WORLD FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION

FOOTBALL                                     

THE FAILURE OF THE FOOTBALL                                                                                      ASSOCIATION

It has been proposed to hold a sort of ‘Football Congress’ consisting of representatives from the public schools and clubs, who should be empowered to draw up an equitable body of rules adapted for universal use. . . . Until we have a universally acknowledged and accepted code of rules for the regulation of both public and private matches, football can never attain the proud position among the national sports of England [as] the ‘cricket of the winter months’. —Sporting Gazette, 18631

In the history of sport, few organisations have begun so unsuccessfully as the Football Association (FA). Its original goal of uniting all football clubs under one code of rules was a complete failure. Just four years after its formation, even its own members considered winding it up. And for the first decade and a half of its existence, it played second fiddle to rugby football. This was not an auspicious start for what would become the world game. 

The FA was founded on 26 October 1863, when representatives of eleven clubs and schools in London answered an advertisement in the weekly Bell’s Life in London for a meeting ‘for the purpose of promoting the adoption of a general code of rules for football’.2 Held at the Freemason’s Tavern in central London’s Great Queen Street, the meeting was intended to be the culmination of a discussion that started in the letters page of The Times at the beginning of October, when a pupil of Eton College called for ‘the framing of set rules for the game of football to be played everywhere’ and that the captains of the football teams of the public schools, universities and ‘one or two London clubs’ should ‘frame rules for one universal game’.3 An animated discussion ensued, with letters from current and former pupils of Harrow, Charterhouse, Winchester and Rugby schools, each largely agreeing with the sentiment but emphasising the superiority of their own school’s code of rules.4 Joining the debate, the Sporting Gazette backed the call for a single set of rules, arguing:

                  where would be the interest in the [cricket] contests between the elevens of Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Yorkshire, Nottingham and Cambridgeshire if the representatives of these counties has their own private opinion respecting the laws of the game and the duties of umpires?5

Despite this animated debate, when the meeting finally convened at the Freemason’s Tavern none of the public schools were represented, with the exception of Charterhouse, whose football captain Benjamin Hartshorne told the delegates that his school wouldn’t join the new organisation until the other public schools did. This boycott did not merely deprive the new association of prestige. It also made the framing of a set of commonly accepted rules almost impossible. Each of the leading English public schools – Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Rugby, Winchester, Westminster and St Paul’s – played football according to its own unique set of rules. Eton even had two codes. One for its ‘Wall Game’ played against a wall in a narrow strip of land five metres wide and 110 metres long, and another for the Field Game, played on a more familiar open pitch. Each school differed in its concept of offside, the extent to which the ball could be handled, the method of scoring, the shape and size of the ball, and much else besides. A school’s method of playing football was a matter of intense pride to past and present pupils, and ideas about the rules of the game were a symbol of each school’s sense of superiority. 

The formation of the FA was not the first attempt to design a single code of rules for football. In 1856 the Cambridge University Foot Ball Club, which appears to have been set up in 1846 by former pupils of Eton, Harrow, Rugby and Shrewsbury, had printed a set of rules based on the principle of taking the best of each school’s rules.6 These eleven rules allowed any player to catch the ball and prescribed a liberal offside rule that put a player onside if there were three defenders between him and the goal. These rules gained no support outside of the university and did not deter students from forming separate university clubs devoted to Eton (in 1856), Harrow (1863) and Rugby (1857) football rules. In 1859 the editor of Bell’s Life suggested adopting a single code of rules for football (he proposed those of the Eton field game) but quickly abandoned the suggestion after receiving ‘many other letters on this subject by public schoolmen, but they are so mixed up with abuse of each other that we consider them better unpublished, and the correspondence closed’.7 Other writers, such as the Uppingham School headmaster J.C. Thring, the journalist John Dyer Cartwright and a number of pseudonymous authors also campaigned for football to be played under a universal set of rules.8All of the men who gathered at the Freemason’s Tavern had been educated in the traditions of public school football.9 Their aim was to find a way of framing the schoolboy rules that would allow them to play as adults and popularise the sport among like-minded young middle-class men, thus ensuring that football became part of the social and business networks of the growing professional classes. But now it came to deciding on a universal code the delegates were hamstrung. Not only did they know that their decisions would be ignored by the public schools, but they themselves were no less divided about how to codify a commonly accepted set of rules. 

At least three of the ten clubs in attendance, Blackheath Football Club (FC), Blackheath Proprietary School and the Blackheath-based Perceval House, were well-known adherents of Rugby’s School’s football rules. Barnes FC, the club of the FA’s founding secretary, Hull-born solicitor Ebenezer Cobb Morley, regularly played under rugby rules, as did the Civil Service club. Indeed, it was not unusual for adult clubs to play under different rules from week to week in order to have regular matches. Moreover, each delegate was committed to his own ideas about the best way to play football. So when they re-convened in November to discuss the rules they became embroiled in discussions about the efficacy of crossbars, the desirability of ‘fair catching’ and the dangers of unrestrained deliberate kicking of shins, otherwise known as hacking. Such was the intensity of the discussion that it was decided to hold a further, third meeting the following week to arrive at the ‘final settlement of the laws’.

