester, on Good Friday next, between eleven (principally printers) from Derby and the same number from Leicester. The winners to challenge an equal number from any town in England, for a purse not exceeding £25.’ As time went on, there was no more consistency in the numbers playing, and the teams usually ranged from twelve, to eleven, down to six a side. In 1844 Bell’s reported, ‘A football match took place on Hampton Court Green on Tuesday last between 12 men of the F and 12 men of the D troop of the 13th Light Dragoons for a supper, which, after a severe struggle, was won by the D troop. Between 30 and 40 sat down to an excellent “spread” at the Toy Tap.’ Even as late as 1859, at Lord’s, the 3rd Battalion the Grenadier Guards beat the 2nd with twenty-five on each side, led by Captains Jarratt and Coulson (the rest of the teams were made up from the ranks). A week later there was a rematch, this time fifteen a side, with six officers taking part.65
In 1858 a letter was published in Bell’s Life putting forward the suggestion that schools should all adopt the same rules, so that they could compete against each other. This engendered a lively, opinionated correspondence, all contributors highly partisan, all refusing to accept any rules except the writer’s own. Frederick Lillywhite (see p. 204) wrote to concur with the original suggestion. He thought it would be highly advantageous if his next Guide to Cricketers could include the ‘rules of all the sports and athletic games which are enjoyed in this country’. In part, he no doubt genuinely wished for standardization, but as a businessman he saw that it would bring commercial opportunities. The following year, no more conformity had been reached, so his Guide published the Eton laws; and by 1862 his brother, John Lillywhite, was selling at his Cricket Warehouse ‘FOOT BALLS and the LAWS, as played at Eton, Harrow, and Rugby; boxing gloves, quoits, hockey sticks and balls, and all articles for winter sports’. In 1863 ‘the laws now in use at all the schools’ were available alongside ‘Boxing gloves, footballs…rackets, hockey-sticks and balls, dumb-bells, &c.,’ at his newly expanded and renamed Cricket and British Sports Warehouse.66
The question of standardization was becoming urgent, and in 1863 a dozen clubs and groups of old boys, mostly from the south-east and London, met to attempt to agree ‘some set of rules which the metropolitan clubs should adopt among themselves’. They called themselves the Football Association, and they were pleased to discover that Cambridge had codified a set of rules which included regulations on the offside rule, permissible forms of tackling, goals and goal kicks. Hands, these rules warned, ‘may be used only to stop a ball and place it on the ground before the feet’.67 Two months after this announcement, Lillywhite was announcing, ‘The FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION - The POCKET LAWS of the above are now ready, price 6d., per post 7d., and in a few days will be ready, the Laws on sheet varnished, with rollers for the Club Room, price 1s., per post 1s. 2d. Published only (by authority) by JOHN LILLYWHITE, Cricket, Football, and British Sport Warehouse’68 (and yet again the name of the shop had changed to reflect the popularity of the new sport).
In 1868 another association of clubs was formed, this time in Sheffield, and this group a
lso established its own code, although it soon liaised with its southern counterpart to attempt to merge the rules of the two regions.* Inter-association competition began - in 1871 Charles Alcock, the new secretary of the Football Association, took a team to Sheffield for a game - but it was not until 1877 that the two sets of rules were finally merged into one that was acceptable to most of the teams. (Most: the miners in east Northumberland agreed finally to accept these rules only in 1882.)69 This codification went some way towards making the Football Association an arbiter of all football disputes, but it was by no means the only association: the Birmingham Football Association had been established in 1875, Staffordshire and Surrey each had their own association in 1877; Lancashire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Cheshire followed in 1878; Durham and Northumberland in 1879; Cleveland, Lincolnshire and Norfolk in 1881; London, Liverpool, Shropshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Sussex, Walsall and Scarborough and the East Riding in 1882; Derbyshire, Essex, Kent and Middlesex in 1883; Cambridgeshire, South Hampshire and Dorset in 1884; and Somerset and Suffolk brought up the rear in 1885.70 Only towards the end of this period of development did the FA become an association of county and district associations, rather than an association of clubs. Thereafter the local FAs ran their own competitions and supervised their teams; the FA itself arbitrated disputes brought by members or associations, monitored the rules of the game, and organized the FA Cup.
In 1886 the International Football Association Board was established, with two representatives each from the English FA and from the parallel FAs that had been set up in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. It aimed to bring national coherence to the governing bodies. It was this group which agreed across all four countries such standards as ball size, how the ball could be thrown in from touch, how to mark touchlines, that crossbars had to be used instead of tapes - all the details that made inter-association competition possible.71
But by the time the International Football Association Board was formed there was a whole new lot of questions to be resolved - ones that were a great deal more fundamental than crossbars and tape. In the early 1870s county cups had been established in Lancashire, Birmingham and Staffordshire, while in 1871 the English FA Cup competition was started, based on Alcock’s idea of a knockout competition; the Scottish Cup competition followed in 1873, and the Welsh in 1877, with the aim of providing inter-school competition. These competitions were held in front of large (although today unquantifiable) numbers of spectators. At exactly the same time as happened in racing, the mid-1870s, it was discovered that football spectators were happy to pay to watch their sport. So, was football pleasant exercise for its participants, or was it a lucrative business opportunity? If the former, how to justify charging spectators; if the latter, where was this income to be directed?
