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Football's Great War: Association Football on the English Home Front, 1914–1918
As modern football grapples with the implications of a global crisis, this book looks at first in the game’s The First World War. The game’s structure and fabric faced existential challenges as fundamental questions were asked about its place and value in English society. This study explores how conflict reshaped the People’s Game on the English Home Front.
The wartime seasons saw football's entire commercial model challenged and questioned. In 1915, the FA banned the payment of players, reopening a decades-old dispute between the game's early amateur values and its modern links to the world of capital and lucrative entertainment.
Wartime football forced supporters to consider whether the game should continue, and if so, in what form? Using an array of previously unused sources and images, this book explores how players, administrators and fans grappled with these questions as daily life was continually reshaped by the demands of total war. From grassroots to elite football, players to spectators, gambling to charity work, this study examines the social, economic and cultural impact of what became Football's Great War.
The wartime seasons saw football's entire commercial model challenged and questioned. In 1915, the FA banned the payment of players, reopening a decades-old dispute between the game's early amateur values and its modern links to the world of capital and lucrative entertainment.
Wartime football forced supporters to consider whether the game should continue, and if so, in what form? Using an array of previously unused sources and images, this book explores how players, administrators and fans grappled with these questions as daily life was continually reshaped by the demands of total war. From grassroots to elite football, players to spectators, gambling to charity work, this study examines the social, economic and cultural impact of what became Football's Great War.
400 pages, Hardcover
Published April 13, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 23, 2022
Football’s Great War – A wonderful addition to Football during the war years.
Over recent years there have been many books published on Football and the First World War. This one is different from the others rather than focus on the battalions or football club, this focuses on what was happening on the home front. This certainly a book that can sit very comfortably with other books on the subject. This is thought provoking research, written by the curator of the National Football Museum in Manchester, Dr Alexander Jackson. This is the first book to cover Football on the Home Front and a very welcome edition it is too.
Jackson reminds us of the progress that Football had made in the previous fifty years to the outbreak of war. How in Britain the game had been codified, played both professionally and with a thriving amateur game alongside, even if they did not get along very often.
There have been many tales and depictions over the years of how football stopped at the outbreak of war, after being forced too. This book shows us that this was not the case, and that football did not disappear because the FA had banned professionalism. What it does show is how important the continuance of the game was in any form for the morale of the British public.
This excellent book of over 300 pages and twenty-chapters, and an excellent bibliography fills avoid on sport during the war. There are some excellent chapters, and this book is not all about the male variant of football it reminds us of Women’s football, something the FA would ruin for fifty years after the war.
This is an excellent book, that you can dip in and out of. Dr Jackson has written an excellent book and this needs to reach a wide audience.
Over recent years there have been many books published on Football and the First World War. This one is different from the others rather than focus on the battalions or football club, this focuses on what was happening on the home front. This certainly a book that can sit very comfortably with other books on the subject. This is thought provoking research, written by the curator of the National Football Museum in Manchester, Dr Alexander Jackson. This is the first book to cover Football on the Home Front and a very welcome edition it is too.
Jackson reminds us of the progress that Football had made in the previous fifty years to the outbreak of war. How in Britain the game had been codified, played both professionally and with a thriving amateur game alongside, even if they did not get along very often.
There have been many tales and depictions over the years of how football stopped at the outbreak of war, after being forced too. This book shows us that this was not the case, and that football did not disappear because the FA had banned professionalism. What it does show is how important the continuance of the game was in any form for the morale of the British public.
This excellent book of over 300 pages and twenty-chapters, and an excellent bibliography fills avoid on sport during the war. There are some excellent chapters, and this book is not all about the male variant of football it reminds us of Women’s football, something the FA would ruin for fifty years after the war.
This is an excellent book, that you can dip in and out of. Dr Jackson has written an excellent book and this needs to reach a wide audience.
September 17, 2023
**Winner of the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize 2023**
There are few issues that excite public opinion and moralising than people having fun in times of war, where a sense of national emergency takes on an all-consuming sense often accompanied by a push to enforced puritanism. Ask most people what they can tell you about football (or sport more generally) during WW1, and chances are you’ll get a story about the Christmas Day Truce with British and German troops playing against each other in No Man’s Land. If there is anything more, it might be something about a debate about whether the professional game should play out the 1914/15 season. Now admittedly, football’s not really my thing – so there’s not much more that I knew.
Alex Jackson’s excellent and richly cast history shows us just how complex the sport was. He blends narrative histories with cross-sectional thematic analysis, effectively demarcating his topic off from the more extensively discussed question of military sport. He grapples with the limitations of records and archives, so the discussion places more emphasis on the elite game, meaning that we’re not able to develop, as Jackson cannot, a sense of how extensive the game was. Even with that problem were still left with a rich, complex, sophisticated, and engaging exploration of the game in and of its time.
Jackson’s approach is broadly chronological, opening with an outline to the state of the game in 1913/14, including that season, providing a base for assessment of the impact of the war. The substance of the book is chronological, highlighting and drawing out key issues as they emerge, while the last third or o is principally thematic concluding with an assessment of post-war developments and a brief look at the impact of the experiences of wartime football on what we might now think of football in inter-war sports diplomacy.
In the course of this, Jackson covers an awful lot of ground and issues; media and public opinion, government views, attitudes of football’s governing bodies and local managers, reorganisation of national leagues to become more sustainable as player numbers fell, audiences shrank, and the logistics of organisation became more difficult. Alongside these there are questions of debates over players volunteering and conscription, the growth of women’s and charity football, support for and engagement with players in the services, engagement with the wounded and maimed, and more. This is a book, and an issue, rich in issues.
