The rise of professional football

With a common set of rules emerging, the next question was who would play. In the 1860s, football was mostly the game of public-school and university players and a small number of clubs in southern England. Within forty years it was the leading sport across much of Britain, played by working-class teams in towns and factories, organised into leagues, and supported by paid players, dedicated grounds and large crowds.

The same period saw national football associations form across Britain and beyond, and the first stages of the game's spread to mainland Europe and South America. Many of the structures that govern football in the modern football world — clubs, leagues, cups, registration rules and national associations — date from this era.

In the early years of the FA, football was formally amateur. Players were expected to be unpaid, to play for the love of the game, and to use the sport as recreation rather than a job. This was easier in practice for players with private income or comfortable jobs, and harder for working-class players who could only play if their employer or their team made up for lost wages.

As football spread to industrial towns, especially in the north of England and Scotland, paying players became normal whether the FA approved or not. Clubs began offering wages, jobs, or other inducements to leading players. After several years of tension, the FA legalised professionalism in 1885, on the condition that paid players were registered. From that point onwards, professional and amateur football existed in parallel.

The earliest clubs date from the middle of the nineteenth century. Sheffield Football Club, founded in 1857, is the oldest association football club that has remained in existence, although its first years pre-date the 1863 Laws. By the 1870s, dozens of clubs existed across Britain, formed by old boys of public schools, by university friends, by churches, by workplaces and by railway companies.

The composition of those early clubs explains a lot about football's later structure. Where a club's roots were religious or industrial, those connections often shaped the club's identity for decades. Many of the most prominent clubs in the modern English, Scottish, German, Italian and Argentine leagues trace their founding to the 1870s, 1880s or 1890s, with origins of this kind written into their names and crests.

Before 1888, English football had a cup competition — the FA Cup, started in 1871 — but no organised league. Friendly matches made up most of the calendar, and clubs that wanted regular fixtures had to arrange them one at a time. The Football League was a response to that problem — a fixed set of clubs, all playing each other home and away across a season, with points awarded for wins and draws.

The first Football League had twelve clubs from the north and midlands of England. Within a few decades the model had been copied across Europe and the world. Most domestic leagues use the same basic shape — a fixed set of clubs, a round-robin format, points for results, and a final table — because that is the shape the Football League introduced.

The English FA was the first national association, founded in 1863. The Scottish Football Association followed in 1873, the Football Association of Wales in 1876, and the Irish Football Association in 1880. Across the next thirty years, similar bodies were founded in the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Uruguay and many other countries.

Each national association became responsible for administering the game in its country, selecting the national team and running the main domestic competitions. The four British associations — England, Scotland, Wales and the Irish FA, now representing Northern Ireland — kept separate national teams and remain the four associations with seats on the International Football Association Board, the body responsible for the Laws of the Game. This is why the British nations play as separate countries in international football.

Many domestic competitions, many long-established football clubs, the idea of professional contracts, the structure of national associations and the basic match-day routines of the sport took shape in this period. When international football and the World Cup appeared in the twentieth century, they were built on top of these structures rather than replacing them.

It is also worth noting that the women's game was developing at the same time. Women's football was popular in late-Victorian Britain and drew large crowds in the early twentieth century, before restrictions and bans imposed by several national associations, including the FA's 1921 ban on women's teams using affiliated grounds, held it back for decades. Those restrictions delayed the development of women's professional structures for decades, despite the women's game being almost as old as the men's organised game.