The first obstacle: parents. Apart from a very small number of the converted, how many parents twenty or thirty years ago would have tolerated their sons exhibiting themselves ‘in an outfit as ridiculous and as indecent as that of a footballer’? ‘You must be mad or a thug to play a violent game like that.’ And, out of stupid humane concerns, sometimes out of fear, children were forbidden to play football by their father, or more often by their mother.