Picturing the Beautiful Game

A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art

Daniel Haxall, Daniel Haxall

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501334580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

The world's most popular sport, soccer, has long been celebrated as "the beautiful game" for its artistry and aesthetic appeal. Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art is the first collection to examine the rich visual culture of soccer, including the fine arts, design, and mass media. Covering a range of topics related to the game's imagery, this volume investigates the ways soccer has been promoted, commemorated, and contested in visual terms. Throughout various mediums and formats-including illustrated newspapers, modern posters, and contemporary artworks-soccer has come to represent issues relating to identity, politics, and globalization. As the contributors to this collection suggest, these representations of the game reflect society and soccer's place in our collective imagination. Perspectives from a range of fields including art history, sociology, sport history, and media studies enrich the volume, affording a multifaceted visual history of the beautiful game.

Part One

Soccer and Mass Media

1

From the Oval to the Crystal Palace: The FA Cup Final and its Depiction in the Victorian Illustrated Press

Alexander Leese

The first mass-produced image of an FA Cup Final appeared in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (ISDN) on April 1, 1882 (Figure 1.1). The wood engraving by Stephen Dadd (fl. 1879–1914) depicts Old Etonians’ 1–0 victory over Blackburn Rovers at the Oval, home of Surrey County Cricket Club, played in front of a crowd of 6,000.¹ Many sport historians regard this match as a major turning point in football’s development from an exclusive pastime for southern gentlemen into a popular national sport.² Since the establishment of the FA Cup in the 1871/72 season, the competition had been dominated by a small group of elite southern clubs whose players were part of the “Old Boy” network of former public school pupils. As football’s popularity grew in the industrial heartlands of Lancashire and the Midlands, the competition expanded to accommodate more regional clubs and by the early-1880s the FA Cup had become a contest “of genuinely national scope.”³ Blackburn Rovers became the first provincial team to reach the final in 1882 and, although they left the Oval empty-handed, their strong performance against the Old Etonians demonstrated that the Cup was well within the reach of the best northern teams.

It was Rovers’ local rivals, Blackburn Olympic, who became the first northern working-class team to win the FA Cup in 1883. Rovers won it themselves for three consecutive years from 1884 to 1886, and again in 1890 and 1891. Dadd maintained his interest in sport illustration and by the late-1880s he was producing regular representations of the FA Cup Final for periodicals. His illustration of Rovers’ 3-1 win against Notts County in the final of 1891 was published in the ISDN the following Saturday (Figure 1.3). Another illustration of the match was produced by William Douglas Almond (1866–1916) and this alternative view appeared in the Illustrated London News (ILN) on the same day (Figure 1.2). Rovers had now won the cup for the fifth time in 8 years, signaling that English football’s center of gravity had shifted decisively northwards.

In 1895, the final moved to the pleasure gardens of the Crystal Palace and this spectacular venue hosted what became the definitive highlight of the football calendar until the outbreak of World War I. It was at the Crystal Palace that the Cup Final gained a strong association with the working-class North of England, “never better illustrated than in the Southerner’s image of the Northerner in London ‘Oop for the Coop.’”⁴ Cup Final day essentially became a holiday for the tens of thousands of spectators who descended upon London to cheer on their team and see the sights, part of the “leisure revolution” that took place in late-Victorian England.⁵ In the first Crystal Palace final, Aston Villa defeated West Bromwich Albion 1–0 in front of a crowd of at least 42,000. Henry Marriott Paget’s (1856–1936) illustration of the match, depicting a clash of heads in front of a large crowd gathered beneath the tracks of a roller coaster, was printed in halftone on the front page of The Graphic on April 27 (Figure 1.4).

This chapter will analyze representations of the three FA Cup Finals outlined above: 1882, 1891, and 1895. These games marked important milestones in the competition’s early history but their events also inspired a range of visual responses: single-scene wood engravings, montage arrangements of episodic action and dramatic front-page compositions of eye-catching sporting drama. Such prints were often the only visual record of specific fixtures and the means by which the public could consume images of football at this time. Certain aesthetic conventions were established in this medium, including an emphasis on the game’s physical demands rather than the scoring of goals, as many artists aligned their work with the ethos of amateurism despite the rapid growth of the professional game. Match photography appeared in the illustrated press by the mid-1890s, but these images tended to be distant panoramas of players standing in their positions at kick-off rather than the action-packed compositions that artists could achieve. The illustrations presented in this chapter provide an insight into which particular incidents, along with more general aspects of how the game was played, watched, and officiated, were considered important elements for depicting football in illustrated periodicals towards the end of the nineteenth century.

The artists’ careers and their experience of illustrating football (or lack thereof) also provide a useful starting point for considering to what extent the compositions accurately reflect the fixtures. In addition to producing whimsical domestic and animal subjects, Dadd became a prolific sporting artist and illustrated a range of sports throughout the 1880s and 1890s.⁶ Almond and Paget, on the other hand, were relatively inexperienced with sporting subject matter, having built their careers around Social Realist depictions of London’s workhouses,⁷ and illustrations of adventure stories and historical narratives respectively.⁸ This period also saw significant developments in printing technologies employed by the illustrated periodicals and the prevalence of wood engraving gave way to photomechanical processes that could recreate the tonal qualities of painting and photography. Most narratives of the FA Cup are constructed from match results and the statistical records of teams, players and attendances. Although this approach tends to satisfy the demands of traditional sports history, which has perhaps suffered from “a near-obsession with list-making,”⁹ analysis of visual representations of early FA Cup Finals offers a richer interpretation than those based on textual or statistical sources alone.

1882: Old Etonians 1 Blackburn Rovers 0

The main focal point of Dadd’s illustration of the 1882 FA Cup Final is a Blackburn Rovers player, wearing the team’s away shirt of thin black and white hoops, charging into the body of an Old Etonian. The Old Boy has managed to relinquish possession of the ball by hoofing it into the air just before his opponent barges into him with his shoulder. The clash of players is balanced by the anticipatory movements of the other figures towards the edges of the composition and the ball that hangs in the air. The ball appears to be at the apex of its arc and the viewer is invited to imagine the next phase of play as it descends towards the waiting players. Apartment buildings behind the Oval can be seen in the distance along with the suggestion of a thin line of spectators gathered along the edge of the pitch. A goalpost can also be made out in the background and its position indicates that the scene is viewed looking from one end of the pitch to the other, with one team—possibly the Old Etonians due to the direction the central figures are facing—attacking away from the viewer while their opponents aim for somewhere closer to the pictu...