Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (68 page)

In 1868 another association of clubs was formed, this time in Sheffield, and this group also established its own code, although it soon liaised with its southern counterpart to attempt to merge the rules of the two regions.
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Inter-association competition began - in 1871 Charles Alcock, the new secretary of the Football Association, took a team to Sheffield for a game - but it was not until 1877 that the two sets of rules were finally merged into one that was acceptable to most of the teams. (Most: the miners in east Northumberland agreed finally to accept these rules only in 1882.)
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This codification went some way towards making the Football Association an arbiter of all football disputes, but it was by no means the only association: the Birmingham Football Association had been established in 1875, Staffordshire and Surrey each had their own association in 1877; Lancashire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Cheshire followed in 1878; Durham and Northumberland in 1879; Cleveland, Lincolnshire and Norfolk in 1881; London, Liverpool, Shropshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Sussex, Walsall and Scarborough and the East Riding in 1882; Derbyshire, Essex, Kent and Middlesex in 1883; Cambridgeshire, South Hampshire and Dorset in 1884; and Somerset and Suffolk brought up the rear in 1885.
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Only towards the end of this period of development did the FA become an association of county and district associations, rather than an association of clubs. Thereafter the local FAs ran their own competitions and supervised their teams; the FA itself arbitrated disputes brought by members or associations, monitored the rules of the game, and organized the FA Cup.

In 1886 the International Football Association Board was established, with two representatives each from the English FA and from the parallel FAs that had been set up in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. It aimed to bring national coherence to the governing bodies. It was this group which agreed across all four countries such standards as ball size, how the ball could be thrown in from touch, how to mark touchlines, that crossbars had to be used instead of tapes - all the details that made inter-association competition possible.
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But by the time the International Football Association Board was formed there was a whole new lot of questions to be resolved - ones
that were a great deal more fundamental than crossbars and tape. In the early 1870s county cups had been established in Lancashire, Birmingham and Staffordshire, while in 1871 the English FA Cup competition was started, based on Alcock’s idea of a knockout competition; the Scottish Cup competition followed in 1873, and the Welsh in 1877, with the aim of providing inter-school competition. These competitions were held in front of large (although today unquantifiable) numbers of spectators. At exactly the same time as happened in racing, the mid-1870s, it was discovered that football spectators were happy to pay to watch their sport. So, was football pleasant exercise for its participants, or was it a lucrative business opportunity? If the former, how to justify charging spectators; if the latter, where was this income to be directed?

Up until 1881, most of the football clubs from the south had been made up of former public-schoolboys or other members of the metropolitan-based middle classes. Of the 158 players from southern clubs who participated in the FA Cup finals up to this date, 39 had a legal background, 38 were army officers, 16 clergymen, 14 teachers (this category overlapped with the clergy, some being both teachers and clergymen), 11 in banking, 8 brewery directors or managers or wine merchants, 6 civil servants, 2 doctors and 2 professors, the rest listing themselves as company directors or simply ‘gentlemen’.
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By the end of the 1870s, northern clubs were already semi-professional, made up of working men who needed to be recompensed for giving up a day’s pay to play. The aims of these two groups could not have been further apart, and the vexed question of whether it was acceptable for players to be paid for their performances was a constant irritation - in the background to begin with, but soon, bitterly, in the open.

