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... a valuable and important book on a neglected theme. -- John K. Walton American Historical Review
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The Football Association of England has become a multi-billion pound industry. But how did English football become not only the defining sport of the nation but also one of the most successful sports in the world? With The Leaguers, football historian Matthew Taylor tells the story of the early days of professional football in England, revealing the distant origins of todays game. Making extensive use of archival materials from football clubs, unions, and associations, Taylor presents a compelling picture of football teams and players in the early days of the twentieth century, tracing the development of the system of professional teams from the hundreds of town, club, and school teams that dotted the countryside. The top tier of those teams comprised the Football League that, by the 1920s, was synonymous with the very idea of professional football in the minds of fans and sportswriters alike. The Leaguers illuminates the role played by the Football Leagueand by successful clubs in the League such as Arsenal and Aston Villaas the rules, standards, and structure of the modern game were being codified. Taylor also considers the careers and influences of early players, including such well-known names as Billy Meredith, Dixie Dean, and Alex James. As footballs popularity grew and sports media proliferated, players found themselves becoming national stars, their portraits on cigarette cards bought by fans throughout England. The first full-length history of the early days of the Football League, The Leaguers will be essential reading for football fans who want to know how their favorite sport grew from modest origins to the worldwide phenomenon that is English football today.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is about the Football League as an organising body for football in England. It is just over 300 pages long and consists of seven lengthy chapters (30-40 pages) each, plus an introduction and conclusion. To place it on the spectrum from "academic" to "populist" I think I need only say that (i) it has a bibliography and (ii) said bibliography is 18 pages long (I didn't count them but that means 350-400 different sources were used). How many books about football can make those claims?
It isn't simply a dry textbook, though. Perhaps the easiest way to give a flavour is through the seven themed chapters. Chapter One is about the pressures to create a Football League and its expansion from its northern/midlands base to cover the whole country. Chapter Two covers the way the management committee of the Football League was constituted and the way it governed the competition. Chapters Three and Four are about the players, covering firstly their wages and terms of employment, and then "labour relations" i.e. relationships between employer and employee as well as with the Players' Union. Chapter Five considers the Football League's attitude to promoting a "level playing field" between clubs (e.g. through pooling gate receipts and sharing it out to prevent rich clubs buying success). Chapter Six covers the Football Leagues relations with other countries in the UK and beyond. Finally Chapter Seven considers the Football League's uneasy relationship with the media and the public.
The author is a historian at Portsmouth University and he has visited a sample of clubs to consult their archives plus spending countless hours wading through Football League documents. He marshals the material well, illustrating the points with examples but sometimes the pace could move on a bit quicker rather than giving another illustration. The thematic format chosen for the chapters also makes sense in terms of going "in depth" into issues but as two problems. First, it doesn't make for a great story - as a general reader I found it quite hard to read more than 8-10 pages at a go and (ii) you lose all sense of what happened at different points in time so the period 1900 to 1939 comes to seem a bit homogeneous.
Thee research has thrown up some terrific pieces of information. I particularly enjoyed the sections on the Football League's relationship with the media and the public - the author brings out the essential contradiction between the League as a "private members club" (which it felt very happy with) and a promoter of the national game (which it did not). The chapter on the promotion of equal competition was also potentially very interesting, although it got a bit bogged down in statistics. On the downside, I didn't feel the chapters on wages, etc. added much to what I already knew and the subject matter of a couple of chapters (relating to the workings of the Football League itself and relationships with other countries) really weren't very exciting to a general reader.
In conclusion, the author deserves great credit for the amount of source material he has worked through and how well he has organised it. If you are an interested general reader like me, read this book for the couple of really interesting chapter and flick through some of the others to get a flavour. The rest is for heavy-duty students of the game only.
It isn't simply a dry textbook, though. Perhaps the easiest way to give a flavour is through the seven themed chapters. Chapter One is about the pressures to create a Football League and its expansion from its northern/midlands base to cover the whole country. Chapter Two covers the way the management committee of the Football League was constituted and the way it governed the competition. Chapters Three and Four are about the players, covering firstly their wages and terms of employment, and then "labour relations" i.e. relationships between employer and employee as well as with the Players' Union. Chapter Five considers the Football League's attitude to promoting a "level playing field" between clubs (e.g. through pooling gate receipts and sharing it out to prevent rich clubs buying success). Chapter Six covers the Football Leagues relations with other countries in the UK and beyond. Finally Chapter Seven considers the Football League's uneasy relationship with the media and the public.
The author is a historian at Portsmouth University and he has visited a sample of clubs to consult their archives plus spending countless hours wading through Football League documents. He marshals the material well, illustrating the points with examples but sometimes the pace could move on a bit quicker rather than giving another illustration. The thematic format chosen for the chapters also makes sense in terms of going "in depth" into issues but as two problems. First, it doesn't make for a great story - as a general reader I found it quite hard to read more than 8-10 pages at a go and (ii) you lose all sense of what happened at different points in time so the period 1900 to 1939 comes to seem a bit homogeneous.
Thee research has thrown up some terrific pieces of information. I particularly enjoyed the sections on the Football League's relationship with the media and the public - the author brings out the essential contradiction between the League as a "private members club" (which it felt very happy with) and a promoter of the national game (which it did not). The chapter on the promotion of equal competition was also potentially very interesting, although it got a bit bogged down in statistics. On the downside, I didn't feel the chapters on wages, etc. added much to what I already knew and the subject matter of a couple of chapters (relating to the workings of the Football League itself and relationships with other countries) really weren't very exciting to a general reader.
In conclusion, the author deserves great credit for the amount of source material he has worked through and how well he has organised it. If you are an interested general reader like me, read this book for the couple of really interesting chapter and flick through some of the others to get a flavour. The rest is for heavy-duty students of the game only.
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