ABSTRACT
All three sets of information are afflicted by certain weaknesses that must be taken into consideration. The most obvious relates to our first category, the activity of a club in a particular year, for this depends entirely on the attention paid to a club in our sources. With reference to the second category, an effort to record those clubs who were members of the FA, we confront two different sorts of problems. First, it is often impossible to determine how long a club’s membership of the FA lasted, because such records were not preserved. Second, it is
important not to overstate the significance of a club belonging to the FA. Many clubs appear to have belonged to the FA but rarely, if ever, used the FA’s code. This last point leads us into two important issues that must be appreciated in relation to our third objective, the attempt to classify the rules used by a club. In the first place, we often lack detailed information on the rules that were used and consequently such decisions are based on inference from the reports of matches and such like. Second, it must be remembered that the football played by clubs who are classified as belonging to the same category often differed significantly. While this is most apparent in those games classified as association, which incorporated a substantial diversity of codes, it must not be overlooked that rugby’s rules varied significantly between some clubs. The only code in which there appears to have been a significant uniformity was Sheffield. This was an association-type game in which the clubs, all of whom were based in the Sheffield area, adhered to substantially the same rules.