But the next meeting settled nothing. The draft set of rules presented to that third meeting by Ebenezer Morley was something of a football Frankenstein’s monster, hurriedly bolting together various features of the different public school codes. Rule 9 allowed players ‘to run with the ball towards his adversaries’ goal if he makes a fair catch or catches the ball on the first bound’, while Rule 13 permitted a player catching the ball directly from a kick or on its first bounce to pass it by hand to another player. These were two of the key elements of football as played at Rugby School, as was Rule 10, which allowed defenders to ‘be at liberty to charge, hold, trip or hack’ the ball-carrier. Yet the very next rule stated that ‘neither tripping nor hacking shall be allowed’.

If this wasn’t baffling enough, the meeting then plunged into further confusion when Morley, supported by John Alcock, whose education at Harrow School made him no friend of Rugby School football rules, informed the delegates that he had decided to repudiate his own draft rules. Instead, he proposed that the FA should adopt a new code that had recently been drawn up by students at Cambridge University, which Alcock had only just seen before the meeting.12 These rules made no mention of carrying the ball but did forbid tripping and hacking. In a state of bewilderment, the delegates voted both for Morley’s original draft and the Cambridge rules.13 No satisfactory explanation was ever given by Morley and Alcock for their unexpected volte face but it is possible that they felt that the social cachet of aligning the FA with Cambridge University might compensate for their failure to persuade the public schools to join the FA.

A few days later the meeting re-convened yet again and amidst considerable acrimony voted to adopt a revised version of the Cambridge rules that removed any ambiguity about hacking or carrying the ball. Blackheath’s F.M. Campbell appealed for the decision to be delayed until further discussions could take place but was slapped down by Alcock and Arthur Pember, the FA president. Realising that it had been the victim of a coup, Blackheath resigned from the FA, little more than five weeks after being a founding member.14 Eight years later, the club would become one of the founders of the Rugby Football Union (RFU).

Despite getting their own way, Morley and Alcock’s rules were something of a dead letter. Indeed, when ‘first match under the rules of the Football Association’ took place on 19 December 1863, Barnes FC won it by scoring six tries to Richmond’s nil.15 As with Blackheath, Richmond would also abandon the FA and become a founding member of the RFU. As the Barnes’ result shows, the FA’s initial rules bore little resemblance to modern soccer. Their six tries were a consequence of FA Rule 7, which allowed the attacking team to touch down the ball behind their opponents’ goal line for the right for a free kick at goal, just as in rugby. The FA’s 1866 rules even allowed matches to be decided on the number of touchdowns scored if the goal score was equal (rugby did not allow tries to be counted in the score until 1886). Rule 8 legislated for a ‘fair catch’ where a player could catch the ball in the air before it had bounced and, again as in rugby, make a ‘mark’ to gain a free kick. Rule 6 also bore a strong resemblance to rugby in that any player in front of the ball was offside. Throw-ins had to be taken at right angles to the pitch as in rugby’s line-out, and there were no cross bar on the goals.16 Even the Royal Engineers’ club, which would appear in four of the first seven FA Cup finals, played under their own rules that allowed running with the ball. Handling the ball by outfield players was not completely outlawed by the FA until 1870. It would only be through a long process of trial and error that association football, as the FA’s version of football was called, came to resemble modern soccer. Having failed in its mission to unite all football clubs under one set of rules, the FA’s fortunes plummeted. At its first anniversary, the FA minute book noted that ‘no business was conducted’ and its committee did not meet again until February 1866. By 1867 membership numbered just ten clubs, barely half the nineteen that were members in December 1863.17 When John Alcock’s younger brother Charles published the first edition of his Football Annual in 1868 he recorded thirty clubs using the FA’s rules but forty-five playing Rugby School rules, despite the fact that no governing body yet existed for rugby-playing clubs. To no-one’s great surprise, or interest, at the FA’s 1867 annual meeting Morley suggested that they ‘should seriously consider that night whether it were worthwhile to continue the association or dissolve it’.18 However, the other five delegates at the meeting were not quite as pessimistic as Morley and concluded that it would be worthwhile for the association to continue.

Their optimism was vindicated. Within a generation, the FA’s brand of football would become a social, cultural and commercial juggernaut, the most popular sport the world had ever known. But it would also be almost unrecognisable to that small group of men who had met at the Freemason’s Tavern.