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The Sheffield footballing subculture of the late 1850s and early 1860s was the first major example of its type in the world. However, just a few miles further south was an area called North East De...

Occasionally, a book’s title requires deciphering – this is such an occasion! In the introduction, the author explains in the first few lines: ‘Puddings, bullies and squashes were terms used at Rad...

Not only was Eric Dunning a leading light in the sociology of sport, he was also one of the first academics to take the study of association football seriously. This article will focus on two areas...

The past two decades have seen a plethora of studies on the early development of football. Peter Swain’s offering is the latest in a line of articles and books by prominent sociologists and histori...

Over the past two decades, academics have robustly debated the early history of the game of football. Initially, support polarized around two conflicting paradigms, the predominance of public schoo...

‘Football does not ask for faith; it compels examination.’1Eric Dunning died on 10 February 2019 and, with his passing, the academic world bid farewell to the father of the sociology of sport. In c...

Rivalries in ‘mob’ or ‘folk’ football were some of the first and most intense in the game, illustrating that such feelings pre-dated the game’s modern form. The parishes of St. Peter’s and All Sain...

By the late 1850s, clubs were formed in England with the sole purpose of playing football. Many began in the London area where, in the autumn of 1863 the Football Association held its first meeting...

A little while ago I reviewed Matthew McDowell’s excellent book, A cultural history of association football in Scotland, but inside I was surprised to find a note from the editor-in-chief of the pu...

This article attempts to further our understanding of the early development of modern football by examining events in Derby and South Derbyshire. Examples of the mob form of the game were common in the county and progress might have been expected to have been swift in terms of initial growth. However, advancement in the city of Derby was slow and it fell to a local elite in rural South Derbyshire to provide the necessary impetus. It is suggested that this urban tardiness may have been a product of the prohibition of the mob game in Derby, an event which may well have stunted the sport’s growth.

This article adds to the narrative of the early Sheffield football subculture. It suggests that there were three main strands of diffusion through which the game developed in and around the city – the ideas of the former pupils of Sheffield Collegiate School, one of which, Nathaniel Creswick, became a co-founder of Sheffield FC, the first club side; the minimal influence from the major public schools, with whom members of Sheffield FC communicated; individuals involved in local forms of the game in the Penistone/Thurlstone area to the north of the city. The authors highlight the part played by several individuals, specifically John Dransfield, in this process.

This special issue is the culmination of a debate between leading academics concerning the early development of the game of football. Up to the year 1863, it is concerned simply with ‘football’, a ...

In this paper the authors seek to continue the debate on the development of modern football. They note the support offered by Tony Collins to the long-standing reservations of Graham Curry and Eric Dunning regarding the weaknesses of the revisionist case, which has sought to lessen the influence of public schoolboys on the game’s early years. The authors do, however, offer some correctives to Collins’s thoughts, particularly in terms of the complex Sheffield footballing subculture. Curry and Dunning support the need for more research based on local studies and attempt to gather together current thinking in this area.

Thirty years ago, the number of academic texts on football in all its forms was relatively few. Now there seems to be one published every month of the year and, as football lovers, we should rejoic...

This article continues the debate on the origins of football. It contains new data which note early football activity and initial club formation in Nottinghamshire. The authors reach the conclusion that former public schoolboys were prominent in the development of football in that particular area and see this as further confirmation of their hypothesis that many of these individuals should be seen as important in the establishment of football as a modern sport.

This article is intended as a reply to Adrian Harvey's recent historiography of football in which he continues to distort the story of the initial development of the game. It not only refutes the revisionist hypothesis of an influential football sub-culture based around public houses but also offers an alternative explanation of the game's past, largely based on the influence of ex-public schoolboys and former university undergraduates. It seeks to push the debate a step further by robustly re-asserting the meagre nature of the revisionist evidence in addition to Adrian Harvey's poor scholarship.

This is the first time that I have received a copy of a book for review which comes with an additional cover containing a rather self-important suggestion on ‘How to write a book review’. It seems ...

This article attempts to redress the balance of historical interpretation in terms of the origins of the modern game of football. We analyse succinctly the new data on football outside school settings unearthed by Goulstone, Harvey and Swain which we find to be sparse and ultimately misleading. Because of this paucity of information, it is robustly contended that this information has been overemphasized by the ‘football history community’ and there is little need for any major realignment in the standard histories of the game. We attempt to reignite the debate by proposing the existence of a sporting, more narrowly a footballing, elite in various localities who were partly responsible for the development of the modern game in England. However, we continue to believe that footballers from the major public schools, especially Old Etonians, exerted far more influence on the game’s early development and eventual outcomes than what recent authors might allow.

In mid‐to‐late Victorian England the footballers of the city of Sheffield created one of the earliest and most vibrant sub‐cultures. The extent of midweek football and the types of crowd disorder in Sheffield football around that time provide two of the more interesting areas for study. The first section of this paper attempts to examine the custom of Saint Monday, the practice of utilizing the first day of the working week as a time for leisure activities, in Sheffield between the years 1876 and 1886. This is attempted through the detailed study of midweek football matches played by clubs from the city and its surrounds during those years. Although Monday will be the principal focus, other midweek days will also come under scrutiny. Secondly there is an attempt to provide a qualitative analysis of football crowd behaviour in Sheffield prior to 1892. The author seeks to add to the ‘football hooliganism’ debate by commenting on existing work carried out in this area dealing with incidents before that date....

This article is a reply to Tony Collins's ‘History, Sociology and the “Civilizing Process”’ (Sport in History, vol 25, No 2, August 2005, pp 289–306). In it, we accept some of Collins's criticisms, eg that, in Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players (1979; 2005), Dunning and Sheard exaggerated the levels of violence in northern rugby in the 1890s and 1900s. For the most part, however, we argue that Collins's criticisms are misplaced and we present the systematic evidence which, we believe, supports our interpretations. We end with an exposition of Collins's misunderstandings of ‘figurational sociology’ and offer a restatement of some of the key propositions on which the ‘figurational’ position is based.

This article examines emergent professionalism within association football in Sheffield during the late 1870s and early 1880s. It attempts to analyse these trends through the career of James J. Lang, a Scotsman seemingly invited to Sheffield with the sole intention of playing football. The city's footballers had already created a thriving sporting sub‐culture and there is some evidence to suggest that Lang may have been one of the first players to participate professionally. His role as an importation is also closely considered. The text touches briefly on other related events together with the careers of additional members of the Sheffield footballing community.