The Association Game: A History of British Football

by Matthew Taylor

The story of British football's journey from public school diversion to mass media entertainment is a remarkable one. The Association Game traces British football from the establishment of the earliest clubs in the nineteenth century to its place as one of the prominent and commercialised leisure industries at the beginning of the twenty first century. It covers supporters and fandom, status and culture, big business, the press and electronic media and development in playing styles, tactics and rules. This is the only up to date book on the history of British football, covering the twentieth century shift from amateur to professional and whole of the British Isles, not just England.

Genres: Soccer, Football

528 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Matthew Taylor is Professor of History in the International Centre for Sports History and Culture.

A social historian with an expertise in the history of sport and recreation, his research focuses on a range of issues relating to the development of sport in Britain, Europe and the wider world and he has published widely in this area.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amid all the words expended on football (soccer) in Britain, there is perpetration of myths, propagation of fantasies, and wishful thinking galore. But every now and then something comes along to cut through all that to present reasoned and sceptical analysis – this is one such book. Taylor seems to have read every piece of scholarly writing there is about British football, and drawn it into a considered synthesis balancing the material against itself and his own important research (his history of the Football League from 2005 is particularly good) to present a careful state of the play analysis. What's more, he has got beyond the narrow English focus of much writing about football to draw into his analysis Scotland, Wales and Ireland as well. Even more satisfying is that he has also avoided the more common trap of equating football with the professional leagues. He has, instead, drawn clear distinctions between professional, amateur, and recreational football, when taken alongside his sensitivity to gender and 'race' and ethnicity, means that this is likely to become the definitive but sacrificial history of British football for quite some time. Taylor has done us the service of drawing together the strands of historical scholarship about British football, and in doing so given us something to work from and argue against.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

An academic history of the sport in Great Britain. Although the focus is primarily on English football, the book examines developments in Scotland and Wales as well. A little dry. In some places it read more like a sociological or economic history.