Football Beyond the Metropolis
SHEFFIELD
Football Beyond the Metropolis
It may not be generally known that Sheffield holds, or ought to hold, a very prominent position in the football world. Perhaps in no other town in the kingdom (London, of course, excepted) is the game played to anything like the extent to which it is in Sheffield. There are now fourteen clubs in the town, almost every cricket club having a football club connected with it. —Sporting Life, 18671
It was this enthusiasm to play football that animated Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest when they founded Sheffield FC in 1857. As with the founders of all the other clubs formed at this time, both were members of their local middle class. Creswick was a solicitor whose father owned a silver-plating business and Prest was a wine merchant. Both were members of Sheffield Cricket Club who thought that football would be a good way of keeping fit during the winter. Sheffield, like its rival and near-neighbor Nottingham, had developed a vibrant cricketing culture, and Creswick and Prest soon found that their new football club did not lack for members. It quickly outgrew informal agreements about how to play football and decided to design its own set of rules.
Although none of its leading members had attended a public school, they had been educated in local private schools and the club saw itself as a socially elite institution. Emulation of their social superiors has long been a defining characteristic of the British middle classes and the Sheffield footballers were no exception. So, to inform their discussions about
football rules, they wrote to all of the public schools asking for a copy of their football rulebooks.2 Having compared the rules of each school, the club picked out those elements it liked, combined them with its own ideas and in October 1858 voted to adopt what would become known as the Sheffield rules of football.
Over the past two decades or so, these rules have become soccer’s version of the William Webb Ellis myth. Just as rugby union promoted the myth of Ellis picking up the ball and running with it during a game of football at Rugby School in 1823 – without a shred of evidence – to explain the birth of rugby, so too have soccer fans pointed to the Sheffield football rules as being the true origins of the modern game. Uncomfortable with the fact that what is often called the ‘people’s game’ was founded by the upper- middle class administrators of the Football Association, many soccer supporters have looked to Sheffield rules as a pure kicking and non-handling form of football untouched by the public schools. But such a belief, like the Webb Ellis myth, has no foundation in reality. This can be seen when the wording of the 1858 Sheffield rules is compared to those of a leading English public school [in brackets]:
1 Kick off from the middle must be a place kick. [vi. Kick off from middle must be a place.]
2 Kick-out must not be from more than twenty-five yards out of goal. [vii. Kick out must not be from more than ten yards of our goal if a placekick, not more than twenty-five yards if a punt, drop or knock on.]
3 Fair catch is a catch direct from the foot of the opposite side and entitles a free kick. [i. Fair catch is a catch direct from the foot.]
4 Charging is fair in case of a place kick, with the exception of kick off, as soon as a player offers to kick, but may always draw back unless he has actually touched the ball with his foot. [ix. Charging is fair in case of a place kick, as soon as the ball has touched the ground.]
Far from Sheffield rules being free of public school influence, the rules in brackets are direct quotations from the 1845 Laws of Football Played at Rugby School.
The links between Sheffield and Rugby School rules go even deeper. Sheffield’s Rule 8, forbidding the ball from being picked up from the ground, was common among rugby clubs and appears in the 1862 Rugby School rules. Moreover, Sheffield rules did allow the ball to be handled by outfield players. Rule 3 allowed catching with hands if the ball was caught on the full in what was known as a ‘fair catch’, a term still in use in American football and which became known as a ‘mark’ in rugby and Australian
Rules. Rule 9 allowed a bouncing ball to be stopped by the hand, is a variation on the Rugby School rule of allowing a bouncing ball to be caught. Rule 10, ‘No goal may be kicked from touch, nor by free kick from a fair catch’, is also based on Rule 5 of the 1845 Rugby School rules, which also allow a goal to be scored from a fair catch. The eleventh of the Sheffield rules, defining when a ball is in touch and how it should be returned to play, uses the same wording as Rugby’s 1862 rules, with the exception that a Rugby player was also allowed to throw the ball in to himself. Even Sheffield’s Rule 6, prohibiting the ball being ‘knocked on’ with the hand and penalizing it with a free kick, appears with slightly different wording in Rule 11 of the 1862 rugby rules. Only Sheffield’s Rules 5 and 7, forbidding pushing, hacking, tripping, holding or pulling a player over, have no link with Rugby School rules.4 This may possibly suggest that they objected to the roughness of the rugby game, but this was also true of some adult rugby clubs, many of whom banned hacking and tripping, as did the Rugby Football Union when it was formed in 1871.
This is not to suggest that Sheffield football was a version of the Rugby School game. Like trying to appreciate the taste of food simply by reading a recipe book, it is impossible to understand how a game was played merely from its written rules. But the similarity of Sheffield and Rugby School rules does highlight the fact that differences taken for granted today did not exist in the 1850s and 1860s. Far from being committed exclusively to a kicking game, Sheffield FC had no objections to playing Rugby style matches until at least the late 1860s. In 1863 they played Garrison FC under rules that allowed ‘striking and throwing the ball’. The following year they played home and away matches against Leeds Rugby Club using ‘rules [that] were of a mongrel type, neither rugby nor association’, according to Leeds’ founder J.G Hudson. In 1868 they played against Manchester FC, then as now a rugby club, losing the rugby match by one goal and eight touchdowns to nil in Manchester but winning the home game by two rouges to nil. It was not until 1876 that Sheffield FC played its last rugby match, against Hull FC.
