The purpose of this talk was largely to enlighten we locals as to why Sheffield should be acknowledged as the home of Association Football. An early game played with a ball was being played in the Americas 3,000 years ago, and in China around 2,000 years ago. Even in this country a few hundred years ago, folk (or mob) football was played between villages, with few rules, but it was very different to today’s game.
Members of a Sheffield cricket club organized informal kick-abouts without any rules. Subsequently Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest formed the Sheffield Football Club on 24th October 1857. It was the world’s first association football club. Creswick and Prest were responsible for drawing up the club’s laws in 1858 which were the first detailed rules to be published by a football club and were called the Sheffield Rules. At the time the various public schools played football according to their own individual rules which varied widely. Two years later, on Boxing Day 1860, the first match between two clubs was held against Hallam FC, based on the so-called Derby rules.
Two years later there were 15 clubs in the Sheffield area, and Sheffield FC became members of The Football Association but continued to use The Sheffield Rules. In January 1865, they played their first away game against Nottingham FC under Nottingham rules with 18 players a side.
Between 1861 and 1875, there was an explosion in the number of football clubs around the country, with the creation of 207 clubs around Sheffield alone. The Youdan Cup was the first football tournament with a trophy to be held in Sheffield, in 1867. In the same year, the club introduced the first use of referees and the first play-off match. There were now enough clubs in Sheffield to form the world’s first county football association, and five years later the Football Association started its own tournament called the FA Cup.
In these early days of association football, players were middle-class cricket club members keeping fit during the winter months, with the funds to treat football as a hobby. But as the game developed, teams with a working-class background, especially those from Lancashire, were coming to the fore. Now players needed to be paid expenses to play competition matches. In 1879, Sheffield Zulus were experienced white players dressed in black jerseys, blackened faces and stockings and beating top clubs to raise funds for people impoverished by the Zulu Wars. As they were paid expenses, the Sheffield Football Association banned the players from playing in any game under their control.
Bettween 1857 and1875, over 40 per cent the assciation teams in the world were formed in Sheffield, making the steel city undenianbly the crucible of the modern game.
The 1883 FA Cup Final was a significant moment in the history of English association football. The final whistle heralded the end of football as an elite sport for the upper classes and the birth of ‘The People’s Game’, a meritocracy that still defies the class system. Blackburn Olympic, an all-English team of working-class players,became the first northern, and first provincial, team to win the FA Cup. The modern game was born.