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A history of the football crossbar
The original incarnation of association football didn’t involve a crossbar. The FA’s Laws of the Game, introduced in 1863, initially stated that a goal should be ‘two upright posts, eight yards apart, without Continue reading
The Victorian Premier League
What would the English Premier League look like at the end of the 2012/13 season if its football clubs had retained their original Victorian names and colours? The league title would have been won by a Continue reading
A football game of three halves
Sunderland and Derby County played a complicated game of three halves at Sunderland’s Newcastle Road ground in September 1894. The weather was perfect, and 8,000 spectators turned up Continue reading
Victorian football crowds and gates
Around 2,000 spectators paid a shilling each to attend the first FA Cup final, between Wanderers and Royal Engineers, at the Oval in 1872. It was a large attendance in football terms, but but nothing compared Continue reading
The best football book ever published
There have been many great books published about football over its long history, but the most-sought after is surely Association Football & The Men Who Made It by Alfred Gibson and William Pickford. Continue reading
Most successful Victorian football clubs
Which was the most successful football club of the Victorian era? In the earliest days of the association game there were no cups or leagues with which to measure success. Football’s first competition was Continue reading
150 years of the Football Association
On Monday 26 October 1863, a meeting took place at the Freemasons’ Tavern in London ‘for the purpose of forming an association with the object of establishing a definite code of rules for the regulation of football’. Continue reading
The invention of football goal nets
The goal net was invented by Everton fan and civil engineer John Alexander Brodie. He was prompted into action by a wrongly-disallowed goal that robbed his team of a victory against Accrington in 1889. Continue reading
Victorian women’s football
‘So it has come at last!’ cried the Bell’s Life newspaper. ‘What next?’ The event that had the paper so agitated was a women’s football match, played in May 1881 at Easter Road, Edinburgh. ‘Several years ago Continue reading
Sam Weller Widdowson’s shinpads
The invention of the shinpad, or ‘shin guard’, is credited to Sam Weller Widdowson, the Nottingham Forest captain, who, legend says, first cut down a pair of cricket pads to protect his shins around 1874. Continue reading
