Innovation not Invention: A Reply to Peter Swain Regarding the Professionalization of Association Football in England and its Diffusion

Abstract

This article is a response to the revisionist view of the history of the professionalization of association football in Lancashire as proposed by Peter Swain in a recent article in Sport in History. It expands on some of the arguments first proposed in my PhD thesis and subsequent articles during the 1990s, and suggests that Swain based his arguments on a number of misconceptions and misinterpretations of my original work. Apart from the flaws in Swain's reasoning and analysis, this article also criticizes his use of evidence in his attempted proof of this reinterpretation. It focuses particularly on his confusion of the concepts of ‘invention’ and ‘innovation’, and the idea of business innovation and its diffusion according to Rogers's classic theory. It also attempts to show the errors in Swain's ‘continuity’ concept as a theoretical structure. In conclusion, it is argued that Swain's ‘new direction’ is in fact a dead end, and that subsequent research should avoid these misinterpretations and misdirections.