Extract from Chapter 2: ‘Growing pains’ | Chaos in pre-FA times
Football was evolving quickly in the early 1860s, but with a certain degree of chaos. Although it was generally diverging into two branches – the dribbling game favoured at Cambridge and the Rugby-style version with its scrummaging, ball-carrying and (usually) hacking – there was no formal distinction between them. They still had much in common, and some optimists hoped the differences could be ironed out, producing a single, unified football code.
Some clubs were yet to decide which set of rules to follow. The time when soccer and rugby would be regarded as two separate sports was a long way off, and it would be even longer before most Britons began to regard the word ‘football’ as synonymous with soccer. New clubs routinely included the ‘Football Club’ suffix in their names, whichever code they adopted.
Many provincial clubs were happy to stick with their own rules, as members mostly played among themselves rather than against other clubs. But those in the London area, being close together, were playing regularly against one another. There were often tiresome pre-match arguments over the rules that would be followed, and the need for a standard code became increasingly evident. With this in mind, the captain of Barnes FC, a man with the wonderfully Victorian name of Ebenezer Cobb Morley, wrote a letter to Bell’s Life in the autumn of 1863, suggesting that a group of club representatives should agree on a set of rules.
At the same time, there was also some interest in standardising the laws among schools and universities. In October 1863, a year after Cambridge graduate J.C. Thring had drawn up his rules for The Simplest Game at Uppingham School, a nine-man committee gathered at his old university to work out a common code, hoping it would also be adopted at other institutions. Led by the Rev. R. Burn of Shrewsbury School, and featuring two old boys each from Eton, Harrow and Rugby, along with one each from Marlborough and Westminster, they came up with a new set of Cambridge Rules, published the following month.
At a time when the press generally took little notice of football, a notable exception was The Field (‘The Country Gentlemen’s Newspaper’), where John Cartwright – arguably the world’s first football writer – showed a particular interest in the game and campaigned for uniform rules. Thinking along the same lines as Morley, Cartwright proposed a ‘headquarters for football’, similar to the Marylebone Cricket Club, in an article published on 31 October 1863. He was probably unaware of a report in the same issue, headlined ‘Formation of a Football Association’.
Some clubs were yet to decide which set of rules to follow. The time when soccer and rugby would be regarded as two separate sports was a long way off, and it would be even longer before most Britons began to regard the word ‘football’ as synonymous with soccer. New clubs routinely included the ‘Football Club’ suffix in their names, whichever code they adopted.
Many provincial clubs were happy to stick with their own rules, as members mostly played among themselves rather than against other clubs. But those in the London area, being close together, were playing regularly against one another. There were often tiresome pre-match arguments over the rules that would be followed, and the need for a standard code became increasingly evident. With this in mind, the captain of Barnes FC, a man with the wonderfully Victorian name of Ebenezer Cobb Morley, wrote a letter to Bell’s Life in the autumn of 1863, suggesting that a group of club representatives should agree on a set of rules.
At the same time, there was also some interest in standardising the laws among schools and universities. In October 1863, a year after Cambridge graduate J.C. Thring had drawn up his rules for The Simplest Game at Uppingham School, a nine-man committee gathered at his old university to work out a common code, hoping it would also be adopted at other institutions. Led by the Rev. R. Burn of Shrewsbury School, and featuring two old boys each from Eton, Harrow and Rugby, along with one each from Marlborough and Westminster, they came up with a new set of Cambridge Rules, published the following month.
At a time when the press generally took little notice of football, a notable exception was The Field (‘The Country Gentlemen’s Newspaper’), where John Cartwright – arguably the world’s first football writer – showed a particular interest in the game and campaigned for uniform rules. Thinking along the same lines as Morley, Cartwright proposed a ‘headquarters for football’, similar to the Marylebone Cricket Club, in an article published on 31 October 1863. He was probably unaware of a report in the same issue, headlined ‘Formation of a Football Association’.