For almost ten years from 1859 to 1868, the Sheffield game allowed players to score a ‘rouge’, a rule taken directly from Eton’s field football game. A rouge was scored ‘by the player who first touches the ball after it has been kicked between the rouge flags [which were placed twelve feet away at the side of each goalpost]’. Touching the ball down with the hand clearly has nothing in common with modern soccer, although Australian Rules football still has extra posts called ‘behind posts’ and Canadian football retains the term rouge for a ball kicked into the end zone and not returned. The similarity of this rule to rugby can be seen quite clearly in the match report of the 1867 Youdan Cup final, which was won by Hallam FC, who scored two rouges to Norfolk FC’s nil. Bell’s Life described Hallam’s first rouge:
The touchdown became such an important part of Sheffield football during this period that it often became the most important way of scoring, as in 1860 when Sheffield FC defeated the 58th Regiment club by a goal and ten rouges to a goal and five rouges.6 In some games, the rule was varied to allow the player who touched down the ball to take an unimpeded kick at goal, just as was the case at Rugby School.7 The fair catch remained a feature of the Sheffield FA’s rules even after the FA had abolished it.
But, as would become the case wherever people played any type of football, the rules under which the game was conducted did not determine its popularity. Five years after Sheffield FC had been formed, there were over a dozen clubs playing football in the Sheffield area. In 1867 twelve clubs – most of them based in local communities such as Broomhall, Hallam, Heeley, Norton and Pitsmoor – formed the Sheffield Football Association to organise regular fixtures. That same year its teams took part in the Youdan Cup, a knock-out tournament sponsored by local theatre owner Thomas Youdan. The final, which was won by Hallam’s two touchdowns, attracted a crowd of 3,000 people. The following year another knock-out competition, the Cromwell Cup, was played for by four sides and once again sponsored by a local theatrical entrepreneur, the incongruously named Oliver Cromwell. This combination of regular competition between clubs representing their local communities, the crowds that matches attracted and the regular discussion of football matters in the press meant that Sheffield was the first city to develop something resembling a modern football culture, which within a generation was replicated in almost every town and city in Britain. Why was Sheffield the first to develop a football culture? Partly because the economy of the city in the first half of the nineteenth century was based on small-scale, highly skilled metal manufacturing, which meant that the working classes had more leisure time and disposable income to watch and, albeit in a limited fashion at first, take part in sport. The city was also one where ‘Saint Monday’, the tradition of workers not going to work on Monday, lasted into the late nineteenth century.8 Perhaps because of this, Sheffield already had a vibrant, pre-existing sporting culture based on cricket. Since the 1820s, it had been the stronghold of cricket in Yorkshire and second only to Nottingham as the most important cricketing centre outside of London. In 1821 George Steer and son-in-law cricketer William Woolhouse built and opened a cricket ground to the east of the city, which by August 1824 was reportedly attracting crowds of between 15,000 and 20,000 for major matches. The enthusiasm for organised sport and the desire of local businessmen to profit from it saw new cricket grounds being opened at Hyde Park and Cross Scythes by the end of the decade. Sheffield cricket was resolutely commercial, matches being played for stake money with sums of £100 being common and even £1,000 not being unknown.9 It was also a game for all the classes, as demonstrated by the Darnall club’s attempts to attract the working classes in 1829 by charging tradesmen sixpence and ‘working people’, by which they meant labourers, just threepence. And, as would be the case with soccer and rugby in the last decades of the nineteenth century, professional cricketers become local heroes, none more notably than the Sheffield-born all-rounder Tom Marsden, one of the first local professionals and one of the finest exponents of single-wicket cricket of his age, regularly attracting five-figure crowds to his matches.
Many of Sheffield’s early footballers were also cricketers and its clubs were also cricket clubs, such as Hallam FC, or closely associated with them, and Sheffield’s football culture was built on this pre-existing sporting tradition. Youdan and Cromwell’s sponsorship of cup competitions was simply a continuation of the long relationship between local cricket and the entertainment industries. Even the formation of the Sheffield FA had a commercial impetus, as its clubs sought to come together to buy cheaper advertising space from local newspapers and provide a cost-effective insurance scheme for its players. The same point can be made about Nottingham, where the strength of local cricket culture provided an infrastructure for the development of football in the early 1860s. When the newly formed Nottingham FC hosted Sheffield FC at the start of 1865 its side included Richard Daft and George Parr, two of the greatest cricketers of the Victorian era and experienced sporting entrepreneurs.11 The fact that the football club became known as the Nottinghamshire County FC underlines the extent to which it sought to follow the pattern of cricket.12 As the newfound enthusiasm for football slowly began to blossom from the late 1850s, Sheffield and Nottingham already had in place the customs and structures that would nourish this new sporting phenomenon.
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