ABSTRACT
When the rst academic histories of football were being researched and written in the 1970s and 1980s, however, the game was neither ubiquitous nor particularly popular. In Britain, Walvin and Mason wrote about football while working within history departments, at York and Warwick, which had both been important in pioneering new approaches to social history. Drawn to the subject from wider interests in popular leisure and labour history, both were nonetheless mocked by some for taking on a topic assumed to be frivolous and marginal. The reluctance of historians to study football was more pronounced still in France, where intellectual elitism meant that football could be written o variously as a pointless, socially disruptive and ideologically suspect activity. Despite the important work of pioneers (Wahl, 1989; Wahl and Lanfranchi, 1995), it was not until the late 1990s that this view was seriously challenged, with the 1998 World Cup, and its associated conferences and publications, acting particularly as a
llip. One could outline similar chronologies in Germany, Italy and other countries in Europe and beyond, with scepticism slow to break down and the serious study of football by academic historians boosted by the increasing global and cultural pervasiveness of the game as well as wider disciplinary and publishing trends (Hare, 2003; Holt, 2014).
