Tales from Football History: From Muscular Christianity to the Death of Amateurism
From the very beginnings of the game, the power dynamic in English football was as lopsided as it's often been in a more general sense.
The origins of muscular Christianity are muddied and convoluted, but it’s reasonable to take as a starting point the poetry of William Blake at the end of the 18th and start of the 19th century. The poem And Did Those Feet in Ancient Times was actually used as a preface to a longer work on Milton, and was actually not particularly well known during his lifetime.
The irony here is that William Blake's poem was actually not really that well-known among the wider population until its inclusion in a 1916 hymn book and it’s subsequent committal to music in the form of the hymn Jerusalem. Blake was a non-conformist and a lot of his non-conformist views have largely been swept to one side. And one recurrent theme of a lot of his work is the unification of body and soul and the wholeness of representing the glory of God through the veneration of the human body.
But what exactly do we mean by ‘muscular Christianity’? Viewed from the 21st century, it looks very similar to what we would consider nowadays to be a certain form of conservatism. It emphasised patriotism. duty, self-sacrifice, discipline, ‘manliness’ and significantly, from the point of view of the development of football, the moral and physical beauty of athleticism, with a particular emphasis placed upon team sports.
It grew throughout the first three decades of the 19th century when it really became the standard way by which public schools taught their pupils. These were, after all, the children who would grow up to become the individuals who would run the civil service, the government or the empire. It was important, as far as the schools were concerned, that they were already instilled with the values of Christianity and of clean living by the time they actually went into these positions.
By the 1850s it was huge and its seminal novel, the seminal text from which we've come to know so much about it, was Thomas Hughes's 1857 novel Tom Brown's School Days. Hughes had been educated in the 1830s at Rugby School.At the time, rugby played a version of football. It wasn't actually codified as its own sport until 1845, but the possibly apocryphal William Webb Ellis ‘picking a ball up and running with it’ story occurred in 1823.
So there was already a split starting to occur within different versions of the game of football that would eventually result in the different sports that we have today. Hughes' novel was an enthusiastic endorsement of his own school days. It's the story of growing up in a good, clean, Christian environment in the 1830s. Still to this day, it's a very, very influential novel. It's been adapted for film and television no less than five times.
By the end of the 1850s, the formation of the Football Association had become an inevitability. The game had already spread beyond public schools, universities and the armed forces, with different schools, towns and districts each having different interpretations of the game's rules. And this became a massive problem when the newly formed clubs started to play against each other. Things were particularly chaotic in universities, where different players from different backgrounds came together with very different ideas of how the game should be played.
The man who would come to be the driving force behind the formation of the Football Association, Ebenezer Morley, wasn't the product of a public school education himself, but the majority of his acolytes were, and the influence of the public schoolboys of London and the South East of England would come to be considerable over the game in a broad sense for decades to come.
Football clubs had already begun to spread out across a broad range of social groups, from churches to factories. But when what would become the FA first met in October 1863 at the Freemasons Tavern, a pub near Holborn railway station in London, it would be the amateurs who would continue to hold sway.
At the first meeting, the clubs represented were the War Office, Crusaders, Forest, the No Names of Kilburn, Crystal Palace—not the current Premier League Football Club—Blackheath, Kensington School, Percival House, Surbiton, Blackheath Proprietary School and Charterhouse. Over the subsequent six weekly meetings, the laws of the game were established.
Football would be a blend of handling and dribbling. Players would be able to handle the ball, a fair catch accompanied by a mark with the heel would win a free kick. The sticking point, however, was hacking, or kicking an opponent in the leg, which Blackheath FC wanted to keep. Blackheath ended up adopting the rugby interpretation of the game instead.
In terms of how this nascent game was to be played, the influence of the muscular Christians was clear. Professionalism was outlawed, and upper and middle class players who could afford to play for nothing and for the pure joy of playing football continued to hold sway.
By the end of the 1860s, the FA had more than 50 member clubs, but even the formation of a cup competition was contentious, with only 15 clubs applying to enter and eventually only 12 taking part. The FA Cup, however, would prove to have an instant effect on the shape of the game.
