A fascinating insight the formation of the Football League, including the discovery of who really scored the first-ever League goal.

Part 1 of this edition consists of the creation of the English football league in 1888. It includes every football league result and the final league tables to the first England International matches in the British Home International Championship results. It also provides the tables and their statistics with the first games against overseas opposition, containing all the players and their teams. Read about the oldest cup competition in the world, the Football Association Challenge Cup (FA Cup), from its humble beginning in 1872 and every result from the first round until the final. The book also incorporates the First World War mini-tournaments to the first FA Cup Final and England Internationals played at the World famous British Empire Stadium, simply known as Wembley Stadium. Part 1 finishes with the 1929-1930 football league season. Amaze your friends with the facts! For history buffs and true sportsmen, The History of the English Football League - Part 1: 1888-1930 is a must read.

Mark Bernstein shows that much of the culture that surrounds American football, both good and bad, has its roots in the Ivy League. With their long winning streaks, distinctive traditions, and impressive victories, Ivy teams started a national obsession with football in the first decades of the twentieth century that remains alive today. In so doing they have helped develop our ideals about the role of athletics in college life.

This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world. The book explores how the world’s football codes - soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic - developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses. Important reading for students of sports studies, history, sociology, development and management, this book is also a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football in all its forms, as well as an engrossing read for anyone interested in the early history of football.

College football is a massive enterprise in the United States, and southern teams dominate poll rankings and sports headlines while generating billions in revenue for public schools and private companies. Southern football fans worship their teams, often rearranging their personal lives in order to accommodate season schedules. The Origins of Southern College Football sheds new light on the South’s obsession with football and explores the sport’s beginnings below the Mason-Dixon Line in the decades after the Civil War. Military defeat followed by a long period of cultural unrest compelled many southerners to look to northern ideas and customs for guidance in rebuilding their beleaguered society. Ivy League universities, considered bastions of enlightenment and symbols of the modernizing spirit of the age, provided a particular source of inspiration for southerners in the form of organized or “scientific” football that featured standardized rules and scoring. Transported to the South by men educated at northern universities, scientific football reinforced cultural values that had existed in the region for centuries, among them a tolerance for violence, respect for martial displays, and support for traditional gender roles. The game also held the promise of a “New South” that its supporters hoped would transform the region into an industrial powerhouse. Students and townspeople alike embraced the new sport, which served as a source of pride for a region that lagged woefully behind its northern counterpart in terms of social equity and economic prowess. The Origins of Southern College Football is an entertaining history of the South’s most popular sport cast against a broader narrative of the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, two momentous periods of change that gave rise to the game we recognize today.

The All-American Football Conference was the only challenger to the NFL (except for the American Football League of the 1960s) to survive more than two seasons in competition with the established league. It ultimately failed to achieve its goal of a peaceful coexistence with the NFL and folded in 1949. Its Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers, which were absorbed by the NFL in 1950, are still in business. This book takes a brief look at all of the NFL's challengers (and would-be challengers) from 1926 to 1945. It looks particularly at the All-American Conference, which overcame obstacles that proved too difficult for others and opened the 1946 season with teams on the East Coast, in the Midwest, on the West Coast, and in the deep South, making it a truly "All-American" enterprise. Each season and off-season is examined in detail.

The new NFL Centennial Edition A multi-billion-dollar entertainment empire, the National Football League is a coast-to-coast obsession that borders on religion and dominates our sports-mad culture. But today's NFL also provides a stage for playing out important issues roiling American society. The updated and expanded edition of NFL Football observes the league's centennial by following the NFL into the twenty-first century, where off-the-field concerns compete with touchdowns and goal line stands for headlines. Richard Crepeau delves into the history of the league and breaks down the new era with an in-depth look at the controversies and dramas swirling around pro football today: Tensions between players and Commissioner Roger Goodell over collusion, drug policies, and revenue; The firestorm surrounding Colin Kaepernick and protests of police violence and inequality; Andrew Luck and others choosing early retirement over the threat to their long-term health; Paul Tagliabue's role in covering up information on concussions; The Super Bowl's evolution into a national holiday. Authoritative and up to the minute, NFL Football continues the epic American success story.