Building a National League: The Football League and the North of England, 1888–1939

Abstract

Football in England has not always been a national game in the sense of an allinclusive competitive structure incorporating every part of the country. The story of the sport's journey from codification and bureaucratisation in the public schools of the south to commercial and professional penetration in the north, and then back again, is much too familiar to repeat here.l That professional football was essentially a northern creation is without dispute but historians are less sure about how long it remained the preserve of a particular part of the country: when exactly did the' sport of the north', in its professional guise at least, become the national game?2 Certainly by the mid-1920s England's two principal cup and league competitions were unequivocally national in scope, even ifregionalism still remained vital to the administration of the sport. Above all else, it was the development of the Football League which was the key to the nationalisation of the association game. Founded in 1888 by twelve of the leading professional clubs in the north-west and the Midlands as a means of ensuring regular competitive fixtures, the League was initially a rather unorganised and marginal body. By the Second World War, however, it controlled the largest sporting competition in the world and was possibly more powerful even than the game's governing body.