Arthur Kinnaird

The Field, that cozy, unselfish country gentleman’s magazine, bore the travails of 1918 well. Most of its sports reporting – and it covered association football with a generous spirit – was about dead and wounded friends, and now influenza had come in to interrupt what little real sport was still going on. Its correspondents kept a brave face from Front and hospital. War’s end caught the Field by surprise. It greeted it with relief and unsentimental sorrow.

The main non-country sports it followed – association football, rugby union, northern union rugby, cricket, tennis and golf – reacted to peace within days. Cricket’s thinkers celebrated daylight saving time and proposed an earlier start and later finish to the day’s play. Rugby union men had played with northern union men in the war and didn’t want to split off again – could an amnesty be offered to the professionals?

In the Field, the future was debated week-by-week through November. The spirit across the sports was open, optimistic: time to make a fresh start.

Not so football. The Field‘s report of a meeting of FA luminaries held on 12th November 1918 and published in their last issue of the month (the Field was a weekly back then) is shocking. If this is anything to go by, the FA planned for nothing less than the deliberate, systematic wrecking of the professional game, a coup that would win round ball dominance back for the amateurs, the Universities and the Public School Men.

Of the names present, only Arthur Kinnaird, FA President since 1890, could claim any deeper reason for wanting any such thing. He was an old man by 1918, with not long left to live. But in his youth he’d ignored his inherited wealth and all it offered to teach in ragged schools in the East End of typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, hunger and poverty. He’d founded the London Polytechnic. He backed and funded an endless stream of organisations that fought directly against the worst sides to Victorian urban life. Football was at the heart of his work – he saw it as the tool his father (Lord Shaftesbury’s right-hand man) hadn’t had. Instead of empty speeches and moralising, sport. Instead of urging, pointlessly,  continence and abstinence, here, Kinnaird saw, was a fantastic pastime that led automatically on to all of those things, and threw in life purpose, teamwork, leadership and courage to boot. Everywhere he went, he started teams. He’d even turn out for his London Polytechnic from time to time.

And bit by bit, as the Victorian era wore on, he lost his wonderful sport to northern brewers, factory owners, gambling syndicates, the financial corruption and partizanship of the growing professional game. He’d had to deal with crowd riots, drug scandals, religious sectarianism and the chicanery of football chairmen. He might have felt, late in life, that the Great War had given one last chance for association football to fulfil its early promise.

His colleagues Clegg and Wreford-Brown, on the other hand, were simply roaring snobs who cared nothing for urban people. Clegg had always hated and opposed professionalism – and drinking, and smoking: how he must have enjoyed match days. Wreford-Brown had already founded and seen fall the Amateur Football Association in pre-War days. Steve Bloomer remembered him as England’s amateur playing captain, refusing to acknowledge his team mates on the train and then taking a gold sovereign out from inside his shorts to press upon each professional goalscorer as the game progressed.

Here are their bullet-points. Remember, this is 1918: FA Cup Finals have already attracted crowds of 120,000. Old Trafford and Goodison Park and Stamford Bridge loom high over their neighbourhoods. Billy Meredith is a national star in his mid-40s.

• Players are to work a trade or occupation during the week near to their club, to which their ties are assumed to be permanent barring good reason
• Leagues are to be regionalised – no more national Football League. This is allegedly to increase “local interest” but it would also have served to undermine the Football League as an alternative power to the FA.
• County Associations are to take charge of all of the football in their area.
• Transfers between clubs that are made for tactical playing reasons are to be outlawed. High transfer fees and wages are to end.

It’s not just that this is a scorched earth policy targetting the professional game and everything that had changed since Kinnaird’s last FA Cup Final in 1883. It’s the tone. Try this paragraph for size:

This (the resumption of professionalism post-War) bears on the subject of work because, to render Mr. Clegg’s proposal easy of fulfilment, it is essential that the man should play for a club with headquarters near his employment. This would assist to arouse the local spirit, so valuable in all sport, and help to spread the popularity of the game. It must be remembered in this connection that the FA rules encourage clubs to retain players. Transfers for the express purpose of winning matches to gain points so as to avoid relegation to the second division of the League are forbidden; in fact, there must be good reason for a man leaving his club. It is not easy for a player to shift about. Each competition has its own rules governing players, and these might be more stringent by forbidding a man to assist more than one club in the same league in one season. Encouragement of long agreements between players and clubs would hinder migration and promote a wish for regular employment throughout the week like other folk.

"The professional must be prevented from getting back to the old habit of loafing"

A scheme for district leagues, on the lines of the preliminary competition for the FA Cup would help in the same direction, and, beyond doubt, the increase of local interest would prove beneficial for all concerned. To do away with the huge transfer fees and to induce the players to utilise the bulk of their time properly are the great objects in view; both may be achieved by helping men to continue to work as they have done during the war. The professional must be prevented from getting back to the old habit of loafing. It cannot be necessary to devote the whole week to preparation for an hour and a half on the football field.

It’s that use of the words “man” and “men” – you can feel the degrading stress being put upon it, as though a separate, lesser species is being discussed. That’s Herbert Chapman they’re talking about there – and Meredith – and Walter Tull (a British officer, mentioned in dispatches and killed at Favreuil only five months earlier).

Whose voice is it that we’re hearing? The article is credited to one “Hubert Preston” – most probably the journalist who ran Wisden for half a century. But Preston loved soccer and reported on professional matches throughout his career. I don’t think he’s doing any more here than channeling Clegg and Wreford-Brown. Why not Kinnaird? Because of Kinnaird’s past, which was that of a genuinely great and generous man, and because the only direct quotation is Kinnaird’s, a humorous reflection on the armistice – “the atmosphere was different from that expected when the meeting was called.”

Well, indeed.

A Floodlit Oval: The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News 16 Nov 1878

New technology and the new sport of Association Football just seemed to go together in the last years of the nineteenth century. Not only was the modern game as we know it born in amongst cutting-edge manufacturing and mining in the English and Scottish industrial urban towns, not only did the arrival of telegraph, telephone and railway make a modern league system possible, not only did improvements in printing and papermaking enable the pink and green ‘uns, but new ideas used the game to show themselves off to a wider world.

1878 was the year of Swan’s patent for the incandescent light bulb. Although that was the realistic starting point of modern electric lighting, Swan was famously not the only researcher on the case – one occasionally hears Edison’s name in this connection – and public experiments and demonstrations went on all the time.

The 1870s was also the decade in which the new football clubs, especially the pioneers in Sheffield, were discovering themselves as a source of revenue from their paying spectators. Football being a winter game, even the fresh availability of Saturday afternoon wasn’t the perfect answer to the problem of getting the biggest possible crowd. In November, December and January, in foggy, smoky cities, a 3 o’clock kickoff, timed to give men the chance for a post-work meal and drink before making it to the ground, was often too late, darkness closing in well before five. (We’ve looked at this issue here before, and found evidence of 2pm and 2.30pm kickoffs aplenty as late as the 1950s).

There was every reason, therefore, for clubs to experiment with artificial lighting. What impresses is just how well they got on, how early, and how well the businesses behind the lighting experiments took their opportunities.

The first floodlit match we know about took place on the 14th October 1878 at Bramall Lane, Sheffield, between teams selected by the Sheffield Football Association from local sides. Football in Sheffield in the 1870s was far further developed towards a recognisable modern form than elsewhere, and the city was a logical choice for the first attempt. This was followed by a poorly-received floodlit match at the Kennington Oval, and then something more interesting at the Powderhall Grounds in Edinburgh on November 11th.

The interest in the Edinburgh match lies in the choice of teams. One was a select Edinburgh FA XI. The other team was Hibs.

Hibernian have always been an Irish team. What that meant for them in 1870s Edinburgh was what it meant for all of the relatively poor Irish community, which clustered around the cheap, insanitary Cowgate and Grassmarket : prejudice and isolation. Hibs had their start from an inspirational, hardworking Irish Catholic priest, but even the best of men from that background had trouble receiving acceptance from the local sporting bodies, who were keen to remain Protestant monopolies. Neither the Scottish FA, nor the Edinburgh FA wanted to know, during Hibs’ hard early days, and actual fixtures proved hard to arrange.

So a match against an Edinburgh FA XI represented a real advance, and an opportunity to break out of an imposed ghetto situation. How this was arranged, and how the London lighting company E. Patterson got involved, isn’t clear. But Hibs’ breakthrough happened under the lights.

Five lights altogether: three at the west end of the ground, and two at the east, reckoned to total 6,000 candles altogether. Forty years to the day before the armistice to end World War One, at 7.30 pm, Hibernians ventured into the spotlight in front of 500 people who’d braved the dark, the cold and a snowstorm to see them take on the Edinburgh XI. That the lights proved to work was a sign that Hibs luck was changing: their 3-0 victory was another.

