Amateur and professional football

When the FA was founded in 1863, football was an amateur game by assumption rather than by rule. The men who drew up the original Laws played football as a recreation, alongside their work as solicitors, schoolteachers and military officers. The idea that anyone would be paid to play football would have looked strange to them, and the early FA had no need to write a rule against it.

That worked while football was confined to public-school old boys, university teams and a few southern clubs. Once the game began to spread to industrial towns and to working-class players, the picture changed. The question of whether players could be paid became one of the deepest arguments in football's early years, and the way it was settled in 1885 shaped the professional game ever since.

Playing football took time. A working-class player who travelled to an away match, played, and travelled home could lose a full day's wages. A man with a comfortable job, a private income or family means could afford that. A factory worker, a miner or a railwayman could not, and the strictly amateur rules meant his club could not legally compensate him for the lost pay.

As the game spread, especially in the industrial north of England and the central belt of Scotland, the practical question became urgent. Leading working-class players were giving up the game or moving to clubs that would quietly look after them. The clubs that wanted to compete at the top level had to find ways to keep those players, even if the rules of the FA officially forbade it.

By the mid-1870s, several clubs in the north of England and Scotland were paying their players in unofficial ways. The most common method was "boot money" — small sums slipped into a player's boots in the changing room. Others arranged paid jobs for the players in factories owned by club directors, or provided housing, meals or expense payments well above what the player had actually spent.

Scottish players were especially in demand. Scottish football's passing game was considered more advanced than its English equivalent in the 1870s and 1880s, and English clubs actively recruited Scottish players with the promise of money or work. The flow of players south became known as the "Scotch professors" — Scottish players who moved to English clubs and were paid for their skills, despite the rules.

In January 1884, Preston North End were drawn against Upton Park in the FA Cup. Upton Park lodged a complaint with the FA that Preston had fielded paid players. Preston's manager, William Sudell, admitted openly that the club paid wages and argued that the FA's rule was unrealistic. The FA suspended Preston from the cup, and within months a wider crisis had developed.

Several leading northern clubs declared that they too were paying players, and that they would form a breakaway British Football Association if the FA refused to allow professionalism. The threat was real — the northern clubs had large crowds and many of the leading players, and a breakaway would have stripped the FA of much of its base. Through the rest of 1884 and into 1885, the two sides negotiated.

On 20 July 1885, the FA voted to legalise professionalism in English football. The decision was a compromise — clubs could pay their players, but every professional had to be formally registered with the FA, and the basic structure of amateur football was preserved alongside the new professional code. The rule passed with a narrow majority of two-thirds, the threshold needed to change FA statutes.

The decision was a turning point. It accepted that football had outgrown its public-school origins and that the working-class players who made up many of the leading teams needed to be paid. From that point onwards, the leading clubs in England were professional clubs, with paid players, dedicated grounds and increasingly business-like operations. The amateur game continued in parallel and remained the dominant model in some parts of English football for many decades.

Within three years of legalisation, the leading professional clubs founded the Football League. Wages and player registration became central parts of how the game was governed, and the system of registering each player to a single club — the basic shape of football's contract system — was put in place. The FA continued to oversee the wider governance of the game while the Football League ran the professional competition.

The old amateur tradition kept its place in English football for the rest of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. The FA Amateur Cup, founded in 1893, ran for nearly a hundred years. Some leading sides — including Corinthian FC, made up entirely of public-school amateurs — refused to play in the professional game and saw themselves as the keepers of the older tradition.