Football History: Andrew Fagg

The World Cup may have ended, but Methodist football fanatics have something to celebrate.

A new book unveils the foundation stories behind some of England’s top football clubs. It may come as a surprise to some that of the 38 clubs that have played in the Football Association (FA) Premier League since its 1992-3 inception, 12 can trace their origin directly to a Church.

For Aston Villa, Everton and Liverpool fans, that means tracing their origins to Methodist Churches. Thank God for Football! (Azure, £9.99) by Peter Lupson, pieces together the clubs’ early histories from contemporary newspaper accounts of local church activities and church sources such as magazines, personal correspondence and records of meetings.

Football was codified as a sport in 1863 and during the following three decades began to shape itself into a professional sport. Churches, meanwhile, were looking to promote physical health, particularly among young people, alongside moral and spiritual health. Some people saw football as an ideal opportunity. As played in the famous public schools, it nurtured qualities of fair play, courage, self control and unselfishness.

The 1870s thus saw a rapid spread of church cricket and football clubs throughout the country. There was no uniform pattern in the formation of Church football clubs, however and the author here is successful in drawing out the distinctive features in each of the clubs’ stories.

Aston Villa Football Club, for instance, grew out of the imposing Aston Villa Wesleyan chapel in Lozells Street, Birmingham. The chapel, now demolished, took its name from a large mansion that stood virtually opposite it. In 1872 some of the members of the Young Men’s Bible Class decided to form a chapel cricket team and to play under the name of "The Aston Villa (Wesleyan) Cricket Club".

A couple of years later four of the team stood captivated by a game of football on a patch of waste ground in Birmingham. They believed it was just the thing to keep the members of the cricket team fit during the long winter months. The rest, as they say, is history.

Each of the 11 club histories featured in the book are unravelled in around 15 pages. Space, very likely due to the scarcity of course material, is not given to flesh out the characters behind the clubs’ formation. Instead the book has the setting the record straight feel about it, giving recognition to the early Christian pioneers of what is now the national game. It provides a fascinating window into the time in which they lived and will be of interest to both church and football historians.

BBC sports commentator John Motson, the son of a Methodist minister, provides the foreword and chairman of the FA (Football Association) Geoff Thompson, a helpful afterword. Himself a Christian, Mr Thompson speaks about present-day Christian pioneers of football reaching out to ‘enrich’ their communities and using the game as a vehicle for social development.

John Motson also provides the foreword to Footballing Lives (Canterbury Press, £9.99), a collection of writings by football club chaplains edited by Jeffrey Heskins and Matt Baker.

He explains how his father, the late Rev. William Motson, introduced him to football when he was a minister of Plumstead Church in south-east London, at a time when football clubs were closely identified with the communities that surrounded them. The modern-day obsession with winning, money and high pressure, he says, means that Christians need to be involved more than ever with the sport.

Initially chaplains were treated with scepticism, but these accounts show that, as in many other fields, they have become respected and liked. Football is constantly subject to the full glare of the media, but this book manages to give a glimpse into some of the issues that never make the back pages.

(Why not dip into the history of some of England’s best-known teams to discover some unexpected Church links?)

Thursday 13 July 2006