One light at each end would fail as the game progressed, but the others proved up to the task. In the 1890s, West Ham (as Thames Ironworks) would test floodlighting almost to destruction, and they whitewashed the ball periodically to keep it visible. Did Hibs? In a snowstorm? Probably not..

When the Football League was founded, ten years later, the potential for floodlighting evening matches was known, and rejected only on grounds of its perceived unreliability and the pressing need to ensure that games would be completed. FA and League cultural and technological conservatism wouldn’t really set in until after World War I. So one has to wonder: had Swan and his fellow pioneers arrived just ten years earlier, would league football have been – as Speedway became during the interwar years – an evening mass audience sport, not an afternoon one? Would we still have had to wait until the Busby and Cullis era for floodlit games to become accepted?

The link between football and new technology seems to break in 1914-18. But then, footballing innovation tout court seemed to go the way of the Footballers’ Batallion, Herbert Chapman and a few stadium enlargements aside. Whereas moving pictures seized on football immediately – one of the first clips taken in the UK shows West Brom playing Blackburn – the earliest colour film of the game is late enough to show a 1940s wartime match at Burnley. Radio took an interest, sure, but only in the face of FA and League suspicion and mean-spirited reluctance (in the immediate aftermath of war, the lack of radio commentary to entertain recuperating soldiers caused considerable bad feeling). Television didn’t commence proper regular coverage until the mid-1960s.

(WARNING: this is quite long)

I’d been casting about for months for an image that might effectively sum up the history of English football. A face, a stadium, perhaps a team lineup or training session. Perhaps a German airport, snowbound. It was a search for a picture that would say the most in the least time about 150 years of the sport. Not easy.

My mind kept closing in on one image in particular, but I rejected it as too clever, too knowing, and too beside itself for its own good. They’ll never guess this - the slogan of everyone who has tried too hard to impress. But the image kept coming back and refining itself.

It’s of a middle-aged man in tweeds, riding alone in a railway compartment. Red-faced, probably; hat in the rack above his head, stick leant beside his knees. He’s not smoking right now, but smells of tobacco, that catch-all deodorant of the Victorian age. It’s a bright day, and he has the window down. Outside, he can see a river widening in a businesslike way as it nears the sea.

Then I see him striding into town, the port town of Ayr. If we were there with him, we’d notice what for him is just background: the long-forgotton but utterly distinctive taste of coal smoke, and the whiff of untreated sewage. In the streets, boys play, some of whom don’t have shoes. He won’t ever know how quaint and strange this scene is to us, because like us he experiences himself living at the very cutting edge of time, at the end of history. The countless thousands of miniscule changes that convert his time into ours have not yet begun.

There are photographs of Victorian Ayr, of course. A large number of them are sepia. That alone banishes them from any sense of our common era – sepia photos are automatically old and subject to that mockery owed by the future to the past. (They are old because sepia worked: it was supposed to add fade-protection to otherwise shortlived images). When they were first taken and processed, they emerged as monochrome images depicting their full colour world. Of that world, only that tiny photographic slice of life was black and white. Now, of course, almost everything that survives of that world is black and white. The insignificant slice has become all that’s left, and it’s as though it always was everything. For people of my generation, born in the late sixties, black and white represents everything that happened before we arrived. Colour is everything that’s happened since. Match of the  Day went colour when I was six months old.

Because of that black and white – colour transformation, and because of other things besides, there’s a distancing. I don’t know my traveller’s name, or even if he existed, although I know why he’s in Ayr. But as I’m going to use him as a peg on which to hang some history of football, it’s worth pausing just to consider that, for him, in footballing or in other terms, he isn’t aware of being a “pioneer” or that the game he is involved in (he’s a football man) is going through its early years. To him, this is modern football. If he reflects upon it at all, as he rolls up at the field where Ayr Parkhouse FC play, then football has already done its developing, turning into the brilliant, boisterous late-century fad that it seems to him.

Not that he’s making any money out of it: this man, whose existence I’ve invented, also has an unpaid job that I’ve invented for him. He’s a scout for the world’s most famous and successful football club. He represents the side that has won the most trophies, introduced the best innovations and tactical developments, provided the most internationals and which, as he makes his way on, is taking a self-sacrificial stand to protect the smaller clubs of the game and to protect the game itself from the looming threat of corruption. Our man is a scout for Queens Park in Glasgow, and he’s come to offer membership to a burly twenty-something forward called John Cameron. I dare say he doesn’t know what he’s starting. Nor does Cameron know just what he’s getting into.

Records disappear, and we don’t know when John Cameron joined Queens Park, the most famous team in the world. But it was probably between 1892 and 1894. The Scottish Football League had been formed in 1890, and, because the League was intended to boost the profits of professional clubs by providing regular fixtures, Queens Park, a staunchly amateur side then as now, refused to join.

This wasn’t, as it’s so often painted, a matter of class snobbery. Football history is too lazy when it comes to the issue of professionalism. You know the conventional story, I’m sure. Public school toffs (boo!) who invented the game, codified it and built its institutions, but who despite this are flannelled fools with irritating laughs, don’t like professionalism because it’s working class. But they have to give in. Hurrah for professionalism and working class sport and we’re the masters now and so on and so forth. Nigel Molesworth would put it better.

I wonder whether a fair number of sports historians, especially in the UK, are that kind of historian because they secretly long to be one of the lads. The classic version of events around professionalism owes a lot to this. It’s less history, more of a “dogwhistle” – meaning, “I’m on the side of the people, I’m one of you.” Let’s put that classic account to one side and piece the thing together with John Cameron’s help.

Cameron was a working class man, but also a product of Scottish education, meaning that he was highly literate, free-thinking and independent of mind. He’d probably been out of school for a decade by the time Queens Park came calling, playing as an amateur for Ayr Parkhouse. This implies that his mode of employment, which we don’t know, was sufficient both to make his living and leave him time for sport. Sport clearly meant a great deal to him – as we’ll see later, he was proficient at more than just football – and a move to Queens Park, who were scrupulous in their background checks at this time, meant that he was confident of finding work in Glasgow too. And that playing for Queens Park was worth the disruption and risk all on its own. There would be no money in it for him.

Cameron epitomises the history of English football because he’s a clever, educated man from the West of Scotland, and because his move to Queens Park puts him at the centre of the change from amateur to professional dominance of the top levels of football.

Working class men could, after all, play serious football as amateurs. This approach to the game – moving around from job to job whilst playing for amateur clubs – is played down by historians, but it’s actually far more typical of the life of serious Victorian and Edwardian players than was full-time or part-time professionalism. The vast majority of players in organised teams in organised leagues at this time, and to this day, were and are amateur. In Scotland, so in England: Herbert Chapman’s playing days were peripatetic in the extreme, and he, like Cameron as we will see, only turned professional late in his career.

Professionalism, we are told, comes about through payments to working class players to compensate for work time lost to football. I wonder, not least because of the unlikely picture of benevolent employers letting their workers absond for the sake of the latest big fad. I’m sure that this is part of the story, but not all.

First of all, consider amateurism. There is little evidence that it has anything to do with aristocratic values. The major sports of the first half of the nineteenth century were corrupt affairs, bent out of shape as we would see it by the demands of gambling, gambling being what kept most of them in being at all. Love of fair play and love of the game were deliberate creations in the public schools and churches, and these ideas spread only as a result of a lot of hard work, persistence, determination and argument. One result was the excellent state of late century cricket, which, given the ructions, controversies and financial catastrophes of the preceding fifty years might not have seemed terribly likely at times. Just getting people to play by the rules when there is no tradition of doing so means creating that tradition from scratch, no easy thing. And then, just as amateur football has swept the nation, and the FA Cup is thriving, and international “home nations” football is thriving, and cities like Sheffield and Glasgow and the industrial towns are burgeoning with new clubs and competitions, all of it helping along a general improvement in law and order and public behaviour… just as it’s all going so well, professionalism rears its head again. Money starts changing hands, clubs poach each other’s players, and it all begins to get a little bit ugly with the promise of much worse to come.

Can you see how there might be other reasons beside snobbery for opposing professionalism? John Cameron’s new club, Queens Park, had players from all walks of life, and provided them all with the chance to play the sport at the very top level. But, having no financial goals other than to pay their own expenses, Queens Park were in a position to stand up for newer, smaller clubs and the benefits those clubs brought to members and players, in a way that Rangers and Celtic were not.

