Tara Smith
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STRANGE as it seems now, football was once the sole preserve of the upper classes. Devised in the hallowed halls of Eton, Rugby, Harrow and Charterhouse schools, it was seen as a game for serious (and monied) amateurs.
But as the sport became more popular in the latter half of the 19th century, with the launch of the FA Cup and a new league system attracting growing numbers of fans, other teams from further down the social order were keen to get in on the act.
And some of those clubs, many of them based in northern mill towns, wanted to attract the best players... so they started to pay them.
The English Game, the latest project from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, who admits he’s no football fan, was inspired in part by a visit he made to a Manchester United match.
It starts on Netflix today, and charts the beautiful game’s transformation from elite sport to the most popular game in the world.
Fellowes focuses on two of the most important and transformative players the game has ever seen; Lord Arthur Kinnaird, an Old Etonian banking heir, and Fergus Suter, a Scottish stonemason who was the game’s first “professional” player and one of the men credited with changing the way football was played.
In many ways, the series is typical Fellowes. The writer, who won an Oscar for Gosford Park and also created the new drama Belgravia, currently showing on ITV, has long been fascinated with class and its impact on British society.
It has classic elements of the rich versus the poor with the series reflecting a changing world in the 1880s amid the industrial revolution.
But, as befits someone who married into the aristocracy, this is much more nuanced than a case of horrid toffs versus virtuous workers.
Kinnaird has problems at home after his wife suffers a miscarriage and that, and her kindness, help make him a nicer person. Meanwhile, some of the working-class footballers are caught up in violence when their wages are cut.
“This is a drama in miniature for what was happening in the whole of Western civilisation,” says Fellowes. “The reason the Football Association was formed was so upper-class people who’d learnt the game at school could play against one another under a set of agreed rules. “But from the moment the rules were established in the 1860s, the sport increased in popularity.”
Few dramas about football have managed to replicate the passion of the real thing – from an underdog winning a cup game or England finally not losing a match on penalties. But this is a very different type of football project. It is more about the invention and the growing importance of the game in the late 1890s rather than the actual playing of it. “Every year there were 120, 130, 150 new clubs registering with the FA,” adds
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