Up until 1881, most of the football clubs from the south had been made up of former public-schoolboys or other members of the metropolitan-based middle classes. Of the 158 players from southern clubs who participated in the FA Cup finals up to this date, 39 had a legal background, 38 were army officers, 16 clergymen, 14 teachers (this category overlapped with the clergy, some being both teachers and clergymen), 11 in banking, 8 brewery directors or managers or wine merchants, 6 civil servants, 2 doctors and 2 professors, the rest listing themselves as company directors or simply ‘gentlemen’.72 By the end of the 1870s, northern clubs were already semi-professional, made up of working men who needed to be recompensed for giving up a day’s pay to play. The aims of these two groups could not have been further apart, and the vexed question of whether it was acceptable for players to be paid for their performances was a constant irritation - in the background to begin with, but soon, bitterly, in the open.
In fact by the late 1870s some players were fully professional. In 1878 the Darwen News reported with perfect equanimity that Blackburn Rovers had been ‘well marshalled by McIntyre, who, we believe is engaged as professional to the Rovers’. McIntyre was an upholsterer from Glasgow, and had played for Glasgow Rangers before he moved to Lancashire to find work. In 1881 the Midland Athlete reported carefully that ‘at present we know of no GLARING case wherein men have been paid to play football…[but] we do know of cases where men have received more than their legitimate expenses to play for a club.’ Others were more concerned about importation, the practice of bringing players into the team just for important matches. This appeared to be on the increase from the late 1870s, when some particularly talented players appeared for several clubs in the same competition in the same season. In 1883 Nottingham Forest placarded the streets of Sheffield with offers of a £20 reward to anyone who provided proof that Sheffield Wednesday was fielding three imported players in a cup tie against Forest. The problem was patched over in different ways in different places. In Lancashire from 1882 two years’ residency was required before those born outside the county could play in cup ties, and it was generally agreed that no one could play for more than one club in the same season in competitions. Other teams established rules that forced players to prove that their expenses were used solely for travel and accommodation.73
Many of the southern teams complained that the northerners were cheating, and the FA, a southern organization, now banned any payments. In 1883 Accrington was expelled from the FA, with Preston excluded from the Cup the following year, both for the sin of professionalism. This was the tipping point. Many in the north saw the FA’s ruling as based on anti-north, anti-working-class prejudice, and there were mutterings that the southern clubs had not objected to northern professionalism until the southerners began to be beaten. And beaten - even humbled - they were. In 1882 Blackburn Rovers had become the first northern team to reach the FA Cup final; in 1883 Blackburn Olympic, a team made up of 3 weavers, 1 loomer, 1 gilder, 2 ironfoundry workers, 1 clerk, 1 master plumber, 1 licensed victualler and 1 dental assistant, beat the Old Etonian team in the final of the FA Cup - the first northern industrial team to win the Cup.74 Previously, these teams had been at enormous economic disadvantage. In 1879 when Darwen was drawn against the Old Etonians in the FA Cup it had to appeal for funds ‘to enable the working lads of our town to compete against government inspectors, university professors, [and] noblemen’s sons’, as the Darwen News put it. A collection in the mills and works raised £175 to compensate for loss of earnings. By the time Blackburn Rovers was preparing for its FA Cup appearance, before both the semifinal and the final it received financial aid from a local industrialist, who paid for the players to stay in a Blackpool hotel for a week before the competition. Here the team trained together, and also received a special diet: a glass of port wine and two raw eggs at six a.m., before a walk on the beach, porridge and haddock for breakfast; a leg of mutton for dinner; porridge and a pint of milk for tea; and half a dozen oysters per man for supper.75* Without their benefactor, the public-school grip on the finals might have taken several more years to dislodge. Instead, Rovers reinforced the northern supremacy by winning the Cup in both 1884 and 1885.
Payments were illegal, but most people understood that they happened. It was very hard to prove, and supporters on both sides pointed to contributions such as those raised by Darwen’s fans, or the provision of food, lodgings and training time to Blackburn Olympic. These were all indirect payments, regularly and openly made. At the heart of the matter was a difficulty in accepting the changing nature of the game. A pastime had become a business; maximizing profits meant playing to win; better, richer clubs would corner the market in the best players, and smaller clubs would go to the wall. This was directly contrary to the ethos of local competition on which the game had hitherto been based.
Charles Alcock was the highly influential secretary of the FA for twenty-five years. Educated at Harrow, he was a founder member of the Forest Club, and then helped that develop into the Wanderers in 1864. First elected to the FA committee in 1866, he became secretary in 1870 (and from 1886-7 he began to receive a salary for the job).† Although an amateur himself, Alcock saw that, if the FA was to sur
vive, it would have to accept professionalism. He agreed with Sporting Life when it wrote that ‘there can be no possible objection to the recognised payment of men who cannot afford to play for amusement, and we can see no reason why the principle which exists in almost every sport should be considered detrimental to football.’77 Alcock thought that the amateur opposition to payment was wrong, suggesting as it did that it was ‘immoral to work for a living’. The Bolton Chronicle was blunt: ‘In the South the players are mainly of the “upper ten” [per cent]. They can afford time and money for training, and travelling, and playing. In the North the devotees of the game are mainly working men. They cannot play the game on strictly amateur lines…They cannot afford to train, or to “get in form”…Besides, they command big “gates” and they naturally think they have a right to a trifle from it.’78
Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain Page 55