In fact by the late 1870s some players were fully professional. In 1878 the
Darwen News
reported with perfect equanimity that Blackburn Rovers had been ‘well marshalled by McIntyre, who, we believe is engaged as professional to the Rovers’. McIntyre was an upholsterer from Glasgow, and had played for Glasgow Rangers before he moved to Lancashire to find work. In 1881 the
Midland Athlete
reported carefully that ‘at present we know of no GLARING case wherein men have been paid to play football…[but] we do know of cases where men have received more than their legitimate expenses to play for a club.’ Others were more concerned about importation, the practice of bringing players into the team just for important matches. This appeared to be on the
increase from the late 1870s, when some particularly talented players appeared for several clubs in the same competition in the same season. In 1883 Nottingham Forest placarded the streets of Sheffield with offers of a £20 reward to anyone who provided proof that Sheffield Wednesday was fielding three imported players in a cup tie against Forest. The problem was patched over in different ways in different places. In Lancashire from 1882 two years’ residency was required before those born outside the county could play in cup ties, and it was generally agreed that no one could play for more than one club in the same season in competitions. Other teams established rules that forced players to prove that their expenses were used solely for travel and accommodation.
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Many of the southern teams complained that the northerners were cheating, and the FA, a southern organization, now banned any payments. In 1883 Accrington was expelled from the FA, with Preston excluded from the Cup the following year, both for the sin of professionalism. This was the tipping point. Many in the north saw the FA’s ruling as based on anti-north, anti-working-class prejudice, and there were mutterings that the southern clubs had not objected to northern professionalism until the southerners began to be beaten. And beaten - even humbled - they were. In 1882 Blackburn Rovers had become the first northern team to reach the FA Cup final; in 1883 Blackburn Olympic, a team made up of 3 weavers, 1 loomer, 1 gilder, 2 ironfoundry workers, 1 clerk, 1 master plumber, 1 licensed victualler and 1 dental assistant, beat the Old Etonian team in the final of the FA Cup - the first northern industrial team to win the Cup.
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Previously, these teams had been at enormous economic disadvantage. In 1879 when Darwen was drawn against the Old Etonians in the FA Cup it had to appeal for funds ‘to enable the working lads of our town to compete against government inspectors, university professors, [and] noblemen’s sons’, as the
Darwen News
put it. A collection in the mills and works raised £175 to compensate for loss of earnings. By the time Blackburn Rovers was preparing for its FA Cup appearance, before both the semifinal and the final it received financial aid from a local industrialist, who paid for the players to stay in a Blackpool hotel for a week before the competition. Here the team trained together, and also received a special diet: a glass of port wine and two raw eggs at six a.m., before a walk on the beach, porridge and haddock for breakfast; a leg of mutton for dinner; porridge and a pint of milk for tea; and half a dozen oysters per
man for supper.
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Without their benefactor, the public-school grip on the finals might have taken several more years to dislodge. Instead, Rovers reinforced the northern supremacy by winning the Cup in both 1884 and 1885.

Payments were illegal, but most people understood that they happened. It was very hard to prove, and supporters on both sides pointed to contributions such as those raised by Darwen’s fans, or the provision of food, lodgings and training time to Blackburn Olympic. These were all indirect payments, regularly and openly made. At the heart of the matter was a difficulty in accepting the changing nature of the game. A pastime had become a business; maximizing profits meant playing to win; better, richer clubs would corner the market in the best players, and smaller clubs would go to the wall. This was directly contrary to the ethos of local competition on which the game had hitherto been based.

