Association football, as it developed rapidly in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, both reflected British society and helped to reshape it. In this newly released edition of Tony Mason’s essential account of the game’s rise, focusing on issues such as the amateur–professional divide, social class and mass spectatorship are seen as fundamental to our understanding of what is now a global phenomenon. Dilwyn Porter supplements this classic text with a brand new introduction.

This reference work aims to provide sports enthusiasts, journalists, librarians, students and scholars with an authorative source of information on a comprehensive range of subjects covering the history and organization of football in Britain. Over 250 entries focus on key organisations or individuals, famous clubs, major competitions, events, venues and incidents, institutions and organisations as well as key issues such as gender, racism, commercialization, professionalism and drugs, alcohol and football.

The field of sport history is a relatively new research domain, situated at the intersection of a number of disciplines and sub-disciplines. This interdisciplinarity has created interesting avenues for growth and fresh thinking but also inherent problems of coherence and identity. Making Sport History examines the development of an academic community around sport history, exploring the roots of the discipline, its current boundaries, borders and challenges, and looking ahead at future prospects. Written by a team of world-leading sport historians, with commentaries from scholars working outside of the sport historical mainstream, the book considers key themes in the historiography of sport, including: The relationship between history, sport studies and physical education Comparative analysis of the role of historians in the writing of sport history Modern and post-modern approaches to sport history Race, gender and the sport historical establishment The role of scholarly organisations, conferences and journals in discipline-building Presenting new perspectives on what constitutes sport history and its core methodologies, the book helps explain why historians have become interested in sport, why they’ve chosen the topics they have, and how their work has influenced the wider world of history and been influenced by it. Making Sport History is essential reading for any advanced student, scholar or researcher with an interest in sport history, historiography, or the history and philosophy of the social sciences.

The contributors to this book argue that the commercialized PR-driven British football world has either created, exacerbated or continued to ignore serious problems of social exclusion along lines of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age.

This original book examines 1930s football in England in its social, economic and political context by focusing on ten of the top players of the era. It sheds light on the decade that saw players taking on a public persona as 'terrace heroes'.

It should be unthinkable to write the social history of Britain from the late nineteenth century onwards without reference to association football. Yet by the time that the Football Association celebrated its centenary year in 1963, no serious academic analysis had been undertaken of the sport and of the various channels by which it had developed in different parts of the country. By the time that historians began to tackle that task, its complexity and diversity were such that it could only be undertaken in installments. Studies emerged that focused upon individual clubs and specific regions or which were limited to narrow time scales. No work examined the long century from the 1860s to the 1970s in full. This book analyses the growth of British football in all its aspectsthe developments of the football crowd, the status of the professional player, womens football, the difficult survival of amateurism, to mention but a few. It also highlights the factors that contributed to diverse developmental paths in different parts of the country. The author has used the widest range of source materials to achieve a broader overview of the games history than has previously been attempted.