Clubs formed outside of public schools and universities soon came enamoured with it but saw nothing wrong with commercialising their clubs, charging people to enter to watch and wanting to pay players to ensure that their teams had the best. But with professionalism outlawed, they had to find inventive ways of keeping players on the staff, with players at clubs owned by business owners often finding themselves in ceremonial jobs which required little more effort than to make sure that they were ready to play football every Saturday.
By the start of the 1880s, these clubs were starting to match the amateur clubs in terms of players and resources. And the critical match came in 1883, when Blackburn Olympic defeated Old Etonians by two goals to one to become the first club from an industrial town to win the FA Cup. The Blackburn captain Arthur Warburton would subsequently proclaim after the match that, “The FA Cup is very welcome in Lancashire, it will have a good home here and it will never go back to London”.
But in the South, there was consternation. Working-class clubs, particularly those based in Lancashire, had been widely suspected of making illicit payments to players since at least 1876. In the wake of Olympic's high-profile victory, influential journalists and officials affiliated with Southern amateur clubs intensified their calls for the FA to investigate the finance of Northern clubs.
They focused in particular on a training excursion that Olympic took to Blackpool, suggesting that the players would not have been able to take so much time off work unless the club was paying them some form of wage. Questions were also asked about players who had relocated from one town to another, seemingly for the purpose of playing for a new football team alone. Ultimately, no action was taken against Blackburn Olympics, although punishments were imposed on other clubs, including Preston North End, who were expelled from the FA Cup in 1884.
This, in turn, prompted the northern clubs to make plans to break away from the FA to form a rival governing body which would not impose this amateur ideal upon clubs. Under pressure of a split, in 1885 the FA allowed professionalism for the first time after the Northern clubs threatened to break away and form an organisation to be called the British Football Association. Under the oversight of Aston Villa's William McGregor, 12 of these clubs would subsequently go on to form the Football League, which began in 1888.
The clubs who sought to be professional may have been satiated by these changes, but the amateur clubs most definitely were not. The FA began the FA Amateur Cup in 1892, but Old Boys clubs that had dominated the game throughout the 1860s and 1870s soon again found themselves being outplayed by the lower orders, so in 1902 they set up the Arthur Dunn Memorial Cup for themselves.
Three years later, the Isthmian League, the first amateur league, was set up with the motto of ‘honor sufficit’ and no trophy being awarded to the winners. In May 1906, a new amateur organisation, the Amateur Football Defence Council, was set up amid increasing tension between the FA and amateur clubs. The following year, with more than 100 amateur clubs having signed up, primarily from the London and the South East, they broke away to form the new Amateur Football Alliance.
The Football Association responded by banning amateur players from playing for professional clubs, and there was clear division amongst affiliated groups, including county FAs, over whether to join the split or not. This schism lasted until 1914, When the FA agreed to allow the AFA to retain its amateur policy.
The AFA, Oxford, Cambridge and the public schools would each nominate one member of the FA council, with the AFA also being represented on the National Team Selection Committee and the Amateur Cup Committee. The AFA Senior Cup was founded in 1908 and continues to be played each year by what's left of the public school teams.
By the time of the outbreak of the First World War though, it was clear that professionalism was the future and that amateurism was becoming increasingly acronistic. By 1914, the Football League had 40 member clubs playing in front of crowds of hundreds of thousands of people every weekend.
But both the Football League and the FA came in for criticism for allowing their seasons to continue after the outbreak of war in August 1914. Neither the FA Cup nor the Football League was suspended until the following year, and when the tournaments returned after the end of hostilities, the Football League expanded greatly, adding a Third Division in 1920 with the admission of the entire top division of the Southern League, a professional league which had started in 1894 for clubs in London and the South East who’d missed the boat on the early years of the Football League.
A second regional Third Division was added a year later, making the Third Division North and the Third Division South, to supplement the First and Second divisions. Still though, the compromise reached in 1914 meant that the amateurs held considerable influence over the running of the FA.