Charles Alcock was the highly influential secretary of the FA for twenty-five years. Educated at Harrow, he was a founder member of the Forest Club, and then helped that develop into the Wanderers in 1864. First elected to the FA committee in 1866, he became secretary in 1870 (and from 1886-7 he began to receive a salary for the job).
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Although an amateur himself, Alcock saw that, if the FA was to survive, it would have to accept professionalism. He agreed with
Sporting Life
when it wrote that ‘there can be no possible objection to the recognised payment of men who cannot afford to play for amusement, and we can see no reason why the principle which exists in almost every sport should be considered detrimental to football.’
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Alcock thought that the amateur opposition to payment was wrong, suggesting as it did that it was ‘immoral to work for a living’. The
Bolton Chronicle
was blunt: ‘In the South the players are mainly of the “upper ten” [per cent]. They can afford time and money for training, and travelling, and playing. In the North the devotees of the game are mainly working men. They cannot play the game on strictly amateur lines…They cannot afford to train,
or to “get in form”…Besides, they command big “gates” and they naturally think they have a right to a trifle from it.’
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In 1884 thirty-six northern teams threatened to leave the FA and form a new British Association, which would be professionally based. The Lancashire FA immediately agreed that it would leave, and the Midlands FA was wavering. Not all the teams were divided on strict north-south, professional-amateur lines, however. It was not until 1890 that the final purely amateur team in the north, Middlesbrough, turned professional, after it failed consistently when competing against the new professionals.
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But the threat of secession of the north looked solid enough to scare the FA, and it took a small step forward, suggesting a compromise: that clubs would be able to reimburse players for any wages they lost by playing. But then it scampered backwards again, adding that all financial details would have to be revealed by the clubs, including wages for every player. At that point Sunderland and Aston Villa threatened to leave. Finally, on his second attempt, in 1885, Alcock coaxed the FA into agreeing to accept professionalism under strict rules: any player who received more than accommodation and travel expenses was a professional; professionals had to live within six miles of the club (this was to foil importations); they could play for just one club; they could not sit on FA committees, or represent their own or any other club at FA meetings; eligibility for cup matches was birth or two years’ residency.
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The FA bias towards amateurs had formally been overcome, but tacitly it continued to operate: in the first year that a professional played openly, he was forced to wear a different-coloured shirt from his teammates. As late as 1888
Punch
remained exercised by northern and Midland supremacy and professionalism, as its heavy-handed piece entitled ‘Midland Yahoos v. North Country Savages’ made clear: ‘Under the Thugby Association Rules’, it smirkingly informed its readers, ‘the takings for gate-money were enormous.’ Many southern clubs and some FAs remained amateur as long as they could. In 1891 the Woolwich Arsenal began to pay its players, followed by Millwall and Southampton. When the London FA, still resolutely amateur, threatened to ban them, Arsenal simply turned its back on its own association and began to play the northern and Midlands teams. Yet, wherever it could exert control, the FA remained stubbornly committed to the superiority of amateurism. The selection for the England team, entirely in the hands of the FA, was
notably tilted towards the amateurs, even when, as in 1894-5, only one amateur player made the team - by the most amazing coincidence, the FA named him captain.
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In 1889 a further large step was taken away from football as a recreation, and towards football as commerce. The Football League was formed, with the stated aim of promoting the benefits of professionalism. William MacGregor, of Aston Villa, the prime mover of the League, was a shopkeeper; his co-promoter John Davies, who later rescued a Manchester United sliding towards bankruptcy, was the chairman of Manchester Breweries. In 1893 Arsenal joined the Football League, and with another six clubs in 1894 it formed a new Southern League for professional clubs. Amateurism had had its day.
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Arsenal is an interesting example of how a team came to terms with professionalism. The club was formed in 1886 by workers at the Woolwich Arsenal, and, although early records are not clear, it is likely that it was entirely run by working men elected from the membership. Long before the club turned professional, in 1891, potential players were recruited to work for the Arsenal and were given well-paid jobs supervised by foremen sympathetic to their training needs. When professionalization had become inevitable, the club initially rejected the idea of a limited-liability company. John Humble, an engineer at the Arsenal who sat on the club committee (and later became a director), said that the club had been formed and run by working men, and he hoped to see it carried on by them, whereas if it became a limited-liability company Arsenal would degenerate ‘into a proprietary or capitalist club’. Despite these aspirations, limited liability had to be accepted: in 1893 the owner of Arsenal’s ground demanded a rent increase of £150, ‘the transfer of rate payments from him to the club, and [the right to appoint] a nominee on the committee’. He was firmly rejected, but it was decided that the best way to protect the club in future was to form a limitedliability company to raise the money to buy its own ground. The company was floated with nominal capital of 4,000 £1 shares, of which 1,552 were allotted to 860 shareholders, the majority of whom were manual workers in the Plumstead and Woolwich districts, probably mostly employees at the Arsenal. Money problems swiftly arrived anyway: the club was burdened by large mortgage repayments, while attendances were not as high as they might otherwise have been because the area had poor public transport; also, the team’s travel costs had soared
after professionalization, when they began to play the northern and Midlands clubs. The Boer War of 1899-1902 finished off the ideal of a club owned by working men. The war brought a large increase in the number of employees at the Arsenal, but it also brought a large increase in compulsory overtime and a consequent decrease in leisure time for both the players and their paying fans. In 1900 the club made a loss of £3,400, and control passed to local businessmen and professionals.
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