Peter Swain

The paper makes a further contribution to the ‘Origins of Football’ debate, seeking to defend the so-called ‘revisionist’ position in that debate by calling into question the reclassification, by some historians, of reports of football played outside of the public schools in the early and mid-nineteenth century. It does not, however, argue that the ‘revisionist’ position should be seen in direct opposition to the ‘traditionalist’ account of football’s origins but in addition to it, bipolar conceptual schemata not being useful in understanding the development and diffusion of the game. In that respect, more evidence is provided from the early 1860s of football playing outside of public school or public schoolboy influence arguing that this evidence ought to be added to other revisionist evidence, and some traditional evidence, to build a further refined, yet fluid, account of the history of football in the nineteenth century.

This paper outlines the transition from football games played for occasional amusement to a system of organized football clubs playing regular matches in Lancashire in the mid-nineteenth century. This was led by young men of an emerging Lancashire leisured class being, in the main, the public school educated sons of the northern county’s commercial and industrial elite. These families had accumulated sufficient wealth, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, to exempt a considerable part of their population from work both at weekends and during the normal working week with football becoming an act of conspicuous consumption. Three case studies of individual clubs and leading individuals within those clubs are presented with detailed archival research carefully avoiding the teleology implicit in much historical writing of the past. It also swells the paucity of good historical material about the organization of sport at levels below national bodies. In so doing, it aims to illuminate some of the shadows in the big picture of the evolution of sport and leisure in Lancashire and Britain itself while informing the ongoing orthodox/revisionist debate into the origins of football in the nineteenth century.

This paper seeks to defend one part of what has become known as the ‘revisionist’ account of the historiography of football in nineteenth-century England. In so doing, it responds to the critique by Tony Collins in his article ‘Early Football and the Emergence of Modern Soccer’ between 1840 and 1880, calling into question the reliance in his arguments of what he describes as ‘legal organized games’ as the only measure of a football culture outside of the public schools. His classification of small-sided games of football as an ‘informal leisure practice or folk custom’ is also interrogated and found wanting. Alternatively, further evidence is presented from 1860 of football games played in a variety of forms, usually alongside other sports, and mainly on church, works’ or schools’ outings, at rural fetes, galas and celebrations, or as street or casual football, the latter taking place in meadows, fields, and greens. Importantly, these were predominantly small-sided games and are, arguably, the ones closest to Association football, as it was codified in 1863, and constituted a broad, tenacious, and increasingly visible football culture that existed amongst the general population across mid-century uninfluenced by the public schools and public school boys.