When Wembley Stadium was built at the start of the 1920s, the FA moved the FA Cup Final there only to see the first held get swamped by a crowd of more than 200,000 people. With it having been little short of a miracle that no one was killed that day, 1923 FA Cup Final day might easily have ended as a major tragedy, the FA considered many options for improving crowd control.
And, in a decision which seemed to sum up so much about the endurance of the muscular Christian ethos at the top of the game, from 1927 on, a stirring rendition of Abide With Me would be sung by the crowd. There was, according to the FA, no amount of potential civil disturbance that couldn't be curtailed by the communal singing of a hymn.
The amateur ethos remained strong throughout the footballing establishment, but it came to manifest itself in increasingly bizarre and troublesome ways as time progressed. Perhaps the strangest case of this came in the late 1920s, when a stalwart of the amateur game decided that it was about time that those confounded professionals needed to be taught a lesson, and tried to get his club, which had never even played a single match, voted into the football league. The club was called Argonauts FC.
R.W ‘Dick’ Stoley was a relic from the founding years of English football, when the amateurs ran the show. He had represented Cambridge University in the England national team and had latterly been involved with the amateur club Ealing AFC, whose major achievement to that time had been beating Norwich City on the way to an appearance in the FA Amateur Cup final in 1904.
The amateur game did at least remain popular with the public. The FA Amateur Cup frequently attracted crowds of over 30,000 people to its final in the 1920s and by the 1950s it would be selling all 100,000 tickets for its final, which had by this time been moved to Wembley Stadium. And the suspicion remained that the best amateur clubs were more than a match for some of their professional counterparts.
Stoley looked enviously north to Scotland, where Queen's Park continued to play an active role in the Scottish Football League. They were the league's only amateur club and were even protected from being relegated into the Second Division until 1922, and even when they were, they were promoted straight back and stayed in the Scottish First Division until after the Second World War. They played their home matches at Hampden Park and even made two appearances in the English FA Cup Final during the 1870s. Stoley's plan was simple.
He wished to create a club to represent the whole of the amateur game in England and get it voted into the Football League. With a nod to the classical Greek taught in private schools, it is one of the trademarks of amateur football. Other examples of this trait include the Isthmian, Athenian, Spartan and Hellenic leagues, not to mention Corinthians FC and Blyth Spartans. He chose to name his team Argonauts FC, for the mythical band of men that accompanied Jason in his quest to find the Golden Fleece.
The club was to be based in London, and Stoley's original plan was to base them at White City Stadium. which had been the venue for the 1908 Olympic Games and which would go on to be a temporary home on two occasions to Queen's Park Rangers, as well as hosting a match during the 1966 World Cup Finals.
Stoley made no secret of the fact that, despite being based in London, the Argonauts would represent the whole of the national amateur game and he wrote to every existing member of the Football League to notify them of his plan. The loudest objections came from Queen's Park Rangers and Brentford, professional clubs into whose territory Argonauts may be parachuted.
Both clubs already struggled for attendances at the time, and there was a real danger that a large amateur club could seriously affect their well-being. In response to this, Stoley amended his plans and confirmed that the new club would instead play its home matches at Wembley Stadium.
But in spite of these teething problems, however, Argonauts had one very influential supporter. In the late 1920s, Athletic News remained an influential publication. Founded in Manchester in 1875, it was a sporting newspaper that focused on amateur sport, and at its peak in 1919 had a circulation of 170,000 readers. It championed the cause of the Argonauts, calling on the FA to encourage amateur clubs to release their best players to join the cause. They reasoned that increased interest in amateur football could stem the tide of public schools from switching to rugby, something which had startedwith the codification of Rugby Union in the 1880s.
With such support, the club's committee was confident that Argonauts could take the place of one of the ailing sides at the bottom of the Football League. When the end of the 1927-28 season came, the clubs met to decide who should stay in the league for the following season, and Argonauts did exceptionally well. Torquay United and Merthyr Town were re-elected, but Argonauts only just fell short of replacing Merthyr by 11 votes. If they'd taken six more from them, they'd have been in.
The club reapplied the following year, but their moment had already come and gone. The Third Division South clubs seeking re-election, Exeter City and Gillingham, were reasonably well-established clubs, both having a rare bad season, and Argonauts received just six votes.
