The great football myth

Far from being invented and refined by toffs, Richard Sanders says that the world’s most popular sport was
civilised and modernised by ordinary people

As a new football season begins, and a sporting legend (Sir Bobby Robson) passes away, it seems the right time finally to expose the big lie at the heart of football. Though it’s universally assumed that the modern game was created by the upper classes, who took the rough-and-tumble kickabout beloved of common people and refined it into the world’s best-loved sport, in fact the opposite is true.

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The myth runs something like this. The game played by the common people from the Middle Ages onwards was wild and savage, little more than a village romp. It was only with the adoption of football by the great public schools in the early 19th century that football acquired a clear set of rules.