Post by Deleted on Jun 12, 2011 19:52:38 GMT
Continuing with a few findings from Association Football & English Society 1863-1915 there’s plenty of material about who ran the game in those days as well as who played it.
The first chunk of information relates to good old Sheffield FC who we’ve previously discussed on these pages as the world’s oldest football club. Many of its players were old boys of Sheffield Collegiate School and you can see they were a pretty upper-class bunch:
Moving on to the professional era, the book posed the question as to “who became a director?” This involved examining the occupations of 740 directors at 46 clubs between 1888 and 1915. Here we see wholesalers and retailers to the fore followed by people from the professions, the drink trade and manufacturing. This almost confirms our stereotypical view of directors ever since:
Then there were the bigwigs on the FA Council. Some were also directors of professional clubs with others coming from the ranks of Oxbridge and the military:
What of the early professional players? Bearing in mind there weren’t youth trainees or apprentice footballers in those days, players had had jobs before turning professional. The chart below is based on pretty limited evidence of several dozen players at a small number of clubs but, hardly surprisingly, it indicates most professional players had working-class origins. However Tony Mason suggests they may have come from more of a “skilled” background than may have been imagined:
Indeed, this still appears to be the case based upon details of the occupations of footballers contained in H.R.Brown’s Football’s Who’s Who for 1907-08 (does Leigh have a copy?):
One other interesting piece in the book is the reproduction of job adverts from the 1880s and 1890s when many Football League players had two jobs:
The first chunk of information relates to good old Sheffield FC who we’ve previously discussed on these pages as the world’s oldest football club. Many of its players were old boys of Sheffield Collegiate School and you can see they were a pretty upper-class bunch:
Moving on to the professional era, the book posed the question as to “who became a director?” This involved examining the occupations of 740 directors at 46 clubs between 1888 and 1915. Here we see wholesalers and retailers to the fore followed by people from the professions, the drink trade and manufacturing. This almost confirms our stereotypical view of directors ever since:
Then there were the bigwigs on the FA Council. Some were also directors of professional clubs with others coming from the ranks of Oxbridge and the military:
What of the early professional players? Bearing in mind there weren’t youth trainees or apprentice footballers in those days, players had had jobs before turning professional. The chart below is based on pretty limited evidence of several dozen players at a small number of clubs but, hardly surprisingly, it indicates most professional players had working-class origins. However Tony Mason suggests they may have come from more of a “skilled” background than may have been imagined:
Indeed, this still appears to be the case based upon details of the occupations of footballers contained in H.R.Brown’s Football’s Who’s Who for 1907-08 (does Leigh have a copy?):
One other interesting piece in the book is the reproduction of job adverts from the 1880s and 1890s when many Football League players had two jobs:
