The Emergence of Football: Sport, Culture and Society in the Nineteenth Century

The Emergence of Football fuses sports history into mainstream economic, social and cultural history, setting the development of the people’s game against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution.

The book challenges conventional histories of nineteenth-century football that surrounded mass games and the public schools and extends the revisionist critique of those histories with the imaginative use of new and original empirical evidence. It outlines the continuing presence of a working-clas...