The Birth of Football

Who invented football? The ancient Greeks, the Italians, the Scots, a group of bored Iron Age Chinese soldiers? No, the English, and they did it in Cambridge. This is the story of how the world's most popular sport was born. It was at Cambridge University that football first became football. Every ex-public school boy who “went up” to Cambridge took with his old school rules with him. Some allowed hacking, in many you could carry the ball, while in others the mob still prevailed. When they ran out for a game on the city's Parker's Piece, chaos ensued. Over a twenty-year period generations of students thrashed out a set of compromise rules - the 'Cambridge Rules'. These rules put skill above force, limited the movement of the football to the boot and were used as the founding principles of association football.

Malcolm Walker charts the tortuous gestation and birth of association football from its primeval beginnings to the six tempestuous meetings of 1863 that saw its official foundation. This is a story of violence, religion, bizarre behaviour, feuding and a dodgy stitch-up that marked football's difficult birth.