How Football was Born

On October 26th 1863, 12 eminently respectable gentlemen met in a gas-lit room at the Freemasons’ Tavern in Great Queen Street, London. They represented clubs now long forgotten: Barnes, Crusaders, Forest, No Names of Kilburn. Drawn from the upper middle classes of the capital, they had set themselves a historic task: to create England’s first national football association and to draw up a common code of rules for the game. The 150th anniversary of that meeting will be commemorated this autumn amid great fanfare as effectively marking the birth of the world’s most popular sport. But there is a puzzle.

Take a look at those original Football Association (FA) rules. Handling is permitted. Forward passes are forbidden. There are touch downs and something similar to a conversion. There are no crossbars. In short they bear no relation to modern football. In fact they are closer to rugby.

This year’s celebrations of the founding of the FA reflect a traditional historiography of the sport that follows a familiar narrative. The old folk game, wild and anarchic and played since the Middle Ages, had effectively died out during the process of urbanisation that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. Football was only preserved on the playing fields of the ancient public schools, specifically Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Charterhouse, Westminster, Shrewsbury and Winchester. There it was tamed and civilised. Each school played by its own rules. Then at Oxford and Cambridge, in the 1840s and 1850s, public school men began to come together to draw up a common code, a process that was completed with the creation of the FA in the autumn of 1863. Football was then handed back to the working class – cleansed and pristine – to become the mass sport we know today.

‘The game of football, as originally played at the Wall at Eton, was the author of every sort and condition of football now played throughout the United Kingdom’, the Etonian declared confidently in 1884. To this day the FA’s website states baldly: ‘Organised football, or football as we know it’, dates from 1863.