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Where it all first kicked off
On 24 October, 1857 a group of well-to-do young men in Sheffield gathered to form the world's first football club. Sheffield FC would go on to spawn a thriving local football scene in the 1860s and would play a key rule in shaping the rules of the infant Football Association, formed in 1863.
The time has long passed when London-centric histories of football used to airbrush Sheffield out of accounts of the origin of the sport and the club's 150th anniversary two years ago was marked by numerous tributes fully acknowledging its contribution. But recent research suggests that contribution may have been even more significant than previously realised – and that fully understanding Sheffield's role may force us entirely to rethink the accepted wisdom of how modern football was born.
The traditional view of the origins of football runs something like this. The game played by the common people from the Middle Ages onwards was wild and anarchic. It was only with the adoption of football by the great public schools in the early 19th century that football acquired any refinement.
When public schoolboys began to play each other at Cambridge University in the 1840s and 1850s a common code began to evolve, and this culminated in the formation of the FA in 1863. Football was then handed back to the working classes, cleansed and pristine, to become the mass sport we know today.
Sheffield FC was seen as part of this process. In his otherwise excellent 1974 book The People's Game, Professor James Walvin of York University wrote: "The Sheffield club was established under the influence of Old Harrovians who persuaded local village footballers not to handle the ball, allegedly by providing the players with white gloves and florins to clutch during the game."
But Professor Walvin was drawing on unreliable secondary sources. In fact, none of Sheffield's original members had been to Harrow, and scarcely any of them had been to public school.
It's true they wrote off to the various public schools to obtain copies of their rule books. But people do not normally learn a sport from a book, and common sense suggests these men had played football before they established a football club. Which begs the question – where had they learned the game?
We now know that there was a thriving folk football scene around the villages of Penistone, Thurlstone and Holmfirth which survived well into the middle of the 19th century. Press reports suggest matches were small scale, well organised and nothing like the anarchic village romps we generally associate with pre-industrial football. "An excellent match of football took place at Thurlstone lately, between six of the celebrated players of that place and six from Totties, which ended with neither party getting a goal," wrote Bell's Life on February 12, 1843. Another report specified that the game being played was "foot-ball, and not hand-ball".
The founder of Hallam FC, the Sheffield club's first local rival, was born in Penistone and Sheffield Wednesday's first captain in 1867 was from the same area. It can surely be no coincidence that Britain's first modern football scene outside London should have emerged so close to this hotbed of the folk game.
The folk-influenced football played in Sheffield was significantly different from that played at the public schools. Sheffield were pioneers in the introduction of free kicks, corners and cross bars. Handling the ball died out there earlier than elsewhere and it was in Sheffield that men first began heading the ball. Most importantly, though, Sheffield played, initially at least, without an off-side rule.
For the public school men this was sacrilege. Most public school games
were built on rigid off-side laws which effectively outlawed forward passing and, in the case of the Eton Field Game, backwards and sideways passing as well.
Public school men regarded passing as positively unmanly, an abdication of responsibility, and at Eton if you waited up field for a pass over the top of the defence it was known as "sneaking". As a result public school football was largely lacking in guile, consisting of two warring blocks attempting to force the ball forward through sheer strength.
Sheffield's off-side rule changed everything. Suddenly the magical geometry, the shifting kaleidoscope of the modern game became possible.
You could pass the ball around your opponents rather than charging through them. It was the birth of the beautiful game.
"The rules affected by the Sheffield Association gave rise to a loose and disjointed game, which directly encouraged the adoption of a certain kind of passing," wrote an early football historian in 1890. "The main feature of the general play of Sheffield teams was the transmission of the ball from one player to another, according to their stations, arranged on a definite plan."
The original 1863 FA rules outlawed forward passing. In 1866 a compromise was introduced whereby you were onside so long as you had at least three opponents between you and the goal – more restrictive than the modern two-man rule but a considerable improvement on what had gone before.
But the public school sides remained resistant to change. When Sheffield's James Clegg became the only non-public school man picked to represent England in the first international against Scotland in 1872 he found his team-mates reluctant to pass the ball.
"Every man seemed centred in himself. I longed to be responsive. But my sensitive nature was chilled by the atmosphere of haughty indifference which pervaded our team. Under such circumstances, I could not play my game," he said later.
In the late 1870s another Sheffield man, Billy Mosforth, became the first working-class footballer to play for England. He found his colleagues' reluctance to pass even more exasperating and, during the 1879 game against Scotland, finally exploded at Alfred Lyttelton, England's inside forward. "I am playing for my own pleasure, Sir," responded Lyttelton. But if the public school men were indifferent, Sheffield's innovation was picked up and developed further by the Glasgow side, Queen's Park, founded in 1867.
Like Sheffield, the Glasgow men, although middle class, had not been to public school and were not bound by public school prejudices. They quickly became the masters of the short passing game. By the mid-1870s Association football was filtering down the social scale in central Scotland and the passing game was then adopted en masse by the newly emerging working-class teams.
It was these teams that produced the first generation of professionals and the passing game spread through the country as these men were employed by English clubs, initially in Lancashire, then the Black Country, then in the North East, Liverpool, Manchester and finally London.
In 1883, Blackburn Olympic became the first working-class side to reach the final of the FA Cup, a competition created 11 years before. Their distinctive passing style – Olympic made a particular feature of sweeping, cross field balls from wing to wing – left their opponents, the Old Etonians, disorientated, twisting and turning as they watched the ball sail back and forth over their heads.
The Eton men sought to impose themselves through brute strength. Public school teams were generally two to three inches taller and a couple of stone heavier than their working class opponents – a result of better diet and living conditions. But the superior fitness of the professionals and semi-professionals who made up the Olympic team soon told and the Lancastrians eventually ran out 2-1 winners after
extra time.
No team of gentleman amateurs would ever reach an FA Cup Final again.
Uniquely among the sports of late Victorian England, football had been conquered by the working class. And it was a victory of style above all else.
Dissection of Sheffield FC's early history teaches us two things. Firstly, traditional folk football was not necessarily as violent as has always been thought.
The bloodline connecting the modern game with that played in the Middle Ages is much stronger and broader than the early histories claimed – and that bloodline runs through Sheffield.
Secondly, football only began to become truly sophisticated with the liberalisation of the offside law in 1866, which opened the way for the passing game to evolve. For this, football has Sheffield to thank. The passing game which first emerged there was adopted and perfected, first by Queen's Park, and then by the legions of working-class teams that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s.
In short – it was not the public schools who civilised the game of the common people, but the common people who civilised the public school game. And Sheffield was central to the process.
Richard Sanders is the author of Beastly Fury; The Strange Birth of British Football, published by Bantum Press, 16.99.
To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepost bookshop.co.uk. P&P is 2.75.
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