On this day in 1888: The Football League kicks off
Today in 1888, Aston Villa came to an anticlimactic 1-1 draw against Wolverhampton Wanderers as the Football League’s first season began. Eliot Wilson tells us more from his latest historical rabbit hole
Football may be, famously, the beautiful game, but it is also a very old one. So-called “mob football” was being played a thousand years ago in various forms across Europe, and while its riotous and chaotic nature makes the modern discipline appear almost stylised and ritualistic, it was from these antecedents that the rules of association football were distilled.
The formalisation of the sport
The Football Association, English football’s governing body, was founded in 1863 and its first secretary, a Yorkshire-born solicitor with the brilliantly High Victorian name of Ebenezer Cobb Morley, drew up the Laws of the Game which remain in force. It began as a game for gentlemen amateurs, but by the 1880s it was successful enough that, then as now, money swirled around it in tempting abundance. Some clubs began to attract players who were tantamount to professional footballers by discreet or loosely disguised payments, to the disdain of those who fiercely guarded the discipline’s amateur status.
There was also the eternal verity that businesses crave certainty. As clubs grew in size and importance, they increasingly found that an ad hoc schedule stitched together from FA Cup fixtures (which had begun in 1871), inter-county matches and ordinary games was not a sufficiently reliable source of revenue. There was money to be made, but it would only be unlocked with better organisation.
The Football League, an alliance of 12 clubs from the midlands and the north of England, had been created in the spring of 1888 to create a season of guaranteed fixtures and a stable, predictable revenue basis. The driving force behind it was one of the directors of Aston Villa, a Scottish draper and teetotal Nonconformist called William McGregor. It sounds blasphemous now, but he may have taken some of his inspiration from the league format of baseball in the United States, though McGregor himself claimed the County Cricket Championship had influenced him more.
1888: The Football League’s first season
Today in 1888, Saturday 8 September, the Football League’s first season began, with five matches involving 10 of the league’s 12 member clubs. West Bromwich Albion beat Stoke City 2-0, Preston North End eased to a 5-2 win over Burnley, Derby County trounced Bolton Wanderers 6-3, Everton defeated Accrington 2-1 and McGregor’s own Aston Villa came to an anticlimactic 1-1 draw against Wolverhampton Wanderers. The two remaining clubs, Blackburn Rovers and Notts County, would not play their first matches for another week.
Although the season was now underway, the clubs had not yet finally agreed a scoring system. The rules stated that the ranking should be determined “from wins, draws and losses”, but gave no more details, and initially those newspapers which printed the league table listed the clubs in alphabetical order. It was not until the end of November that year that agreement was reached to award two points for a win and one for a draw, and that goal difference would be used if clubs ended the season equal on points.
The first season ended on 20 April 1889, each club having played the other twice, once at home and once away. Attendance was initially modest, ranging from 3,000 at some grounds to more than 7,000 at others, but the game was in its infancy. Notts County played at Trent Bridge as tenants of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club and had to defer to cricket fixtures for scheduling; Dudley Road, home of Wolverhampton Wanderers, had a rudimentary lean-to shelter and a small area with duckboards for spectators to stand.
Preston North End were crowned League champions at the end of it all, having been undefeated throughout the season with 18 wins and four draws. Only Arsenal’s Premier League sweep in 2003-04 has ever matched Preston’s achievement, and the squad was quickly dubbed “The Invincibles”. It was a truly British team, with eight English players, eight Scotsmen and two Welsh goalkeepers (one of whom, Dr Robert Mills-Roberts, had just been appointed house surgeon at Birmingham General Hospital). For good measure, Preston also won that season’s FA Cup, beating Wolves 3-0 at Kennington Oval on 30 March 1889.
The game goes on
The idea of a well-organised professional league had clearly worked. In 1892, the Football League absorbed the rival Football Alliance as its Second Division, with a Third Division following in 1920 and a Fourth Division in 1958. There were 92 clubs in the League by that stage, a far cry from the original dozen of 70 years previously.
The English Football League plays on, the oldest of its kind in the world. But it now sits in the shadow of the Premier League, created in 1992 for the same reason that the Football League had come together in 1888: by being more organised and professional, there was more money to be had. And that money now amounts to billions of pounds, a figure the players of 1888 would have recognised only in terms of the UK’s GDP.
Those who innovate are always liable to find themselves overtaken by others who go another step further. Even so, William McGregor and the other organisers of the Football League deserve commemoration for their part in making English football what it is, starting with those very first matches today in 1888.
Eliot Wilson is a writer, commentator and contributing editor at Defence On The Brink