To understand the pressure for professionalism, it’s necessary to remember just how remarkable a fad football was at the end of the nineteenth century. Because of the growth of industrial cities, there existed concentrated populations keen for entertainment. Football offered businessmen a new and substantial opportunity. Ring off a field, get two teams together, and charge admission: build it, and they will come. But you need to persuade people to come to your show, not your rival’s from the other side of town, so you need to find out who people will pay to watch and get them in somehow. Offer them a job in your factory, or just give them cash in hand. If your rivals have the upper hand, raise the money somehow and steal their entire team! This fate befell the first professional FA Cup winners, Blackburn Olympic, whose side was “bought” en masse by Blackburn Rovers. Olympic soon vanished from sight.

The more people you can get in to see your games, the more profit you make, so the period 1890 – 1914 sees what is in effect an arms race of stadium building and team building. You have to become the big club in your town before someone else does. Chelsea appear out of nowhere in 1905 complete with Stamford Bridge: their founders took a huge financial risk that they only just got away with – had they not been able to persuade the Football League to give them instant admission, they’d have folded immediately. After 1920 or so, no new “big clubs” appeared: the period of meteoric growth was over. The fast money left football for cinema, motoring and radio.

So early professional football was about getting the best showmen and the best big top before the other guy did. So, for a while, the best players could command a premium for their services. But not for long.

Queens Park were right, in the end, about the threat posed by the Scottish League to small clubs. The years after 1890 were ones of terrible winnowing, even for those clubs who did join. One third of the founder members did not see the decade out. Cambuslang, Cowlairs and Renton had all ceased to exist by 1898.

They were right in another way, too. By remaining amateur and remaining, for the time being, away from the horror and bloodshed of the Scottish Football League, they kept the top level of Scottish football open to all. In England, amateur players were being squeezed out of the national team and out of the clubs. In the Edwardian era, only Vivien Woodward of the hundreds of thousands of amateur players in England made any great international contribution.

In 1896, John Cameron made his debut for Scotland. Alongside him was another Queens Park alumnus, one R.S. McColl. If that sounds like a newsagent to you, it’s because that’s what McColl later became.

Cameron wouldn’t live so long, nor become so rich. Shortly before his cap, he went professional, burning his bridges with Queens Park, and joined Everton.

John Cameron epitomises the history of English football by being one of the many Scottish mercenaries who came to play in England.

Cameron arrived at Everton at a propitious time. What we now call “The Old Lady” – Goodison Park – was reaching completion as the first football stadium to completely enclose its pitch with stands on all sides. And here, in the biggest and most modern arena in the entire world, he made an instant impact as Everton thrashed an excellent Sheffield United team 5-0.

We are now so familiar with the idea of the big football ground that we forget just what was happening in Liverpool first, then in Manchester and Glasgow. It’s thought that the Colliseum in Rome could hold 50,000 people. Within a few short years, Cameron would play a vital and historic match in front of more than twice that number. In our industrial cities, at the end of the nineteenth century, the largest secular, peaceful gatherings in the history of our species would take place. And, only fifty years after the Chartists provoked panic in London with their Kennington Rally, a Cup Final only a few miles from that spot with an equivalent number of attendees would barely raise the authorities’ collective eyebrow. Football was a fad, but it was also a miracle.

And cities that were, in effect, brand new, landmarkless places, suddenly acquired symbols for themselves in the form of the new stadia. Liverpool was Goodison Park and, later, Anfield – and these places would be known the world over. Manchester was Maine Road and Old Trafford. Queens Park had the last laugh over the professional upstarts: Glasgow was Hampden.

Now that stadium building has recommenced, this is happening again. If you had to think of a building in Reading, is the first that comes to mind the Madejski Stadium? Or Bolton, the Reebok? Middlesborough, the Riverside?

Goodison Park was the very first of all these, the first ever: and Everton “acquired” John Cameron to help fill it. In the ten years of professionalism that had already passed, many Scots had “come south”: Cameron was no pioneer in that respect. Hundreds more would follow over the years, and even a short list reads like a greatest hits of the game: Dalglish, Law, Busby, Docherty, Gallacher, even our very own Alex Massie.

Cameron joined Everton just at the moment when the great days for professional footballers were coming to a close. In the previous year, the Football League introduced its registration scheme, by which a player could only turn out for the club he was registered with, regardless of his own future desires and intentions. Henceforth, his club would “own” his right to play League football, and should he leave them, could prevent him, should they wish, from playing for a rival.

The registration scheme was belated recognition of what Queens Park had seen five years before: professionalism left unchecked would make life impossible for smaller clubs. The early years of the Football League had been dominated by the richest clubs, purely and simply, and this was a danger to the stability and the viability of the League itself. Their solution was to turn players into bondsmen. And bondsmen they would remain, right up until the 1960s.

Loyal local players playing loyally for local teams are much admired these days – the Scholeses and the Nevilles and the Carraghers. It’s thought that they hark back to better days when that kind of thing was much more common, and they are seen as a dying breed. But the loyal players of the past – like Tom Finney at Preston – had no choice in the matter. They could not have moved had they wanted to, without their club’s agreement. At the height of his powers, Finney received an offer from an Italian club which would have rendered him free of financial worries for the rest of his life. Preston refused to countenance it. And that’s one of the better stories. Players could be and were left in limbo, registered at a club but with no contract.

Even as late as the 1950s, most football contracts were for the season. Many players would be cast off for the summer, forced to find jobs until the next year’s fixtures came around. The registration scheme meant that, unlike their colleagues in industry, there was nowhere for them to go. So much for the loyal players; so much for the game “before it was ruined by money.” A fine man like Tom Finney deserved better than the peverse combination of fame and feudalism he was dealt, but that was what the best players faced, and the mediocre ones fared far worse.

The registration scheme, the first turn of the key in the lock if you will, came a year before Cameron’s arrival in England. Worse was about to come. John Cameron, as we’ve seen, was able to work and support himself outside football and yet play at the top level. Players, being considered as showmen and entertainers (the idea of the “sportsman” was in its infancy), training and development were at best ad hoc, and there is no evidence to suggest that professional players were decisively fitter than their amateur counterparts. If it wasn’t the football that brought him to Everton, then, it must have been a combination of a big money offer and his own sense of travel and adventure.

The money was next to come under threat. The arms race to build stadia was squeezing clubs’ finances. Clubs which, only a couple of years earlier, were spending their money on players, had now realized just how large football crowds might get before the soccer bubble burst. Bums on seats became a priority over boots on the ground. It was this realization that cleared the way for the registration system, and now the clubs turned their attention to the imposition of a maximum wage.

It was Cameron’s moment to come into his own.

In theory, at least, the registration system made it possible for clubs to lower the wages of their players without losing their services. But because the registration system only covered Football League clubs, it was still open to the disaffected to move to Scottish League clubs or to clubs in the growing Southern League in England. But in 1897, the Scottish League banned this kind of poaching – and within the Football League itself, the lobbying for a £4 maximum wage was gaining ground rapidly.

Most players received less than that, but the elite, including Cameron, were drawing salaries of up to £10 and saw their livelihoods threatened. Cameron, intelligent, confident and literate, was not about to allow that. In February 1898, John Cameron was able to announce that the new Association Footballer’s Union could call upon 250 members. He was Secretary, and with his Everton and Scotland colleague Jack Bell as President, the driving force. Billy Meredith, of Manchester City, was in, as was Jimmy Ross of Preston North End, Tom Bradshaw of Liverpool, and others.

There had been earlier unions, of course – ASLEF was up and running by this date – but the AFU predated both the NUM and the NUR, to say nothing of the General Federation of Trade Unions. It was an early and audacious foundation, formed under acute time pressure and within a highly peripatetic workforce spending a great deal of its time on the railway and the road.

Although the immediate threat was that to existing pay scales, Cameron knew, as Jimmy Hill and George Eastham would know sixty years later, that the “retain and transfer” registration scheme was at the very heart of their problems. He called for negotiations regarding transfers to involve the club and player concerned – not, as was usually the case, merely the two clubs with the player excluded. Bell, meanwhile, promised that the question of pay would be left alone for the time being and that there was no question of a strike.

Cameron did not know how long he had to save the situation. Once a maximum wage was imposed, he knew, that was that – his career’s potential destroyed in the interests of the Everton board. So, when a better offer came his way, he took it.

So did Bell; so did Bradshaw. Bell was replaced as AFU chairman by a Preston player in the twilight of a great career, Bob Holmes. Holmes himself would demonstrate my point about professionalism by “retiring” as a professional in the wake of the collapse of the Union in 1899, yet playing on as an amateur for Preston for another three years. For Holmes, it was twilight. For Cameron, the adventure was only just beginning. In the summer of 1898, he joined Tottenham Hotspur of the Southern League. His successor as Secretary was a schoolteacher.

it was the big money move. And it was a move away from retain-and-transfer, away from the immediate threat of the maximum wage (which came in finally in 1901, remaining in force long enough to snag the likes of Charlton, Greaves, Clough and Haynes).

