OF ALL THE CLICHÉS ABOUT FOOTBALL, few insult the game’s founding principles more flagrantly than “the beautiful game”. Ruud Gullit’s idea that football should be “sexy” is even more preposterous. For the vigorous and visionary Victorians who invented the game, sexiness and beauty were the last things they wanted.
The game they created was rough and imbued with martial virtues. It was played by sturdy, lion-hearted men using heavy leather balls in thick, ankle-high boots in seas of mud. The Victorians preferred pluck and strength to sensuality and creativity. Their aim was to teach boys how to be “manly”. This old English conception of football still underpins all that is best and worst in the English game. It accounts for the energy and drive that makes our game exciting. It also explains why the typical English footballer has always been a sturdy fighter rather than an artist. The interesting question is: why did the Victorians make football this way?
A clue can be detected in the words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was, among other things, an accomplished full back for a team he founded in Portsmouth. “Better that our sports should be a little too rough than that we should run a risk of effeminacy,” he said.
This distaste for “effeminacy”, which was shared by most of his contemporaries, was rooted in the peculiar circumstances of late Victorian England. Economic and strategic anxieties got mixed up with religious fervour and blossomed into sexual neurosis on an epic scale. Britain’s ruling elite was gripped by the idea that their empire was about to go the same way as that of ancient Rome — felled, according to Edward Gibbon, by sexual decadence.
Moralists gave warning that the nation was on the eve of an “age of voluptuousness and reckless immorality”. Because sex was considered beastly, Englishmen were continually urged to “master the beast”, as if their bodies were like the wild animals of Africa. There were plenty of sexual terrors to choose from: prostitution, syphilis, the (non-existent) “white slave trade” and homosexuality were all feared as great moral and social evils.
Strangely, what worried the late Victorians most was masturbation, which was imagined to be a mental sickness that maimed and killed and was seen as a mortal threat to nation and empire. Stamping out “self-abuse” thus became one of the central obsessions of the age. It was also a crucial factor in the birth of football. The idea was that if sport could keep boys busy and healthy, a range of sexual and social problems would melt away and Britain would become a land of the chaste, pure and noble-minded.
The sublimation of sexual anxiety into the ugly game started in the public schools in the middle of the century with men such as Edward Thring, headmaster of Uppingham School. Second only to Thomas Arnold, of Rugby, as the leading educationalist of the age, Thring was among the first to set organised games at the heart of school life. A muscular Christian and anti-masturbation fanatic, he aimed to turn “weaklings into men ”. In one of his typically cheery and unconsciously Freudian weekly sermons (entitled “Death, and Death, and Death”) he warned pupils not to succumb to the “worm-life” of foul earthly desires: “I say, that by and by, all of a sudden, you know not how, all that you have learnt to love through years of baseness will drop off.” Drop off!
His younger brother, J. C. Thring, was one of the founders of football, who drafted a set of rules in 1862 and took part a year later in discussions that led to the creation of the Football Association. When the game split into rival codes (rugby and association) over the legality of “hacking” (shin-kicking), both sides deployed arguments about “ manliness”. Thring claimed that hacking was unmanly and that football was rough enough to do without it. The representative of the Blackheath club, voicing a prejudice against supposedly highly-sexed foreigners that would last for more than a century, claimed that banning hacking would so emasculate the game that even Frenchmen would be able to play it.
Most of the leaders of early football, such as Lord (Arthur) Kinnaird, the great Old Etonian, came from this background. Kinnaird was the single most influential individual in the first 60 years of the game. Famous for his flowing red beard and muscular exuberance, he was a star in the 1870s and 80s and played in nine Cup Finals, winning five times. He went on to be the game’s leading politician and was FA president for 33 years.
As the century progressed, football became ever more important in schools as sport fused with prudery and headmasters waged war on individuality, intellectualism and originality. At Harrow, masturbation-anxiety persuaded the headmaster to order all boys’ trouser pockets to be sewn up. At Clifton, boys’ “immodest” knees were covered. At Eton, Edward Lyttelton, the headmaster, said that smooth cricket pitches, which lessened the chance of injury, made the game “comparatively worthless”. Another teacher derided golf and tennis as “unsuitable” because they were insufficiently painful. Sport inculcated imperialism and militarism — but the only sensuality allowed was the rough physical contact of games. It was in this context that football became a mass movement, spreading rapidly from its aristocratic roots to the wider population via teacher-training colleges, churches and organisations such as the Boys’ Brigade. Most of England’s great clubs were created in the 1880s, as was the Football League, centred on industrial Lancashire and the Midlands.
Public school-educated evangelists who sought to raise the moral condition of the working class through football were central in this process. Almost half the clubs now in the Premiership began as church teams. The burgeoning “social purity” movement also encouraged sport. The White Cross League of Ellice Hopkins, a Christian feminist, was the largest and most aggressive purity organisation to target the working class.
Her best-selling pamphlet, entitled True Manliness (a million copies sold — a Harry Potter of its day), urged young men to turn away from “bestiality”: “Get up the moment you awake, use plenty of cold water . . . work hard, and don’t loaf about by yourself, but take plenty of exercise, to the verge of fatigue.”
The more extreme elements of Victorian militarism, imperialism and sexual neurosis waned after the First World War, but never went away entirely. Even after the heritage of Victorian sexuality was demolished by the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the legacy of footballing “manliness” proved surprisingly durable. In the Sixties and Seventies, football’s small number of sensualist rebels, mavericks such as Rodney Marsh and Frank Worthington, were treated with suspicion by their clubs and kept at arm’s length from the England team. The taunts of rival fans revealed that the footballing public still viewed skill and originality as signs of effeminacy: “Georgie Best superstar / walks like a woman / and he wears a bra”. “Where’s your handbag Charlie George?” Glenn Hoddle was “Glenda”. But the arrival of foreign players and coaches in the Nineties heralded the start of the feminisation of the old game.
In the era of Footballers’ Wives and “roasting”, it is evident that modern footballers do not share quite the same sexual codes as the founding fathers. Even among the few remaining English players who most resemble the old lionhearts, change is apparent. Wayne Rooney may be wayward, but he is a silkier beast than Ted Drake or Nat Lofthouse. John Terry is more technical than Terry Butcher. What appears to be emerging in the Premiership is a hybrid — the best of the old-fashioned English game fused with new skills and tactical sophistication.
Even so, old anxieties remain. In Italy, the nastiest thing fans can think of to say about a referee is to call him a cuckold. In Latin America, they say rude things about his mother. Back in dear old Blighty, the referee is — and we trust always will be — “a w****r”.
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