The Origins of German Football -
New Info, New Hypothesis
If you have read other content of this site then you will be aware that we believe there is football and there is Association football with an inability to distinguish properly between the two, what might as short-hand be called The Sheffield Syndrome, although other towns and establishments are available, a plague on, a muddying of the modern history of the game. And now it seems not just to be a British problem but Dresden in Germany had joined in.
On a recent visit to the German Football Museum in Dortmund, the best football museum we have seen, SFHG was lent by the inestimable Exhibition's Curator, Dr. Martin Woerner, a book, more of pamphlet really. And it has proven, well, revelatory, not least in largely answering, indeed re-butting the fairly recent claim, one, which had from its outset puzzled, that our , i.e. the World's football arrived in Germany, indeed specifically in Eastern Germany, in 1874. Fact is now that it is clear football did, just about, but Soccer, Association football, did not, and would not for another fifteen years or so and then at much the same time in at least three ways.
The first, a direction, was probably Switzerland and specifically to Karlsruhe in 1889, the second was at about the same time from direct contact with the UK, probably to Heidelberg, both in the west of the country. And then there was Dresden and by, we suggest, conversion of a very specific kind. That in the 1870s the Saxon capital had what is too often referred to as an "English" population but was British and Brito-Euro-Germanic and substantial enough to form a sporting club is undoubted. The club, named The Dresden English Football Club .......... had a starting membership of seventy; all male, of course.
There is even a line in the pamphlet that accuses them of training for them. The very idea.
Aging into bowls or golf
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