John Cameron epitomises the history of English football because he was closely and personally involved in the losing battle against constraints on players’ pay and conditions.

It was a step up the social ladder, too. Late Victorian Tottenham was a far cry from the sea of industrial terracing Cameraon had known in Glasgow and Liverpool. He left behind a game that was in the process of ghettoising itself for the sake of money. First professionalism, then the League, then the retain-and-transfer system, then the maximum wage – all were measures to extract as much money from large crowds in large towns and cities as possible. In the process, they robbed the real attraction of the piece – the players – of their just share of the profits. The working class could come and watch. The working class could sign away their freedom and security and play. But the money that was the reason for it all went into other hands. If this was working class sport, then so was Roman gladiatorial combat.

Cameron, meanwhile, found himself well paid and in London, living a few streets away from where A. E. Housman was putting the finishing touches to A Shropshire Lad. His club was young and ambitious:moreover, it soon knew that in Cameron it had more than a star player on its hands. By February of 1899, he had become player-secretary-manager, one of the very first players to make the step up.

The step into management was not the obvious one it seems today. At this stage in the development of the English game, the players were seen as the experts in the art of playing. As we’ve seen in the case of Cameron, there were highly intelligent players with intellectual capacity to go with technical ability, and this would have meant some degree of on-field adaptability and thinking. Herbert Chapman acknowledged as much about Edwardian football, looking back on it from the 1930s, blaming the 1925 change in the offside law for the loss of subtlety and cleverness in the English game. His own Huddersfield team of the 1920s had its little university of writers and preachers. There have been few such since, and most of those are called Blanchflower and Giles, and how many of those are English?

The secretary-manager’s primary task was not to plan tactics but to act as go-between for the board and players. In some cases, the choice of, negotiation for and acquisition of players was also involved. All his other duties could just as well come under the heading of clerk. The idea of an ex-player moving into management needed some actual ex-players to bring it into being, and, as we’ve seen in the case of Bob Holmes, the Football League was barely old enough to be generating ex-players at all.

John Cameron epitomises the history of English football by being one of the very first Scottish ex-player managers in the League, and one of the first ex-player managers of any nationality.

As you might expect by now, Cameron was one of those managers who took a role in choosing players, and, as he continued to play himself, on-field tactics. Had there been tracksuits available to him – at this stage, British athletes still wore dressing gowns, and only US athletes had the actual tracksuits – he might have been called a tracksuit manager.

As it was, he masterminded the first successful comeback by a non-League side against a League side since 1888, scoring against Sunderland in a victorious FA Cup tie.

Cameron’s signings were good ones: Jack Kirwan, briefly his successor at Everton came; so did George Clawley from Stoke. Tom Morris was to become a long-term Spurs stalwart, but was new on the scene when Cameron led the side out for the first ever game at White Hart Lane.

John Cameron epitomises the history of English football by taking a leading role in the top-level game’s arrival in London.

By 1899, the Football League’s position on pay was beginning to endanger its preeminence in England. There was a steady flow of players from the Football League to the Southern League, and the evidence of the FA Cup showed that the southerners, without the benefit (outside the capital) of large industrial populations, were catching up. In 1900, Southampton  reached the FA Cup Final, where they lost to Bury. They had already featured in a semi-final, partly due to the good form of George Clawley in goal.

Another of the former AFU men, Thomas Bradshaw, had also made the trip south to Tottenham, and played alongside Cameron in the victory against Sunderland. Shortly afterwards, he was to illustrate in his own life just what the AFU had been needed for.

Bradshaw joined “Thames Ironworks” – the future West Ham – in the close season of 1898-9. He was injured in a game early in his season, but although he recovered to play again, it was already apparent that tuberculosis had him in its grip.

Bradshaw had mouths to feed at home, and was possessed of powerful, unselfish courage. He played his last game, visibly short of breath and stamina, on the 9th of December. By the time Christmas Day was over, he was dead.

His own tragedy was his family’s too: he would not have been insured, nor would compensation have been due. Professional footballers were well paid for their time, especially in the Southern League, but not enough to make widowhood and being orphaned anything less than a disaster.

Cases like Bradshaw’s would inspire Billy Meredith and his colleagues to rebuild the fight for union rights in the opening years of the twentieth century. Bradshaw’s colleague, Syd King, would write him a sad eulogy in his 1906 “Book of Football,” a year after King had become the first English sportsman to endorse Oxo.

Tuberculosis was far from uncommon as a cause of death amongst footballers – it took Harry Chapman, Herbert’s then more famous brother, before the Great War.

Two years after Bradshaw’s death at 26, Cameron led Spurs to the FA Cup Final, where they met one of the crack sides of the Football League, Sheffield United, and took on the unique challenge posed by William Henry “Fatty” Foulkes.

Over 110,000 supporters attended the Final, held at Crystal Palace, a venue which – unlike Goodison – was not yet enclosed on all sides.

United were deservedly strong favourites, and began well, taking the lead through Fred Priest on 20 minutes. Spurs levelled through Sandy Brown almost immediately, however. The next day’s newspaper told the rest:

When Brown was put through by Cameron to beat Fouike again with a rising shot for Tottenham five minutes after the interval, the predominantly southern crowd went wild. Hats went into the air, handkerchiefs were waved, and spectators daringly perched in the trees around the ground almost fell out of the branches. But the match was far from settled, for within a minute a strange incident changed the face of the match.

A linesman flagged for a corner-kick after Bennett had charged Totten­ham goalkeeper Clawley near the goal-line and the ball had gone behind. The referee then surprised everyone by awarding a goal to Sheffield, on the grounds that the ball had crossed the goal-line as Clawley had attempted to field Lipsham’s shot from the left seconds before Bennett had moved in to charge him. The general opinion was that referee Kings-cott had made a sad error of judgement. He was too far up the field to be able to decide the point, yet he refused to consult with a linesman much nearer to the incident.

Daylight robbery. The replay, at Bolton’s Burnden Park, is here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrwI1AVrSa4]

Cameron scored in Spurs’ 3-1 win. Tottenham Hotspur under John Cameron remain the only non-League side to win the Cup since the formation of the Football League.

It would fall to other men to lead Spurs into the Football League itself. By then, a player’s union would finally have clawed itself into existence. After 1910, in any case, the Southern League and the Football League came to an agreement which regularised retain-and-transfer across both organisations. Had that not happened, it is interesting to speculate that a post-1918 Southern League might not have taken advantage of depression in the north of England and become the game’s dominant force, with players able to earn their market worth and that outside of the working class bondsman’s ghetto that the Football League had become.

Cameron remained manager after he hung up his boots, but the loss of his place on the field led to the loss of a great deal of his influence. The players he had brought south with him had one by one retired or left, and by 1907 Tom Morris was the last significant member of the Cameron inner circle remaining.

Not for the first time, Cameron made the adventurous choice. He left England, and followed his former playing opponent William Townley to Wilhelmine Germany.

Townley, another smart man frustrated by the restricted ethos of English football, had gone over some four years earlier, and found the water warm. Although football in Germany was somewhat frowned upon, being seen as a socially inferior sport, its fans and enthusiasts had one thing about them that had great appeal. They didn’t think they knew about football, and they wanted to learn.

Cameron took over at Dresdner SC in 1907, by which time Townley was at Karlsruher. They were the first of a series of significant, thinking football men who’d seek disciples abroad before World War One, men who’d shape the whole future of European and ultimately World football. Jimmy Hogan followed them out two years later, closely followed by Jack Kirwan, Jack Reynolds and Fred Pentland. German, Dutch, Spanish and Hungarian football has reason to remember their names.

Football was spreading, but it would be a mistake to see this as a recognisable development at the time. The first modern Olympiad only took place in 1896, and the whole idea of international competition outside of Ashes or Home Championships style fraternal meetings was unfamiliar. Nor had any modern sport escaped the borders of its founding culture. Most existing sports in 1900, apart from the Victorian British inventions, had their equivalent in the ancient world. The idea of taking e.g. football and “developing” it in new countries and for new culture simply did not exist. Even Cameron and co. were merely meeting a demand in a way that paid them well and which they found satisfying.

That demand reflected a situation and created a trend. The situation: the English being alien to the concept of coaching or of football being something that could be learnt or improved upon. The trend: the best English coaches being, in effect, driven out. It took fifty years to work itself out, until 1953 and the Magyars’ huge victory at Wembley. But the English had rode their luck. Had the Austrian team held a more confident view of itself in the 1930s, defeat might have come to London twenty years earlier. The brilliant postwar England team of 46-48 hid the underlying trend for another couple of years. But by 1953, all of the best men knew what had happened. Mercer, Finney, Matthews, all realized that they’d been overtaken and that change would have to come. We’re still waiting for it.