Considering this collapse in support, It's perhaps surprising that they applied again in 1930, still without ever having played a single match. On this final occasion, Merthyr Town were voted out, but they were replaced by Thames Association Football Club rather than Argonauts, who didn't receive a single vote. Thames went on to have a short, unhappy spell in the Football League. Playing at the vast 120,000 capacity West Ham Stadium in Custom House, East London,
But Thames AFC had joined at precisely the wrong time, as the most severe effects of the Great Depression kicked in. They struggled to make any impact in the League, and their sole place in the Football League's history books is as the holders of the record for the lowest-ever attendance for a Football League match when just 469 people turned out to see them play Luton Town in December 1930.
After two seasons, finishing third from bottom and bottom of the Third Division South, Thames AFC resigned their place. Argonauts didn't apply again after 1930, and their name is now used by an amateur club in Bristol. Dick Stoley did, however, get to see his dream of club football at Wembley Stadium take place. During the 1930-31 season, Ealing AFC, the club with whom he was involved with while experimenting with the Argonauts, played eight matches there.
But where did Stoley go wrong? The fact that Argonauts came within a dozen votes of getting a place in the Football League in the first place would seem to indicate that professional clubs were not averse to the concept of the amateurs being involved in their competition. The brief dispute with QPR and Brentford would appear to be a red herring too.
Stoley demonstrated his desire to appease these clubs by proposing to move his to Wembley. It's likely that the biggest single factor was the fact that Argonauts haven't played a single match. Had they demonstrated on the pitch that they were a strong enough team to join the Football League, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that they could have taken the half a dozen votes from Merthyr Town required to win a Football League place. But this would be the last time that an avowedly amateur club would seek to join the Football League. By the 1930s, the stereotype of the working-class football supporter was dominant to the idea of the gentleman amateur.
Within international football though, an ongoing preoccupation with amateur ideals had an altogether more corrosive influence. The Football Association first joined FIFA in 1905, the year after it was formed. The British associations, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, opted to leave FIFA after World War One when FIFA chose not to exclude those who had been part of the Central Powers, but the British Associations’ stance had changed by 1922, and by 1924 they'd rejoined FIFA.
Still, though, the amateurs continued to dominate discussion of the home country's involvement in the wider world of football. The British Olympic Association had fought against broken time payments, the monetary compensation for athletes' earnings while competing in the Olympics. At the 1925 Olympic Congress in Prague, the British had requested an amendment which concluded that governing federations should define amateur status for their sports, but only in accordance with the definition of amateurism accepted by the Olympic Congress.
In 1928, Switzerland proposed to FIFA that in certain circumstances, broken time payments should be allowed to be paid to players and FIFA accepted this motion. The response of the Home FAs was to resign from FIFA in protest again. As a result of this resignation, none of the home countries competed in either the 1930, 1934 or 1938 World Cup finals. At the 1930 Olympic Congress in Berlin, Belgian delegates proposed that for each sport the definition of amateur status be left to its international federation.
The British Olympic Association argued for a common definition of amateurism and argued that broken time payments were against the Olympic ideal. The UK would play an amateur team at the Olympic Games men's football event to increasingly diminishing returns until 1960. But, having joined the competition for the 1936 Games in Berlin, the British Olympic would never again return to the glory days of 1908 and 1912 when they won the gold medal.
The FA rejoined FIFA in 1946 and participated in their first World Cup in 1950, with the British Championship—more commonly known in its later years as the Home Internationals—serving as the qualifiers for the top two. England won and took up their place, but Scotland, who’d been offered a place if they finished in second, turned theirs down. England, however, would be knocked out in the first round after having arrived in Brazil hopelessly underprepared, and it's possible to argue that the decision of the home nations not to play in those first three World Cups contributed to the stunting of English international teams for decades to follow.
Or perhaps, and this is something that is usually overlooked by those fond of alternative readings of history of football based on the home nations playing in the first three World Cup finals, they simply would have been found out in 1930 rather than 1950. We'll never know for sure. The international team's humiliation of 1950, however, barely seemed to register at home, where a boom in attendance has been enjoyed in the years following the end of the Second World War.
