ABSTRACT
While British engineers, merchants and educationalists would take soccer around the world, they were not the people who popularised it. Many British expatriate communities abandoned soccer as it became popular among the local population, choosing rugby for its exclusivity, and the driving force behind soccer’s exponential growth in the non-English speaking world became the local middle classes who sought not only recreation but also a means of expressing a newly developing national identity. Soccer had become the global game by breaking the link with its British inventors.
