The great football myth

Far from being invented and refined by toffs, Richard Sanders says that the world’s most popular sport was
civilised and modernised by ordinary people

As a new football season begins, and a sporting legend (Sir Bobby Robson) passes away, it seems the right time finally to expose the big lie at the heart of football. Though it’s universally assumed that the modern game was created by the upper classes, who took the rough-and-tumble kickabout beloved of common people and refined it into the world’s best-loved sport, in fact the opposite is true.

The myth runs something like this. The game played by the common people from the Middle Ages onwards was wild and savage, little more than a village romp. It was only with the adoption of football by the great public schools in the early 19th century that football acquired a clear set of rules. These men then handed football back to the masses — civilised — to become the sport we know today. It’s a lie first propagated by the earliest historians of football (all of them public schoolboys) and one that has been repeated largely uncritically ever since. But it’s high time a whiff of democracy entered the historiography of the people’s game.

The old, original public school games are still played at a number of institutions today and you just have to stroll along to Eton, Harrow or Winchester to observe the fundamental problem with the idea that public schoolboys civilised football. Their games are horribly brutal. Health and Safety has put paid to some of the nastier practices in recent years but public school football remains incomparably more violent than conventional football. Scrums play a central role, charging is permitted and players spend much of their time writhing together in the mud.