Football before codification: the problems of myopia

This article examines football in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Australia immediately prior to the codification of the game by the Football Association in England. Small-sided games, often for a monetary prize and hence according to accepted rules, were common. Recent immigrants from the United Kingdom were often the main participants in the United States and Australia and this suggests that football was deeply embedded in the lives of these people before they left home. These games were more like association football as it evolved than the ‘mayhem in the villages’ or the different varieties of public school football. The widely accepted story that rough football had to be civilized by the public schools before it could become the game of the nation and later the world requires re-examination. If this revised view can be sustained, it helps explain the explosion of popularity of association football in the decades after 1863.