Somewhere out there, perhaps there’s a corner of some foreign Cameron or a Townley waiting to come to visit us.

Cameron enjoyed seven good years amidst the beauty and culture of Dresden. Then came war, and with it, the strange, marvellous, tragic climax of his life.

It took place here.

This, along with some bales of hay tucked away behind, is all that remains of Ruhleben Race Course, in Spandau, Berlin. In 1914, the German Empire rounded up the “enemy aliens” within its borders. A large number of them ended up in a camp at Ruhleben. See an inmate’s sketch of the camp here.Cameron was here, along with a star-studded cast of British footballing names. Steve Bloomer came; so did Fred Pentland.

Pentland and Bloomer can be seen at the extreme left of this Ruhleben team lineup from 1918.

Also present were Fred Spiksley – who’d been coaching in Sweden before Germany – Samuel Wolstenholme, another former international to take the Kaiser’s football shilling, John Brearley – a Cameron signing at Spurs, and Edwin Dutton, whose father introduced football to Berlin.

(Jimmy Hogan was interned in Austria; Jack Reynolds  saw the war out in Holland and passed the time by getting Ajax of Amsterdam off to a good start. His immediate predecessor was another Cameroon, Jack Kirwan, who returned home to fight, before helping Italian football get started in the postwar period).

So, in the unlikeliest of settings, began the four year symposium of almost everything of the best in British football coaching. There has never been such an event or such a group since. Ruhleben left copious records, including inmate newspapers and magazines. Sadly, what isn’t recorded is the conversation between these people. We know they organised teams, cups and league competitions. But what they must have learned from one another there.Whatever it was, in 1918 it left Ruhleben and spread around the world.

After the war, Pentland went on to coach the Spanish side that beat England in 1929, and broke up the Spanish inheritance of Edwardian tactics and formation for something not dissimilar to the Hungarian formaton of the 1950s.

Spiksley went on to coach in Mexico, before returning to Germany.

Steve Bloomer went on to coach successfully in Spain, after pre-war coaching in Germany and the Netherlands.

The first two years of internment seem to have been bearable. 1914-16 account for most of the accounts of football – and of tennis, at which Cameron is alleged to have excelled. Thereafter, things darken. Food is certain to have run short at times, and it’s possible that the huge German losses of 1917 would have lessened sympathy for the prisoners, and wiped memories of their having helped Germany before. Pictures survive of work gangs: a memoir is entitled “Hell Could Not Be Worse.” Another hints at physical mistreatment of inmates.

Whatever went on, Cameron changed direction after the war. A year at home, coaching in Ayr, was followed by a move into writing and journalism. He had form of this already, writing a “souvenir”of Spurs’ entry to the Football League from his new German perspective in 1908. It was a route taken by quite a few players at the time – and there would be others later, notably Len Shackleton, who did so much to get Brian Clough’s managerial career underway.

By comparison with his performance up until 1914, Cameron’s post-War career is quiet, almost silent. You scan the years, expecting him to pop up again, to do something new or unexpected. It doesn’t happen. John Cameron was 46 by the end of the War, and, at that age, even for a fit man, 2-4 years of imprisonment and privation can mean breakdown. He is the only significant football man not to be in Steve Bloomer’s 1918 picture. The reasons why are probably sad ones.

In his career, John Cameron was at the heart of every issue that has marked British football. Except for one: race. That he narrowly missed: the great Walter Tull joined Tottenham Hotspur two years after Cameron’s departure. Tull travelled with Spurs to play Bristol City in his first season. A correspondent relates:

A section of the spectators made a cowardly attack on him in language lower than Billingsgate.. Let me tell those Bristol hooligans that Tull is so clean in mind and method as to be a model for all white men who play football whether they be amateur or professional. In point of ability, if not actual achievement, Tull was the best forward on the field.

Tull’s war saw him become the first Black officer to lead white troops into battle – indeed, to become the first British-born black officer ever. Sadly, the end of the war did not come soon enough for him.

Cameron lived until 1935, long enough to see the rise to fame, and the death, of the last innovative English manager, Herbert Chapman. All of the footballing change and growth that Cameron had lived through in his career before 1914 stopped thereafter, apart from Chapman, and I wonder what he would have made of the passivity and stasis of the interwar English game, especially once Arsenal’s great manager was gone. Since 1935, certainly, history has simply repeated itself. Here we are again, a few rich clubs dominant, buying their talent from outside England’s borders, denying the need for coaching, bickering over player’s pay.

We’ve done it all over and over again, but Cameron was there first. And that’s why he’s the Scotsman who epitomises the history of English football. Well, I did say he didn’t have to be English….

Fans Arrive at Crystal Palace for Newcastle v Villa FA Cup Final 1906

What British football had become by 1905, the world game reflects now. League systems, knock-out cups, international matches, the basic rules, professionalism, the nature of the football club, football administration – they’re all British inventions dating from a hectic 42 year period beginning in 1863 with the formation of the Football Association.

But in the 42 years after 1905, there is only one innovation to add to the list, and it’s a minor one, not universally adopted: the Buchan/Chapman third-back game. British men were responsible for innovation abroad – see the excellent El Bombin site for more on this – but Herbert Chapman’s many other frustrated ideas aside, the domestic game goes quiet.

In the subsequent sixty years, we’ve become wholesale importers of ideas and trends – some good, some not so good. We have exported Bobby Robson and hooliganism.

It’s worth asking why this is so. When English thinking has changed the design of rugby union kit in the last decade, when English cricket has invented the 20-20 game in the last decade, when British designers have dominated Formula One racing – it’s worth asking what happened to our national game to make it such a passive affair, content to jog along behind.

What follows are ideas, not conclusions: have at them.

The end of Britain’s industrial dominance

Industrialisation happened to Britain first, and had the effect of creating in short order a large number of large towns and cities with new wealth and few traditions of their own. Football clubs appear in these places as soon as the first shoots of reform free up time and energy, when there is enough of a railway system to make competition possible, but before suburbanization pushed available clear land out of range of the high-density inner cities.

By 1914, that development had run out of steam in many respects. The railway network had peaked, leaving no new territory that could be opened up. The industrial north, changed out of all recognition since 1840, would remain in its essential Edwardian form until World War II. The football clubs of the north would do likewise. They were born in innovative places, and stagnated in stagnating ones.

Football was an entertainment, not a sport

Once the idea of the large football stadium had been made real, starting with Everton’s Goodison Park, it found its typical form very quickly. Today, as in 1905, there seems to be a maximum crowd size of 60-100,000. Beyond that, the fan is too far from the pitch. Pace television, that imposes an upper limit on the income available from playing matches – and, as a maximum wage had been imposed by 1905, it imposes an upper limit on what’s worth building. There are few significant new stadia built after 1914, and no extensions of capacity beyond that maximum.

Most of the changes seen between 1863 and 1905 had served to create the situation in which football could perform as a mass entertainment – the standardization of rules, the incorporation of professional players, the creation of competitions. Once this was done, the question of why the game should continue to change became moot. The next major change – the loosening of the offside rule in 1925 – came because the status quo was not providing the same entertainment and football, already an expensive option for working and lower middle-class men, was facing strong competition for its audience.

British international dominance

South America and Europe caught up with Britain because we were there to be caught up with. We allowed ourselves to be caught up because we were ahead for a very, very long time, and our psychological advantage endured for a good twenty years after that. Since 1953, we have never regained the lead, but we have kept the rest of the world sufficiently in sight for the situation to be relatively painless. This is because of the relative strength of the Football Association and domestic football structures which have shown incredible resilience over the years and have kept standards up to a level above that which would trigger drastic remedial action.

Education

That first generation of professional footballers were, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the first generation of working class people to undergo compulsory education. As a result, there were a large number of highly intelligent men playing professional football – the kind of intelligence that white-collar work and red-brick universities would claim in ever increasing numbers in subsequent years.

Because the idea of football as a lifelong career didn’t exist as it does now, few of these men remained in the game. Those that did – and Herbert Chapman is the supreme example – did not have successors. Edwardian football was a home to the intelligent and articulate; these people would find better homes in later years, the game itself undergoing a brain drain that has never really gone into reverse, not even now in an age where footballer’s wages dwarf those of white collar professionals.

Significant numbers of the great postwar managers – Busby, Shankly, Paisley – came from Scottish or north-eastern mining stock, areas where white-collar escape remained difficult longer than in the big industrial cities. Others – Clough, for instance – failed to take the opportunities of their education.

