Corinthian-Casuals & The State of Amateurism in the 21st Century
We live further than ever from the idea that people should play football out of a love for the game. But what's going on at one of the very few remaining clubs to stick by that 19th century ideal?
There was a time when to just talk about league and non-league football wasn’t quite enough. Because non-league football was also divided into the professionals and the amateurs.
It is one of the most striking truths of the formation of organised sport that it should have come as side-effect of the industrial revolution, which had created a new merchant class. At the time of the formation of the game in the 1850s, this new upper middle class found that they could afford to spend their children to the same schools as the upper classes. And these students both took the game home with them upon graduation from university or completion of a school course and abroad, should their post-university careers take them away from home.
Football has always been a game that has straddled the class divide with singular inelegance. The game’s evolution came through the mob football of England and the introduction teaching the principles of muscular Christanity, in which the glory of God was to be celebrated through physical activity. The Football Association was formed by the upper classes, the Football League by the merchant classes.
The question of paying players to pay came to symbolise this particular class struggle. The originators of the laws of the game who’d come to form the Football Association were strictly amateur. They believed that the game should be played to the love of playing and not for money, but then again… they could afford to.
Throughout the 1860s clubs sprang up all over the place, notably in rapidly-expanding working class areas. These clubs soon found that they could make some money by enclosing their ‘grounds’ and charging everyone a penny to get in. It also became evident that those who’d started watching these matches were starting to want their local team to win.
It therefore benefited the club owners to bring in the best players in from elsewhere, and this brought them into conflict with the FA. The FA eventually relented on professionalism in 1885, and the baton had already really changed hands by then. Three years earlier, one of the old amateur clubs had won the FA Cup for what turned out to be the last time. In 1888, seeking more regular fixtures, twelve professional clubs formed the Football League.
But the amateur game lived on. The FA Amateur Cup began in 1893 and amateur leagues started to form, most notably the Isthmian League in London and the south-east of England and the Northern League in the north-east. The amateur game’s golden years arguably came in the 1950s, when sell-out crowds of 100,000 would attend the Amateur Cup final at Wembley.
By this time, most of the original amateurs had already broken away into the Amateur Football Alliance in 1907. But there remained the occasional stray. The Casuals had been a public OBs team, but they became a founder member of the Isthmian League in 1904 and didn’t cross over when the AFA was formed three years later.
Indeed, if anything, their most successful spell came during the 1930s, not least in 1936 when they finished as runners-up in the Isthmian League to Wimbledon, but won the FA Amateur Cup by beating Ilford 2-0 in a replay at the Boleyn Ground after they’d drawn the first game 1-1 at Selhurst Park. Following the failure of Argonauts, a public school folly proposed by RW Stoley to get a place in the Football League in the late-1920s, Casuals were reclaiming what for some was a ‘rightful’ place atop the amateur game.
In 1939, Casuals merged with another amateur club with a history. Corinthian FC had been formed in 1882 with similar lofty ideals to Casuals. Indeed, such was their adherence to the spirit of fair play that the idea of ‘corinthian ideals’ was named for them. Corinthians took the game on tour, lending their name to the club from Sao Paolo, leaving their influence on the early game wherever they went.
Unlike Casuals, they didn’t join a league. They didn’t enter the FA Cup into the early 1920s, and when they did it was letting a bull loose in a china shop. In their first season, Brighton took two replays to knock them out. The following season they knocked Blackburn Rovers, one of those twelve original Football League members back in 1888, in the First Round.
Corinthians and Casuals started to be managed by the same committee in 1937. Two years later they would merge as Corinthian-Casuals. And then they couldn’t play another match for another six years on account of the war. The new club adopted the pink and chocolate colours of the Casuals and assumed their place in the Isthmian League when that resumed in 1945.
The Isthmian League was as dedicated to the amateur ethos as Corinthian or Casuals. The league’s motto was ‘Honor Sufficit’, a belief system that stretched as far as not giving out a league title trophy or winners medals at the end of each season. Similarly, there was no relegation at the bottom of the division. Admission was by invitation—or at the very least application—only.
At the peak of their post-war height, they almost took the most glittering prize of all. 100,000 people were at Wembley to see them draw the 1956 FA Amateur Cup final with the Northern League powerhouses Bishop Auckland before losing the replay 4-1 at Ayresome Park. A decade later, they reached the First Round of the FA Cup before losing to Watford.
But these post-war years were not a successful period for the club. Football was changing. In 1964, the chairman of amateur Athenian League winners Hitchin Town confided to a stranger (who he didn’t realise was a sports journalist) that the paying for players had been commonplace for years.
The story made national headlines. Shamateurism. It was the beginning of the end of the amateur game in the way that it had been known. In 1968, the semi-professional clubs were given a competition with a Wembley Final of their own. Meanwhile, Corinthian-Casuals were starting to really struggle on the pitch. In the 13 years between 1968 and 1981, they only finished above second from bottom in their division once.
The biggest change of all came in 1974, when the FA finally ended the distinction between professional and amateur players. The FA Amateur Cup was wound up. The biggest clubs would continue to play on in the Trophy, alongside clubs from the Isthmian and Northern Leagues. A second tier competition, the FA Vase, was established to run from the 1974/75 season.
In 1984 they were kicked out of the Isthmian League over new ground-sharing rules. Four years later, they finally moved into their own ground at Tolworth in Surrey. They even made it back into the Isthmian League in 1997. We might have expected the end of amateur football and the decline of non-league football might have killed Corinthian-Casuals off, but this isn’t what happened.
So on this non-league day, I’m emerging from Tolworth railway station, am extraordinary construction of two low prefabricated barriers leaning forward as though bowing, a couple of hours before kick-off with questions on my mind. The amateur ethos is an anachronism in the 21st century, but what does it look like in 2024?
