ABSTRACT
Authors have learned a great deal about the history of our national winter sport in the last decade. Tony Mason’s careful research supplemented by the work of Charles Korr and Wray Vamplew among others has provided both a coherent picture of the organizational and commercial structure of football as well as valuable data on the wages and conditions of professional footballers. Early accounts of the history of association football, or of rugby football for that matter, ask us to accept that these games were passed down to the urban workers by those who had learned them at public school. Organized team sports, especially football and cricket, were integrated into this close-knit pattern of collective life through neighbourly solidarities and the ‘local’. The pub was the central social institution of the adult male working class and occupied a pivotal position in the world of sport.