Football’s economics after 1914 limited the need to think and innovate – the run-on from educational reform meant that there were ever fewer people in the game able to do the thinking.

Gentlemen and Tradesmen

The traditional British idea of the gentleman – not sullying his hands with work – lives on: the dream of the country house and the ownership of land as the ultimate goal of the approved British life is as powerful now as ever. British sport has a version of this – most recently seen in the resistance to professionalism in Rugby Union. Games are for enjoyment, not to be taken seriously; training spoils the fun. And that British nostrum, “don’t be clever” converts into a sporting “don’t be skilful” – unless you propose to justify your skill in the manner of a Best or Gascoigne, that is.

In short, the very idea of improvement, of innovation, is suspect in the British game and always has been.

Alongside that is the determination – the tenacity of the idea – that there are such things as English or British values and that these are more important to victory than skill or intelligence. “Passion and commitment” in short. The Australians, who show both of those qualities in spades, disagree with us, and want intelligence and strategy too. We don’t: witness the steady, stealthy writing-out of Clive Woodward from the English memory of the 2003 Rugby World Cup.

Those who are keenest on the “passion and commitment” idea think themselves the salt of the earth; in reality, they are the dupes of snobbery, ignorant of their need of Langland’s advice and prisoners to an invisible, Austenesque social snare.

Homophobia

The rest of British life has benefitted from the cultural, economic and moral energy released by the horribly belated correction of moral attitudes towards homosexuality. I don’t know why the hell football doesn’t want that too, other than its usual reasons of childish, sniggering cowardice. Football is prone to mistake intelligence or creative thinking for homosexuality and to see that in a negative light.

Feminism: repeat to fade. Poor Jackie Ashley.

Football has done a great deal to fight racism in Britain – perhaps that deserves the term “innovation” in the light of recent experiences in Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe. That it felt it to be in its own interests to do so doesn’t take away from the courage shown by the pioneers who set that change in motion thirty years ago. But in relation to other things, it can seem anomalous.

Coaching

The Premier League’s coaching certificate is a qualification that you cannot fail – all you need do is put in the hours. Isn’t that extraordinary? but it comes from a tradition that insists on coaching, if it really must take place, mustn’t be too clever and must come from the heart, from natural talent, not from actual learning.

On Radio 5′s 606 last night, a Chelsea fan urged the replacement of Avram Grant as manager by Kerry Dixon and Gianfranco Zola. In British football management circles, you have to have been a horse if you are to become a jockey. Wenger, Mourinho and Benitez, none of whom played top level football, are living arguments to the contrary, but this conundrum has a habit of failing to impose itself on the national sporting consciousness.

“The lads in their wisdom,” in Gordon Strachan’s phrase (used after his Coventry City side ignored his instructions and took a beating) has always been the attitude. Edwardian football didn’t have managers in charge of tactics and strategy until Chapman, and there haven’t been that many in truth since. Foreign managers working in Britain or with British players complain at the lack of interest in matters of tactics, of strategy or problem solving, something exemplified by the difference between Sven Goran Ericksson’s approach with Manchester City compared to his treatment of England.

Conclusion

The British game that grew out of industrialization was an entertainment, not a sport: it was “only a game” albeit one with serious life lessons to teach. Once it found a viable form, as it had by 1905, the season in which the six-yard zone ceased to resemble breasts, once it was making as much money as was possible, why change, and how?

The British were top dogs at football for a very long time – and have never been so very bad at it as to feel the need for any significant alteration in their approach to it.

Football was, and perhaps still is, badly positioned to attract the active interest of the kind of British person who is responsible for the UK’s reputation for ideas, inventions, eccentricity, Clive Sinclair and Beagle II. But it’s good at engaging the interest of the type of person who hates all that sort of thing. Wodehouse divided humanity into golfers and poets. Football probably thinks Wodehouse was a ponce.

But football’s a frightened little lad in an overlarge body, laughing too loud at the rest of the world with the boys in the crowd, and the cheap words still come too easily.

What do you think? Nonsense? What other angles of this deserve coverage? Did British football cease to innovate?

H.Chapman in playing days

Queen Victoria died in January 1901. A matter of months later came the first significant footballing appearance of the name Chapman. “Chapman H.”, once of Worksop, had trialled for Grimsby Town in 1898, but it was the inclusion of that name on a list of triallists at Sheffield Wednesday that marked his break into the sporting big-time.

Chapman was a local boy, son to an illiterate coal miner living in a nearby village called Kiveton Park. He was born in 1879, at the height of Sheffield’s period of innovation and influence in football.

Football was to Sheffield what racing was to Newmarket, long before Liverpool or Manchester had any real part in it. In 1878, Bramall Lane, home to both Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United at times, saw the world’s first floodlit match, a game attended by 20,000 spectators. The FA Cup Final in London could only attract 5,000 that year. Sheffield was home to the first cup tournament – the Youdan Cup – and some of England’s oldest sporting clubs were based in the city(Sheffield Wednesday had already been in existence for 47 years when it introduced football to its cricketing members).

Mention of Worksop and Grimsby make it clear that even in the game’s earliest years, it was far from inevitable that talented players would end up playing for their local clubs. Chapman’s own brother would play for Sheffield United, but also Swindon Town, Tottenham, Notts County and Northampton.

Chapman was a dashing, hard-shooting centre-forward. His time at Sheffield Wednesday was to prove the club’s golden age. When the club won the Football League title in 1903, breaking the Sunderland/Aston Villa stranglehold, it wasn’t their first success. They’d won the League in 1892, the FA Cup in 1896, and had the distinction of losing 6-1 in the 1890 Final, still the second worst defeat in a Final. Nor was it Sheffield’s first. Sheffield United had a League title from 1898, and an FA Cup from 1902.

But it did mark the end of the great Villa/Sunderland days, which would never really return for either club. Wednesday won the title again in 1904. The highlight of Chapman’s playing career came in 1907, when he was made man of the match after his superlative performance in the 2-1 FA Cup Final victory over Everton.

Chapman would play on for several more seasons, chalking up about 15 in total, a reasonable number for the time. He wouldn’t have been far from an England call-up at his peak, perhaps only kept out by the likes of Steve Bloomer.

Those Wednesday fans who as adolescents begged Chapman’s cigarette card off their elder brothers would have been remembering him to their infant grandchildren during the Korean War; the oldest of them would have lived to see Maradona’s Hand of God goal in 1986. Any film of Chapman playing will be tucked away unpublicised at the British Film Institute Archive, if it exists.

But the Chapman name isn’t famous for goals and memorable performances. After injury and ill health ended his playing career, “Chapman H.” , by now a father of three, became a manager, of his last playing club, Hull City, in 1913. And it’s for management…

But “Chapman of Wednesday,” as he was described in his pomp, died of tuberculosis in 1916, aged 36. He died at his brother Herbert’s home in Leeds. And this is going to be Herbert’s story.

Corinthian attitudes and coaching greatness don’t run together: all of the great managers seem to have an exhaust trail of money, questionable money. For Revie it was undenied allegations of bribery in the early 1960s, then the undercover contract from the Arabian peninsular that took him from the England job. For Venables, it was his own extra-curricular business dealings, then his command of incredible contracts at insecure clubs on the way down, to whom he’d be the angel of death. For Clough, it was bungs, left uninvestigated owing to his ill health, but before that it was a pay-off from Leeds. For George Graham, it was Rune Haage; for Alex Ferguson, it was his own son. British football has a long, long record of failing to reward the talents of the men who made it what it was, diverting the takings by means legal but unlovely into the pockets of the board. Even now, when players are finally being compensated (some would say, wildly over-compensated) managers aren’t seen as quite so deserving, as the ugly reaction to Sven Goran Erickson’s last FA deal showed. Money, or the lack of it, or the quiet mis-use of it, has always been a footballing theme, and it was to shape the career of Herbert Chapman in fundamental ways. He’s in my financial list too; for Herbert Chapman, it was Leeds City.

That’s not a typo; Leeds City were a small football league club of the Edwardian era that struggled to compete for its audience with successful local rugby league clubs. (Chapman, who managed Leeds City, was prone to finding himself in rugby towns. His first managerial post was with Northampton Town, and he’d have his first substantial success at Huddersfield. Arsenal, and London, were a slightly different matter, as capital cities usually are). In the late Victorian and Edwardian period, every football club was new in terms of how we’d understand the term, and ideas of history and tradition hadn’t taken hold. What you did, as a new club competing for to win crowds was to make it into the Football League, by means fair or foul, and what you did to achieve that was build your stadium. You made a high-risk investment in your superstructure. If it came off, then you would do extremely well financially, eventually. If it didn’t, you’d go straight to the wall.