This was shared in amateur football, where attendances for the FA Amateur Cup Final would reach 100,000 by the early 1950s. From this peak, though, would begin a slow decline from which it could not recover. The gentlemen amateurs had already been done for decades earlier, but their descendants did have one final trick up their sleeves.
In 1948, Harold Warris Thompson, a professor at St. George's College, Oxford, proposed a joint team made up of the best players from Oxford and Cambridge universities. The team was named Pegasus FC and it wouldn't play in any leagues, only in the FA Amateur Cup and their local county cup in Oxfordshire. The club’s founding president was Kenneth Hunt, who'd been a member of the Great Britain team which won a gold medal at the London Olympics of 1908 and had gone on to play for Corinthians before becoming a clergyman.
Hunt wouldn't live to see his team's brief burst of success, though. He died in February 1949, but Pegasus did see success, albeit only for a short while. They won the FA Amateur Cup at the second attempt in 1951 and, after not competing in it the following year, did so again in 1953, defeating Harwich and Parkstone 6-0 in the final at Wembley. After reaching the quarter finals of the competition for two successive years though, they stopped entering from 1955-56 on and folded all together in 1963 after several years of competing in the county cups only. Harold Warris Thompson, meanwhile, ended up the chairman of the FA.
Pegasus, however, were an outlier. Of the 15 clubs that won the Amateur Cup more than once throughout its 80-year history, only they and Old Carthusians, the Charterhouse Old Boys who won the trophy twice in its first four years, didn't come from one of three leagues - the Isthmian League and the Athenian League from the south-east of England, and the Northern League from the north-east.
The undisputed kings of the FA Amateur Cup were Bishop Auckland, who won the trophy ten times between 1896 and 1957, including three years in a row between 1955 and 1957. In second place, meanwhile, with five wins each, came Clapton and Crook Town. The trophy was lifted by clubs now in the Football League on four occasions. Middlesbrough won it twice in the 1890s, whilst Wimbledon and Wycombe Wanderers both lifted it once each.
The very presence of working class clubs at the top of the amateur game proved the success of the amateur ethos in the extent to which it broke out, but also its limitations. The competitiveness of these teams was a long way from Corinthians, whose goalkeeper famously would stand aside when the opposition was awarded a penalty kick because saving the shot might be considered ungentlemanly. The Oxford Dons and public school alumni who tried to revive this age were fighting a tide that couldn't be withstood.
Football as a business was industrialising, just as the rest of the world seemed to be. The start of the 1960s saw the football landscapes continuing to evolve beyond recognition. The abolition of the maximum wage after professional players nearly went on strike in 1960 further accentuated this. And even the original hometowns of the game, the traditional mill towns of the north-west of England, started to suffer as the decade wore on, with wage demands increasing, and the advent of regular televised league football starting to concentrate interest on a handful of big city clubs.
In the north of England, the senior semi-professional clubs arranged themselves into a new league, the Northern Premier League, in 1968, and the FA marked this with the introduction of a knockout competition for semi-professional non-league clubs in the form of the FA Trophy, which began the following year. This competition was dominated by the clubs of the Northern Premier and Southern Leagues until the formation of the Alliance Premier League a decade later. The writing, however, was already on the wall for amateur football by this time.
The post-war boom in attendances was little more than a distant memory, and the amateur ethos felt like a remnant of the past was being clutched onto in the face of all logic, while stories of “shamateurism”—supposedly amateur clubs paying their players under the counter—started appearing in the national press, which undermined any notions of the supposed ‘purity’ of amateur football while also potentially drawing the attention of the Inland Revenue.
So the FA announced that the 1973-74 season would be the last during which there would be a distinction between amateur and professional players. The FA Amateur Cup would be abolished, with all senior clubs taking part in the FA Trophy, while more junior clubs would take part in a new competition, to be called the FA Vase. The three leagues that had provided most of the winners of the competition would go on to have very differing fortunes.
