Prologue: Whatever Happened to the People’s Game?

Abstract

For more than a century the game of soccer has been widely recognised as the British national game. Notwithstanding the claims of cricket to represent the English at play in the summer, it was soccer which evolved, from ancient folk customs, to become the most popular game in the highly urbanised and industrialised world of the late nineteenth century. Highly disciplined in conduct and regulation, enormously popular among legions of men and boys from all social classes, commercially attractive to investors and ancillary backers, football by the mid-1880s was thriving as no other game had done before. Watched by tens of thousands, in new purpose-built stadiums, played by thousands more — thanks in large measure to the game’s unique qualities of cheapness, simple organisation and the ease of organising football for new generations of compulsorarily educated school boys — soccer was universally accepted as ‘the people’s game’. It is true, however, that this catchy epithet ignored the crucial fact that, by and large, only the male half of the population loved the game. None the less, few could deny the unique position — acquired in a very brief period — which soccer had come to occupy among that generation of men born into late Victorian and early Edwardian society.