Leeds City were as involved as anyone. In 1900, the most powerful club in the area were Hunslet – you haven’t heard of them because they were unable to keep hold of a venue. The failure of Hunslet, and, a couple of years later, Holbeck Rugby Club, left the field open for a new football club and a ground – Elland Road – on which to base it. There was still much debate as to whether Leeds and the area could sustain enough interest to make a club viable, but in the first season of soccer, local rugby attendances halved. Leeds City floated as a limited company, and built the Scratching Stand at Elland Road, which would survive into the Revie era.

They, like Chelsea at the exact same time, were determined to make it into the League at the earliest possible moment. The Stamford Bridge outfit literally boozed their way in through the door, and began life as a League Club, something unimaginable now. Leeds City had to wait a few months more, and started off in the West Yorkshire League, which they treated with complete contempt, saving all their love for a series of exhibition matches against top Football League sides. They were elected into an expanded Football League Division Two within a year, alongside fellow wannabes Chelsea, Hull City, Stockport County, and a London club, Clapton Orient. Suddenly those names look a little less quaint and traditional, and more signals of aggressive, shouldering intent, the baptismal names of the bully clubs who pushed themselves to the front forever as the game took shape in the early years of the twentieth century.

You built your stadium, took the fans from other local clubs, made it into the League, then breathed a huge sigh of relief before addressing the arrival of the huge bill all this activity had generated. Paying for all of this was going to require strong measures – strong measures that would utterly change the way football developed in Britain. It was to pay the wages of the likes of Archibald Leitch, architect of Villa Park, Ibrox, Stamford Bridge, White Hart Lane, the Cottage at Fulham, and Huddersfield’s Leeds Road ground (of which much, much more anon) that the Football League introduced a maximum wage in 1901.

Until the introduction of the maximum wage, which was very much the act of smaller, newer clubs, professional players received what amounted to the market rate for their services. Sometimes the means of delivery of that market rate were obscure – top clubs were adept at finding lucrative local jobs for their players, or else simply pushed cash at them under the counter. Plus ca change. In its early days, the Football League clubs sucked in the best players in Britain, and the top clubs did so more than the others. In the first thirteen years of the League, only three clubs shared out ten of the titles. The Premiership has relearned that lesson: money buys the best managers, and the best players, and thus the trophies.

It wasn’t just the cap on wages. A player could only achieve a transfer to another club with the permission of his existing side. As the Kingaby case of 1901 was to demonstrate, this wasn’t always forthcoming. (Kingaby was an Aston Villa player seeking a transfer. Villa refused, and he sued them on the grounds of restraint of trade. He mishandled his case, alleging malice on the part of Villa, and lost.) Until 1910, it was possible for a player whose League career was in limbo, with a club refusing to release his registration, to take refuge in the Southern League, or, earlier, in Scotland, but these escape routes were closed one by one. It’s an interesting example of workers’ rights actually eroding as the twentieth century got into its stride. The golden age of football, from the players’ point of view, began with the legalisation of professionalism in 1885 and lasted only sixteen years.

For the likes of a Chapman, who was interested in bringing success to a club in terms of trophies and not just in terms of audience revenue, the structure of the Edwardian and post Great War game posed severe problems. Some kind of corruption, however defined, had been made inevitable. But that same structure sheds light on the kind of person Chapman was in early life. His professional career, as we’ve seen, was astonishingly peripatetic for his time. His arrival as a professional at Northampton Town coincided with the arrival of the minimum wage in 1901. In the next four years, he played for Sheffield United, Notts County, and then Spurs (of the Southern League, which may or may not have been significant). For three Football League clubs to agree to his departure in three or four years shows the manager as player – like Clough, like Ferguson, like O’Neill, a difficult underling, a restless employee, a pain in the neck – who, given the chance to lead, fits the hole they’re in for the first time.

Chapman became what was then often known as secretary-manager of Leeds City in 1912. It was his second such job, and he was coming in on the back of a reasonably successful spell at Northampton Town. Secretary-managers were expected to act as go-betweens, as a diplomatic link between the board of a club and the players. They were usually expected to take care of a substantial amount of the buying and selling of players: Chapman’s predecessor at Leeds City, Frank Scott-Walford, had coped with Leeds’ precarious finances by relying on players from his previous club, Brighton. Tactical nous was not expected – players were meant to be the experts at actually playing, after all – but a secretary-manager was to foster good team relations and team spirit.

Although Chapman picked a good time to turn up at Leeds – the financial instability of the Scott-Walford period had seen the club (still only six years old, remember) almost go out of business, but investment from the board had been forthcoming. Nevertheless, Chapman’s Leeds City went straight into a financial scandal. Chapman had signed three new players – Billy Scott, George Law and Evelyn Lintott. It was agreed by Leeds that they’d be paid the full maximum wage, £208 for the year. The problem was that two months had already elapsed since the end of their previous playing contracts, meaning, in effect, that they were being paid more than the maximum wage for that year. Aston Villa had done the same, and been punished, and Leeds, on realising the situation they were in, reported themselves to the League. That was honesty, and the punishment was mild, but the situation was absurd for an ambitious manager. The rules were being silently broken in every direction; clean hands meant empty hands.

We like to think that we live in an era of ever-accelerating change, but I doubt Chapman would agree. When he was born, photography had been around for about thirty years, and it was still a complex, elite affair. He was a player by the time the automobile was invented – and about to turn professional when Marylebone Station was opened in London. If he travelled by road as a young man, it was on macadamed roads – tarred surfaces arrived shortly before he took over at Northampton Town – and, in cities, hotels pressed to have the roads outside paved with wood or rubber to muffle the sounds of hooves and win a quiet night’s sleep for their guests. When Chelsea joined the League in 1905, basement slaughterhouses still persisted in the vicinity. The whole vast Victorian infrastructure that crumbled from under us in the 1970s was brand spanking new, and so was the telephone, the typewriter, the mass-market newspaper. By the time Chapman arrived at Arsenal, the Kingston bypass was open, and radio commentary of games routine. The miniskirt had come and gone for the first time; “dogfights” no longer actually involved dogs.

More time has elapsed between now and Charlie George’s FA Cup Final winner for Arsenal than divided Arsenal’s election to the Football League and their winning their first title under Chapman. Highbury wasn’t the venerable, elegant old stadium subject to tears and nostalgia: it was as new as the Flying Scotsman (no, newer) and almost as glamorous. Almost as glamorous: by then, the early fears of the FA about professionalism had all proven prescient, and the game had become financially-driven, commercialised, working class, a focus for mob behaviour and as gimcrack as the kind of glittering gin palaces for whose sake square-spectacled architects now lie down in the road.

To put it another way, over the course of Chapman’s career, English poetry went from Tennyson to Ezra Pound, from the warmly populist and musical to the deliberately elitist. Football, despite the FA’s best efforts, took precisely the opposite course. And that’s unusual and interesting. The jazz that had already peaked by the time Chapman arrived at Arsenal went, as Larkin said, from Lascaux to Pollock in fifty years. It did that without ever escaping its lower class origins. Football, trapped in its milieux by the maximum wage, made no equivalent move – in fact skill, subtlety and panache became objects of suspicion. In football, Tennyson to Pound, Lascaux to Pollock, happened overseas, in Uruguay, Brazil, and Italy. Thank goodness English football had Lowry, at least (and it really did: he painted at least one matchday scene).

Leeds City’s real moment of truth came in the aftermath of the Great War. Chapman was still involved in war work at the time, at the Barnbow Munitions Factory, and is likely not to have been directly involved. In Chapman’s absence, the club took to infighting, especially between his stand-in successor and former assistant George Cripps, and the new chairman of the board, Joseph Connor. The financial situation of the club declined, and in 1917 only the intervention of the Football League encouraged the board to continue rather than winding the club up. In the meantime, Leeds were making illegal payments to guest players (normal League life had been suspended in 1915, and the game had been on a war footing ever since).

Chapman’s return in 1918 seemed to have calmed matters down somewhat, but the renewal of the contract of a disaffected player (Cripps had not been popular and hadn’t taken Chapman’s return well) Charles Copeland brought down the roof. Copeland had been demanding the doubling of his pre-War wages, and attempted to blackmail the board by threatening to blow the whistle on the club’s illegal payments. The board called Copeland’s bluff, giving him a free transfer to Coventry (of all places). Unfortunately, Copeland had made sure to come away with documentary evidence of his allegations, and took Leeds City to the authorities. A joint FA-Football League enquiry resulted in the closure of the club. City probably mishandled the enquiry, but nevertheless the decision was still a shockingly harsh one – the charges against them hadn’t, in the end been entirely substantiated, and (as in the Manchester City scandal of 1905) the sense of “but for the grace of God” was palpable at other clubs.