The Isthmian League would continue to expand to two, then three divisions. It remains a feeder league to the National League South to this day. The Northern League, though, remained a holdout against the streamlining of non-league football and, concerned at the travelling costs for clubs who would have to play matches outside the north-east, they turned down the chance to become a feeder league to the Alliance Premier League in 1982.
Its strongest teams, however, seemed to disagree with this decision, and several defected into the Northern Premier League during the 1980s. The Northern League eventually moved into the non-league pyramid, but at a lower level than would have been thought possible a couple of decades earlier. Since 1991, it's been a feeder to the Northern Premier League, but its clubs continue to survive, and the League has had an outstanding record in the FA Vars in recent years.
The issue of which clubs will play in which divisions within a regionalised pyramid, of course, remains contentious to these days. And the issue of travel costs for more remote clubs and the inequality that this creates has never been an issue of great importance for anybody but the clubs concerned themselves. On the 20th April 1974, though, the formal split between the amateurs and professionals ended for good. From now on, they would all just be players. A crowd of 30,500, turned out for last the FA Amateur Cup final, with Bishop Stortford beating Ilford.
Amateurism is such a curiously British thing though, isn't it? Only the British could really take the concept of the class system and just crowbar it into football like that. And we still feel it to this day. All that FIFA stuff about fair play being at the centre of their advertising stick and their self-aggrandising statements. It's really a relic from a bygone age but it's a really easy one to hang on to because nobody's going come out as being in favour of unfair play.
Amateurism takes many different forms now. There are plenty of volunteers working in football at non-league clubs, behind the scenes. This is informed by love and duty and devotion to something. Those people are the people who are, if anything, the spiritual successors to the best of the amateur ethos
The worst of it also still exists, in the know-your-place society that we still inhabit, in the attitudes towards people of different social classes and the way we give free passes to some and not to others. That's all around us at the moment. It goes way beyond football. Amateurism in the modern era is a state of mind rather than a set of particular practices. And there was a lot to admire in the way that the original amateurs took football abroad. They made it the global game. They took it to South America, for one thing.
It also had a finite lifespan. It could only go on for so long. The industrialists were always going to win that argument, because why should an audience—a paying audience, and in particular a partisan paying audience which wants to win—give a damn about good manners? Why should they care about principles of sportsmanship and fair play?
To a point, we all want that. We want an even playing field. But at the same time, the louche gentlemen of the late 19th century, who saw themselves as such, were swimming against an inevitable tide that was always going to drown them Who'd want to play or pay to watch football on a point of principle alone? That was never going to be a majority of of the football-watching public. It was always going to shrivel and shrink away until the very distinction itself became an anachronism.
That didn't happen until the 1960s and 1970s and when it did happen, it happened very rapidly. The FA Amateur Cup went from its high point to being out of existence in 20 years. That's not that long, a blink of an eye in terms of the time it took to go from its height to the FA formally ending that distinction. This is not so much a reflection on the waning power of the establishment, but on this occasion it wasn't one that they could withstand indefinitely.
No-one could control where people went to matches, and if people wanted to go to matches where better players were getting paid and the game felt more competitive, well, that's what they were going for. Over its final 20 years, from the mid-1950s onwards, amateur football started to feel obsolete. Football was beginning to industrialise. These weren't ‘clubs’ in their original sense any more. They’d become businesses, and that was clear by the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s.
The end of the maximum wage in 1960 and the coming of regular televised football between about 1962 and 1964. Those two things coming together really turbocharged the industrialisation of the game. By this time, very few were watching it because they were amateurs. They went because that was the team that they supported and that team happened to play in an amateur league.
There was a succession of clubs that left the Isthmian and Athenian Leagues to turn professional. Wimbledon made that jump, Barnet made that jump, Plenty of others did, too. It was to get yourself that little bit closer. Anybody could apply to join the Football League. Amateur clubs could apply to join the Football League, but if the Football League was going to vote somebody in, were they seriously going to vote in an amateur club? Or were they going to vote in a senior semi-pro non-league club?
It's good that we live in times that are less straightened than the second half of the 19th century. But there is something fundamentally appealing about the idea of fair play. Amateurism wasn't completely without its appealing or interesting side at all. But then again, perhaps that's just me being insufferably British about it all.