The obvious and immediate answer to that question is ‘not great’. Corinthian-Casuals are bottom of the Isthmian League Division One South-Central table with just 15 points from 31 league matches, going into this one. True enough, they’re only bottom by one place. But with three league wins and just 22 goals scored all season, this season can only really have a negative effect on dedictation to that ethos.
Prince George’s Playing Fields are about much more than just Corinthian-Casuals Football Club. There’s an indoor bowling club and scores of recreational pitches with similarly spongy surfaces for youth teams. Cutting past the slightly dystopian looking Lidl House, the UK headquarters of the supermarket chain and a building which definitely doesn’t have internment camps built into its basement, it’s on down a country lane for barely five minutes before the floodlights become clearly visible to my right.
So, what am I expecting, as I walk across the car park towards the turnstile at this ground? The pot holes in the car park don’t look very different to anywhere else, the flags are just as tatty from flying in the wind all winter, the vibe is a very familiar feeling of anticipation that isn’t quite excitement.
There’s a bar, a burger place, a shop selling shirts and other souvenirs. The patio area is nicely maintained, and there are some guys who have come over from Atletic Bilbao. It all looks very normal indeed. What was I assuming? A bunch of upper class twits of the year be standing around a piano, improvising a barbershop quartet, or something?
It’s decent turnout, too. Crowds have averaged at around 200 for most of the season, the sixth-highest in the division. As there so often seems to be at non-league matches these days, a healthy proportion of the crowd here today is made up of kids with their parents. The atmosphere is nowhere near as doom-laded as you might expect at a club that’s bottom of the table a week before Easter.
The home supporters have a hint of the ultra culture about them. Flags in the stand behind the goal celebrate Socrates and Bob Marley. It’s not the first time this afternoon that I’ll have cause to think of Marley this afternoon, though the second occasion is more related to smell than anything to do with flags. There’s a handful of Badshot Lea supporters—they’re mid-table and highly unlikely to trouble the top or bottom in a few weeks time—in yellow and green scarves hanging around the bar.
There’s a fairly familiar tempo which attaches itself to teams that are bottom of the table. They come out onto the pitch full of vim and vigour. Throughout the the early stages of the match they swarm forward in the hope of taking an early lead, giving them something to protect in the second half. It hasn’t really worked, yet. The punches thrown by the home team demonstrate why they’re bottom of the table, a couple of speculative efforts from distance and a chance which their number nine really shot put away but doesn’t.
But for all of this, Badshot Lea aren’t cutting up any trees either. Sometimes, teams in the middle of the table can find themselves being dragged down to the level of struggling opponents that they may meet, and this appears to be one of those afternoons. The best chances fall to the home side, but that’s not really saying very much. By half-time the score is still goalless.
For a while, I ponder the possibility that this is how I end my fourteen year run without a goalless draw, but when you’re watching a bottom of the table team there’s always a chance that they could implode before your very eyes. Of couse, one of the best-worn stories about Corinthian-Casuals tells of how their goalkeepers, shamed over their team having conceded a penalty, would stand aside and give the opposition a free shot at goal or, if awarded one, punt the ball well over the crossbar so that they couldn’t benefit from them.
They don’t do that any more. Not that it would have made much of a difference anyway. Twice in fifteen minutes they concede a penalty kick, both times for fairly straightforward fouls. On neither occasion does the Corinth goalkeeper stand by one of his posts, melodramatically offering the open goal to atone for his team’s sins. On both occasions the penalties are converted, confirming bottom place in the table for at least another week with a quarter of the game still to play.
Except… it isn’t. Not quite. Corinth apply some more pressure and they do manage to pull a goal back. The crowd, which has been fairly quiet, finally get some air into their lungs—this is only the 22nd league goal that anybody’s seen them score this season—and for five or ten minutes there’s a little bit of tension in the air as the home side start to push forward in pursuit of an equaliser.
But there’s another script of matches like this, the way this game ends up. The home side have too many players committed forward in search of an equaliser and in the last minute they break away to score a third goal and wrap the game up. Corinthian-Casuals stay bottom of the table, with the only real cheer for the home supporters being the news coming through that second-from-bottom Binfield have lost as well, meaning that at least they’re not any further adrift at the bottom of the table.
There are two very different prisms through which we can view this ongoing outpost of amateurism in the 21st century. On the one hand, the criticism that the wealthy could always ‘afford’ to greater scruples over winning than those whose livelihoods depended upon seems fair. In the 19th century, amateurism was viewed by some critics as an attempt to impose a set of values on this new game which benefitted those who didn’t need money in the first place.
There is something obviously quaint and anachronistic about the fact that this club survives in the football pyramid in the 21st century. The other amateur clubs ended up diverging from the rest of their game into their own tournaments. 130 years ago this year, Old Carthusians beat Casuals 2-1 at The Athletic Ground in Richmond to win the first FA Amateur Cup. On Non-League Day, Old Carthusians were getting beaten 5-2 after extra time in the semi-finals of the AFA Senior Cup.
There’s no booing, upon the blowing of the final whistle. This was hardly an unexpected result, after all. The club remains as strict as ever over its amateurism, but they’re never short of players to turn out in the pink and chocolate. If they’re relegated from the Isthmian League come the end of this season—and was litttle in this performance to suggest that they will—they’ll just pick themselves up, dust themselves down, and get on with things in the Combined Counties Football League next season. One of the small upsides of carrying a ‘winning is everything’ mantra is that it’s easier to retain a sense of perspective when the defeats start mounting up. The amateurs may be in the gutter at the moment, but some of them are still looking at the stars, no matter how distant they may seem at the moment.