With five others, Chapman was banned from football management. He was out of the game for two years, until Huddersfield Town persuaded the Football League to allow his appointment with them. Chapman appears to have taken his ban on the chin, which would have been out of character for such a force of nature and not what would have been expected. However, he’d already resigned from Leeds by the time of the enquiry, and was working in a management capacity at the Olympia oil and cake mills in Selby of Joseph Watson & Son. Presumably, having a future already mapped out outside football (as a player, he’d always kept a career outside the game going) suspension had less of a sting. And so, it took the closure of the mills, and Huddersfield’s intervention, to prevent the loss to football of the man who would prove the greatest visionary and manager of the first half of the twentieth century. He joined Huddersfield in 1921, and had 12 years left to live.

One of television’s highlights for me in 2004 was the BBC series “The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon“. Mitchell and Kenyon were film makers in the early years of the twentieth century, and what looks to be their entire archive of footage has been rediscovered in amazingly good condition. It’s fasinating stuff. Imagine all of those old sepia pictures of relatives so long dead they are difficult to name, come to life on the screen in front of you. At first viewing, once the initial shock of the moving picture has worn off, what strikes you is how cheerful everyone looks compared with similar scenes on our streets today. Then, little by little, the poverty begins to push for your attention – and you notice the careworn faces, the torn clothing, the unhealthily thin figures, the smoke and dirt. But not all the films prompt thoughts about how far we’ve come – because Mitchell and Kenyon also took their cameras to football matches, and that’s interesting in an entirely different way. The Bfi DVD, Electric Edwardians: The Films of Mitchell and Kenyon, contains a few of the better football films in full – their archive contains dozens more. (If that whets your appetite, there’s footage from Olympic football matches and early Home Internationals on the DVD The History of Football, which is also warmly recommended).

Now it has to be said that the Mitchell and Kenyon films are not Match of the Day. For one thing, they are very short – film stock of the day was expensive, and the rolls lasted only minutes apiece. So we are given snippets of action, which largely fail to give any narrative, any sense of the course of the match. For another, film cameras were heavy and hard to manouvre. So most of the films are taken from only one viewpoint (modern football coverage uses ten or more viewpoints) and that at ground level, denying the viewer the kind of overview we’ve become used to from cameras perched high in the stands. I don’t suppose I have to add that there’s no commentary or other sound.

All of this makes it hard to find answers to the kind of question you’re likely to want to ask when watching Edwardian football. I’m assuming that most people are like me in that respect – when confronted with Sheffield United v Bury 1901, we’re not all that worried about it being a bore-draw; its very existence is enough. What I want to know is, what were the skill levels prevalent in the early years of the Football League? What were the tactics? How were the pitches, and the balls? Did the rules back then make big differences to the play? How fit were the players? What were the grounds like, who were the fans, and how did they behave?

And it’s hard to forget when watching that at the time the films were made, the game was new. The League was all of twelve years old; the FA Cup was in its 38th year. Football in the UK was not, as it is now, heavy with history and tradition. A lot else behind the scenes was new, too – the miles of Victorian terracing that still dominate our cities today were 20-30 years old then, like Milton Keynes is now. The car had been invented 4-5 years previously, the railways were half a century old or less (like motorways now). The telephone was 30, the record player 20. Radio didn’t exist as we know it today, although the principles were understood. The football grounds in the films are usually either the same ones as are used today, or have only recently been abandoned for new stadia – in the films, they are brand spanking new. The fans aren’t going to football because it’s working class tradition, or because their parents took them as children, or because some drama like 1990′s World Cup semi-final turned them on to the game. They are the ones who made it all a tradition – they are the first fans.

Training methods of the era are laughed at now – books on the football of the period love to pick on things like West Bromwich Albion’s “training walks”. All I would say is, on the evidence of the Mitchell and Kenyon films, the players of the day were plenty fit enough. But it’s not the willowy, Coe-Ovett fitness of a Thierry Henry or a Ronaldinho. It’s Rooney they remind you of, stocky and heavily muscled. None of the players look particularly tall. And they can run – the snatches of play we are left with are quick, competitive and physical. It looks as if it might be fun to watch in a lower-division derby kind of way.

Skill levels are harder to fathom. (The footage in the History of Football is better for this). There are some fine, subtle touches on the ball, and skill on the ground, but plenty of ball in the air, too, in that familiar middle-of-the-pitch-mixer fashion too familiar from poor quality games today. Some kind of tactical structure can be detected – it’s not just everyone chasing after the ball. We know from various biographies of the players and coaches of the day two significant things: that ball skill for its own sake wasn’t especially valued, something that pushed coaches who did value it into jobs with teams in e.g. Austria and Germany, and that certain skills now familiar, like the body swerve, had only just been thought of. And it’s possible to hazard a guess that the game was just too new for the traditional source of skilful players – children playing football in the street – to have really gotten underway, so wasn’t feeding through into e.g. the David Jacks, Dixie Deans and Alex James’s of the interwar era. But there’s little you can say purely on the basis of the Mitchell and Kenyon films. Until 1924, the offside law required more defenders behind the ball than it does today, and it’s thought by some that this called for more skill and cunning in unlocking defences – and certainly, newspaper reports of matches in the season 1924-5 complain that the new, lighter offside law was handing the advantage to long-ball tactics and “lumping it up to the big man”. The more things change, the more they stay the same, but you can’t really tell from the films.

The pitches themselves look rough. This isn’t just because it’s football. If you look at photographs of cricket squares of the period, or the greens of golf courses in the Harry Vardon period, you’ll see little evidence of sort of quality we take for granted in such things today. Weeds, bare patches, unevenness is the rule, not the exception. And it does seem to make a difference – the ball bobbles unpredictably on the ground, the bounce is uneven, and the pitch markings are often obscured by mud. Traditionally, the English favoured a dribbling game, the Scots a passing one; by the time Mitchell and Kenyon were active, the Scottish model was winning through, but I can imagine it having being difficult to pass the ball accurately at times.

The grounds themselves look familiar – with less cover for the fans, and almost universal standing terraces, but not otherwise very different. Some of the fencing protecting the pitch is surprisingly fan-hostile – three-pronged metal affairs of the kind they use around warehouses today feature, for example. Not that there weren’t reasons for having it there: -

“a section of the supporters varied the proceedings by engaging in a free fight.. (M)atters were assuming serious proportions among the crowd and policemen blew their whistles noisily. Then was seen the spectacle of a football match in progress and three stalwart constables racing across the ground. The unruly folks who had leaped the barriers scuttled. But one less active than the rest was captured and he went back over the palings in a very sudden if undignified manner, the constable acting as assistant, while the crowd cheered..” (Aston Villa v Notts County, October 1900, from the Birmingham Daily Mail).

Various modern-sounding forms of crowd trouble were a feature of the early game – although things were quieter in the Edwardian decade than in the 1880s and 1890s, and they were to become quieter still after the Great War.

The crowds themselves in the films are overwhelmingly male, but not universally working class. Well-dressed clerks and businessmen mix with men who have obviously just arrived from pit or factory. Practically everybody smokes, hanging what must have been great blue clouds over the stands. Because there is no camera trained on the crowd when a goal is scored – and the films rarely capture a goal in any case – there’s no evidence for what happens on the terraces in terms of celebration, crowds heaving back and forth and so on. Because the films are in black and white, it’s hard to tell if anyone is wearing their club’s colours – it wouldn’t be a club shirt, then, of course, and in any case this was a period in which club colours were yet to be fixed in stone by tradition. The Mitchell and Kenyon film of Manchester United playing away at Burnley shows them in the first season of red and white kit – the year before, they were known as “Newton Heath” and played in green and gold (colours revived for an away strip in the Cantona-Hughes era).

Anyone interested in seeing these films for themselves would be best advised to start with the BBC video, Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon. This gives you the genuine pleasure of listening to a really well-informed Sheffield United supporter’s comments as he’s shown Sheffield v Bury; in addition to knowing his history (he recognises several 1901 players and puts them into context) he’s plainly a warm and decent human being. Electric Edwardians shows the films in full, but the commentary – by Dr Vanessa Toulmin of the National Fairground Archive – is from the point of view of a professional film historian and is just a lot less immediate. Football On Trial by Murphy, Williams and Dunning, contains a fascinating chapter on pre-1914 football violence. The History of Football contains lots of excellent early footage – the early Olympic Games matches, the early Home Internationals, and the first World Cups (1930, in Uruguay, is particularly worth watching). This last is a great launching point for thoughts about England’s changing standing in the world game, and I hope to write about that at greater length at some point.