
How Football Began
A Global History of How the World's Football Codes Were Born
- 208 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world.
The book explores how the world's football codes - soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic - developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses.
Important reading for students of sports studies, history, sociology, development and management, this book is also a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football in all its forms, as well as an engrossing read for anyone interested in the early history of football.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- List of plates
- Introduction
- 1 The failure of the Football Association
- 2 Before the beginning: folk football
- 3 The gentleman’s game
- 4 Sheffield: football beyond the metropolis
- 5 The end of the universal game
- 6 From the classes to the masses
- 7 Glasgow: football capital of the nineteenth century
- 8 The coming of professionalism
- 9 Kicking against the pricks: women and football
- 10 Rugby football: a house divided
- 11 Melbourne: a city and its football
- 12 Australian Rules and the invention of football traditions
- 13 Ireland: creating Gaelic football
- 14 Football and nationalism in Ireland and beyond
- 15 American football: the old game in the new world
- 16 Canadian football: between scrum and snapback
- 17 Rugby league football: from people’s game to proletarian sport
- 18 The 1905–07 football crisis in North America
- 19 The 1905-07 football crisis in world rugby
- 20 Soccer: the modern game for the modern world
- 21 The global game
- Bibliography
- Index