A people’s history of the people’s game

Dilwyn Porter
International Centre for Sports History and Culture, De Montfort University

Academics, even those who write about football, spend much of their time – almost certainly too much – engaging with other academics rather than addressing a wider audience. John Williams’s scholarly credentials are impeccable and recognised not only by his academic peers but also by those who govern the game. At the request of the Football Association (FA) he contributed a chapter to the 1991 Blueprint for Football though ‘without knowing that this was the document that would revolutionise the English game’ (p. 277).  One of his greatest strengths, however, is his ability to communicate informed insight to readers unlikely to expose themselves to the risk of being blinded by social science.

In particular, Williams embraces the banal but very important question: ‘How does it feel?’ It is significant that he has chosen to highlight Arthur Hopcraft’s much-celebrated The Football Man: People and Passions in Soccer (1968), making it the subject of one of the 80 short chapters that comprise this book. The author’s particular football passions surface more than once in the course of this artful compilation, each vignette crafted to illuminate an aspect of the game’s history in Britain from the nineteenth century through to the present day.   What Williams tells us about the collective experience of Liverpool fans converging on Rome for the European Cup Final in 1977 has to be taken seriously not only because he has written extensively on football fandom but also because he was himself moved to make a gruelling five-day pilgrimage to support his team. Thus, he is able to locate the experience in its particular historical context while conveying an instinctive understanding of how it felt to be there at the time. It was, it seems, ‘a fantastic Merseyside affair’ (p. 258).

It seems unlikely that the game’s founding fathers could have possessed the foresight that Williams ascribes to them here, but if it helps readers to engage, so be it.

Williams is an engaged observer. Like the photographer Stuart Roy Clarke, whose work he admires, he seeks moments which allow him to ‘document the prevailing football narrative around change’ (p. 293). These provide the pegs on which he hangs his chapters, each one designed to lead the reader gently to a deeper understanding of a game that has been in constant flux since the foundation of the FA in 1863. Soccer purists might wonder why they should encounter the myth of William Webb Ellis picking up the ball and running with it at Rugby School in the 1820s. It serves a useful purpose here, however, in helping to explain the development of team games at Britain’s public schools and the importance of devising compromise rules that would enable the products of these elite institutions to play with and against each other. Sometimes, especially when evoking the more distant past, Williams allows hindsight to influence his account. It seems unlikely that the game’s founding fathers could have possessed the foresight that Williams ascribes to them here, but if it helps readers to engage, so be it.

When considering early manifestations of women’s football there is a similar tendency to think a little too far ahead. Thus the British Ladies Football Club and its imitators in the 1890s provided ‘a raucous and challenging enough start’ (p. 67) and the much-celebrated Lily Parr and her team-mates at Dick, Kerr Ladies during and immediately after the First World War succeeded in persuading the public ‘that women might be capable of competing in football to a level that was well beyond the comical or farcical’ (p. 106). What might have been discussed here, perhaps, is how women’s football was so easily cast into the outer darkness for so many years by the FA’s infamous ‘ban’ of 1921.  Why did it fail in the interwar period while other women’s sports boomed? In some ways, the story of Jack Leslie, which Williams uses to highlight the racism deeply embedded in the British men’s game is more straightforward. Selected to play for England in 1925 only to be mysteriously replaced by another player – a decision for which no reasonable explanation was offered at the time – Williams concludes that Leslie was denied the opportunity to play at international level because he was black. ‘It was’, he concludes, ‘on reflection, a moment of deep national shame’ (p. 124), though it is doubtful if many would have seen it that way in the 1920s.

The author is an engaging storyteller and maintains an impressive momentum throughout. Inevitably, some vignettes stand out just a little more than others. His account of the death of Celtic goalkeeper, John Thompson, fatally injured when diving at the feet of Sam English of Rangers in 1931, has often been told, but rarely with such empathy for the unfortunate victims of this tragic accident.  One especially important essay, ‘Protect Me from What I Want’ (pp. 275-79) summarises succinctly – and with feeling – what has been gained and what has been lost since the advent of the Premier League in 1992 heralded a new dispensation in English football and generated an ever-widening chasm separating the elite from the grassroots. Football never has been ‘The People’s Game’ in the sense of being owned by those who only played and watched, but sustaining the illusion of moral ownership was and is an important part of its mass appeal. As the chasm widens with the passing of each season this becomes more difficult to achieve. Football in Wind and Rainrecognises that how we feel is likely to inform how we think on whichever side of the chasm we find ourselves. It permits readers access to the history of a game that many of them love with a passion and merits the wide audience that it seeks.

Copyright © Dilwyn Porter 2025