ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book attempts to explain various events involved with the story of the early years of the development of football. Historians of the game initially established conclusions based on general hypotheses, apportioning credit to former public schoolboys for the early development of football. The recent debate in Britain over the early development of modern football, sometimes erroneously referred to as the ‘origins debate’, was triggered in 1999 when Eric Dunning replied to Adrian Harvey’s early writings on the subject. As the place where the first modern forms of football developed, England remains fertile ground for research into the game’s early development. Martyn Dean Cooke demonstrates that thriving Association football subculture matured in ‘The Potteries’ during the Victorian era. With more and more international studies being conducted on the subject, it is important to view the subject simply from a British point of view.