Jackson’s grasp of his material means these are well managed, and that the demands and gravitas of the questions at hand do not overwhelm the experience of reading. Part of the way he manages these demands of content and engagement is by developing his analysis drawing on cases and instances that while not representative as such are illustrative. This means that there are people we meet quite often along the way; this is an effective technique for drawing out bigger and more complex questions in this kind of social history. A danger in this approach, however, is the need to remind us as readers who these individuals are; in some places Jackson cannot avoid the problem of repetition in the descriptions that accompany these reminders – but this is a minor quibble in the big picture. For the most this approach works well, and effectively humanises what, in places, could easily have become a large and complex issue.
There are, therefore, several key figures who appear throughout – journalists acting as both critics and advocates, administrators at national, county and local levels, and less frequently players in various capacities. This various core characters allow Jackson to draw out diversity of opinion and practice in ways that highlights variation in the football world, adding richness and nuance to the case. He also, however, makes excellent use of individual one-off instances. For instance, he reads (newspaper) reports of the Military Tribunals that heard appeals against conscription with subtlety to unpack attitudes amongst players, a task made more difficult by a post-war government decision to destroy those records, making it impossible to get a clear sense of numbers or the extent to which reported cases were in any way typical.
The book is well produced (although in a couple of places marked by some poor proofing) that matches Jackson’s engaging and accessible style, maintaining scholarly rigour and sharpness while reaching an audience well beyond the usual academic one. This makes this a valuable contribution, both in terms of is content – it is a significant contribution to our understanding of both football history and the social history of WW1 – and reach. It is notable also that Jackson took what we can see as primarily a sports history book to a specialist military history publisher. Would that more of us in the academy we as thoughtful in our publishing decisions and approaches.
All in all, a valuable and significant contribution to the field. The likely audience may appear specialist, but this is likely to have quite wide appeal: I highly recommend it.
There are few issues that excite public opinion and moralising than people having fun in times of war, where a sense of national emergency takes on an all-consuming sense often accompanied by a push to enforced puritanism. Ask most people what they can tell you about football (or sport more generally) during WW1, and chances are you’ll get a story about the Christmas Day Truce with British and German troops playing against each other in No Man’s Land. If there is anything more, it might be something about a debate about whether the professional game should play out the 1914/15 season. Now admittedly, football’s not really my thing – so there’s not much more that I knew.
Alex Jackson’s excellent and richly cast history shows us just how complex the sport was. He blends narrative histories with cross-sectional thematic analysis, effectively demarcating his topic off from the more extensively discussed question of military sport. He grapples with the limitations of records and archives, so the discussion places more emphasis on the elite game, meaning that we’re not able to develop, as Jackson cannot, a sense of how extensive the game was. Even with that problem were still left with a rich, complex, sophisticated, and engaging exploration of the game in and of its time.
Jackson’s approach is broadly chronological, opening with an outline to the state of the game in 1913/14, including that season, providing a base for assessment of the impact of the war. The substance of the book is chronological, highlighting and drawing out key issues as they emerge, while the last third or o is principally thematic concluding with an assessment of post-war developments and a brief look at the impact of the experiences of wartime football on what we might now think of football in inter-war sports diplomacy.
In the course of this, Jackson covers an awful lot of ground and issues; media and public opinion, government views, attitudes of football’s governing bodies and local managers, reorganisation of national leagues to become more sustainable as player numbers fell, audiences shrank, and the logistics of organisation became more difficult. Alongside these there are questions of debates over players volunteering and conscription, the growth of women’s and charity football, support for and engagement with players in the services, engagement with the wounded and maimed, and more. This is a book, and an issue, rich in issues.
Jackson’s grasp of his material means these are well managed, and that the demands and gravitas of the questions at hand do not overwhelm the experience of reading. Part of the way he manages these demands of content and engagement is by developing his analysis drawing on cases and instances that while not representative as such are illustrative. This means that there are people we meet quite often along the way; this is an effective technique for drawing out bigger and more complex questions in this kind of social history. A danger in this approach, however, is the need to remind us as readers who these individuals are; in some places Jackson cannot avoid the problem of repetition in the descriptions that accompany these reminders – but this is a minor quibble in the big picture. For the most this approach works well, and effectively humanises what, in places, could easily have become a large and complex issue.
There are, therefore, several key figures who appear throughout – journalists acting as both critics and advocates, administrators at national, county and local levels, and less frequently players in various capacities. This various core characters allow Jackson to draw out diversity of opinion and practice in ways that highlights variation in the football world, adding richness and nuance to the case. He also, however, makes excellent use of individual one-off instances. For instance, he reads (newspaper) reports of the Military Tribunals that heard appeals against conscription with subtlety to unpack attitudes amongst players, a task made more difficult by a post-war government decision to destroy those records, making it impossible to get a clear sense of numbers or the extent to which reported cases were in any way typical.
The book is well produced (although in a couple of places marked by some poor proofing) that matches Jackson’s engaging and accessible style, maintaining scholarly rigour and sharpness while reaching an audience well beyond the usual academic one. This makes this a valuable contribution, both in terms of is content – it is a significant contribution to our understanding of both football history and the social history of WW1 – and reach. It is notable also that Jackson took what we can see as primarily a sports history book to a specialist military history publisher. Would that more of us in the academy we as thoughtful in our publishing decisions and approaches.
All in all, a valuable and significant contribution to the field. The likely audience may appear specialist, but this is likely to have quite wide appeal: I highly recommend it.
January 14, 2024
A seminal work that covers a potentially dry subject in a very readable way. Wide ranging research and the authors extensive knowledge are evident with little nuggets of information on every page.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews