Moderns

Chapter 8 examines the zeal for Association Football as the game moderns play. It starts by leaving the playing fields of Eton to describe an altogether different sort of sporting life on the streets of industrial Britain. Jack London remarked in People of the Abyss (1902) that a whole new sub race had grown up there, ‘the pavement people’ he called them, and although he doesn’t mention it, they were playing football far more than they were suffering from racial degeneration. For many working-class boys, football was a passion, their first craze, like rock n’ roll it was a way of feeling free in another otherwise hostile environment. Football for the workers was released by the factory acts in 1853 and by the 1880s it was an integral part of ‘the weekend’—a consumer economy that ushered in a new kind of urban life. Boys played football almost anytime anywhere. The chapter asks why the girls wouldn’t, or couldn’t. In the 1960s Arthur Hopcraft said football was ‘inherent in the people’ and so it was. Along with cinema, dancing, and popular music, it created new liberties and belongings. England won the World Cup in 1966. This was the pinnacle of footballing achievement by a class and a country that had given the world its favourite sport. Very soon after however, British football was in the doldrums, and it was violence that seemed inherent now.