Thorough study of original sources brings the FA Cup history to life

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Mats Greiff
Department of Society, Culture and Identity, Malmö University


Graham Curry
From the Privileged to the Professionals: The Early Years of the FA Cup
155 pages, hardcover
Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge 2024 (Routledge Soccer Histories)
ISBN 978-1-032-25899-7

England is often claimed to be the cradle of modern football. Football was organized relatively early with the formation of various organizations with the aim of creating rules for how the sport should be practiced, but the associations also organized regular football matches with various tournaments, often with school football as a model. England is also regarded as the country of origin of professional football, where players could be compensated for their efforts on the pitch, which also allowed for systematic training.

In his book From the Privileged to the Professionals: The Early Years of the FA Cup, the historically oriented sports sociologist Graham Curry analyzes the development of English football during the 1870s and 80s. The period of investigation is delimited by the first 18 years of the FA Cup, from the establishment of the knockout competition in 1871-72 to 1888-89, when Preston North End secured the so-called double, by winning both the FA Cup and the newly established league. For his analysis Curry tries to answer three research questions:

    • “Where did the idea and format of the FA cup originate?
    • What was the social structure of the competing sides throughout the timeline of the study and how did it change?
    • Did the advent of professionalism in English football and the establishment of the Football League modify the processes and/or the perceptions of the FA Cup?” (p. 2)

Curry is critical of the research to date on early English football, arguing that it is largely based on secondary sources about early football, and that researchers have not dug deep enough into primary source material. According to Curry, there is no study based on primary sources regarding the FA Cup’s first two decades. Curry wants to remedy this, with his attempt to nuance the previous history and try to recreate “wie es eigentlich gewesen”. Primarily, Curry digs deep with the help of daily newspapers, but he also uses census material to trace the social composition of the player collective. In addition, he is closely related to Norbert Elias’ figurative sociology.

This means that I, as a non-English reader, can learn a lot about early English organized football and about the processes of sportification and professionalization that were evident at the time under investigation.

In a shorter theoretical discussion, Curry explains his theoretical approaches, which are based on the necessity of studying individuals and the societies they shape as long-term processes. Curry sees most such processes as unintended consequences of the aggregates of multiple individual acts. All human action is related to power, and he emphasizes that power cannot be explained by a single factor, but rather by several different factors in a complex interaction. Methodologically, Curry argues that sociological research must undertake a constant two-way traffic between theory and research, where both aspects mutually influence each other. Furthermore, he connects to Elias’ thoughts on the interplay between actor and structure, which also can be expressed as individual and society.

Curry lives up to his ambition to delve into the source material of the time, in order to problematize the common view of how the class composition within the practice of football looked and how professionalization slowly but surely broke down old amateur ideals. In a chronological review, he starts with the background of the FA Cup and how school football was organized before 1871. Five chapters follow in which Curry describes the development of the sport of football in a very detailed manner, starting from the history of the FA Cup in chapter two. An entire chapter is devoted to the tournament’s inaugural season with detailed reasoning about the social composition of the players, but also with interesting reflections on which clubs participated and which abstained. In chapter three, tendencies towards social change among players, from upper and middle class towards lower middle- and working-class participants are dealt with. This change is partly due to more clubs from geographical areas like Lancashire and the Midlands entering the competition. However, and importantly, no club was wholly representative of a particular class, which is where Curry nuances previous research.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown. Public domain)

In chapter four, Curry notes a supremacy of the East Lancashire clubs which reflects a transformation from domination by South England clubs consisting of the privileged classes to a more mixed composition of players, including professionals from Scotland. These were lured to England and played for parts of the season. In chapter five, the controversy between advocates for amateurs and professionals are high-lighted. When they reached a compromise, football was saved from the split that occurred in rugby. In chapter six, Curry analyzes the final season of Scottish clubs in the competition and the advent of the football league, which was introduced to get better conditions for professional football with a longer season, more matches and a higher degree of regularity, which increased the clubs’ economy. Football’s path towards becoming part of an entertainment industry was thus begun, even if it was not a stated intention by the actors at the time.

Curry’s drilling in depth and the presentation’s closeness to primary source material makes his study interesting from many aspects. The approach of writing about the development of football from a bottom-up perspective where the reader gets close to actual players is appealing. This means that I, as a non-English reader, can learn a lot about early English organized football and about the processes of sportification and professionalization that were evident at the time under investigation. Nonetheless, there is some disappointment that Curry can’t quite live up to the ideals that Norbert Elias has articulated and advocated.

The book is incredibly detailed, and in parts it feels like I as a reader get really close to the actual people in the study. However, I miss “the big context” or the dialectic between context and details. How does the development of football relate to changes in society in general? Which societal changes, as e.g., the emergence of an entertainment industry, affected sports? What was the importance of the factory system’s increasingly strict discipline of workers’ time keeping, when it became necessary to allow football players to be paid for training and competition? With the establishment of workhours regulated to the clock in the factory system, the combination of factory work and playing football probably became more difficult. I miss such perspectives when Curry explains all change with endogenous forces and reduces the exogenous to nothing instead of seeing the dialectic between them, or as it can also be expressed, the dialectic between the small history and the big one. In other words, sports history cannot be isolated from the rest of social and cultural history or seen as independent from it.

Copyright © Mats Greiff 2024


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