When talk turns to the origins and early development of Association football, especially abroad, the repeated story is that it emerged from English Major Public Schools (MPS) and the upper-class gentlemen they produced. For example the otherwise entirely laudable German Football Museum in Dortmund and even the FIFA Museum in Zurich have it as their narrative. But it is a myth. It is demonstrably wrong. And even in the decade and the half when products of those schools did gain control of the game's then overseer, the (English) Football Association, it suffered two major and one minor defeat in five years and once weakened was over the next twenty years simply driven by and twice. And here is the somewhat hardball explanation, in part for which we thank our esteeemed colleagues in Sheffield. 

That pre-Association footballs world-wide were played is undoubted but the sources of our current game are British, note British not English. There was and still is throughout documented folk-football of the mob-mayhem kind. But we now also have in our own country what has been proven to be from at least 1627 the World's oldest, known field for more minimal and clearly organised, local, Sunday encounters. It is at Anwoth in Dumfries so unlikely ever to have been influenced by the on-field goings-on at Rugby, Eton, Harrow, Westminster etc. 

So what do we think happened and by whom to facilitate the first emergence of The Beautiful Game. The place was not the playing-fields of Eton or similar, even as the public schools, major and minor, codified their various games. It was Sheffield with the formation in 1857 from a cricket club of Sheffield F.C., essentially by Nathaniel Crestwick, locally-born, the son of a silver-plating manufacturer, himself a solicitor to trade, certainly middle-class, a gentleman even, but not public-school educated, and William Prest, York-born, Sheffield-raised, a wine-merchant and again not public-school, although one brother did go to Cambridge and two others were lawyers in London. Crestwick was twenty-six, Prest twenty-five. 

And Sheffield F.C. would be followed in 1860 by the formation of a second club in the city, Hallam F.C. by John (Charles) Shaw from Penistone, fifteen miles to the north, who would work as a lawyer's clerk and then legal stationer so was again middle-class and did go to an, albeit local, public-school. Penistone School played a variant of the Cambridge game.

Thus by 1863, when the meeting took place in London's Covent Garden that would see the formation of the Football Association and therefore the creation of the first iteration of Association game Sheffield's version was already up-and-running with the latter clearly taking an interest in the former. Sheffield maintain that a letter was even written from there to encourage what was a London minority to stay with the kicking-game and not follow the majority desire mainly to use the hands. Certainly, as the only obviously MPS, Charterhouse, its football first recorded in 1862, dropped away by the third meeting to re-join the manual advocates, Sheffield F.C. then made the effort to attend the subsequent, initial FA meetings and critically those in the years to follow, notably in the personage of Secretary and Treasurer, William Chesterman.

And then there are the FA founders themselves. First President was twenty-eight year-old Alfred Pember, a stockbroker, a "gentleman" but home-educated. Secretary was Ebenezer Morley. He was a thirty-two year-old rower and cricketer also a solicitor but had been born in and grown up in the North in Hull, arriving in London in 1853 and qualifying there in 1854. And Treasurer was James Turner, twenty-three, who worked as a wine-merchant and once more had not seen a public-school. Moreover, even when there was a changing of the guard in 1867 with Morley stepping up to the Presidency, the brief Secretary had been the again non-public-school, sherry importing son of a Scot, Robert Watson Willis, before his future brother-in-law, Robert Graham, aged just twenty-two, not only took on his role but that of money-man, both for three years. Graham too was a stockbroker and had actually attended footballing Cheltenham College, but for just eighteen months and with that school only codifying its own game in 1871.  

And thus it remained until 1870, so already seven years after foundation, at which point Morley remained in place but Graham was succeeded by Charles Alcock. Alcock himself had at twenty-four only joined the FA Committee in 1866, succeeding his elder brother, John. But here for the first time would there appear reference to a major public-school. Alcock would later write about his club:

"Just at that time (1859 on foundation of Forest Football Club) a happy thought occurred to two or three old Harrovians located in the north-east suburbs of London ... to carry on the game of football which they had just had to give up on leaving school."

But there was just yet a caveat. The Alcocks were again not Southerners. Whilst their boys were at Harrow the rest of what was not an upper-class but a genteel family was in the shipping-trade at home in the North, in Sunderland, and did not finally come south until the mid-1850s.

It is Charles Alcock, who has been credited with the creation, firstly, of the FA Cup and of the representative International. But there were precedents, both pointed out as being Sheffield. The first, competitive, knock-out trophy was the Youdan Cup, played for there by twelve teams in 1867. The initial FA Cup would have just three more but including Queen's Park from Scotland. And whilst the first representative match involving the London FA had been in 1866, it had followed on from one between Nottingham, played to its rules, and the Steel City in 1865. The London game was thus the second overall and moreover, whilst it was played in London, won by the capital and to the iteration of the FA rules adopted just six weeks earlier, it had been suggested by non-other than Sheffield's William Chesterman, who also captained and played as did Pember, Morley, Willis, Alcock and a certain Arthur Kinnaird of the Wanderers' club, said to be a newcomer to the game. In fact it can be argued that the year from the match in March 1866 to the FA Annual meeting in 1867, attended by only six clubs but also by Chesterman, was to be pivotal for the survival of an FA on the point of dissolution with Sheffield thus twice-over the catalyst for continuation, indeed salvation.        

Ebenezer Morley would remain at the head of the FA until 1874, when he was succeeded for the next decade and a half by the Royal Engineer's Francis Marindin, who before the Army had attended Eton. Alcock would remain Secretary until 1895 but in 1877 his role as Treasurer would be taken on by Arthur Kinnaird, a Diasporan Scot but also an Eton product. He had first joined the FA Committee in 1868, having been instrumental in the formation of Old Etonians (OE) in 1865-66 and/but with one important observation. OE had been the first of the major public-school teams specifically to take to the Association game. Old Harrovians, Old Carthusians and Old Wykehamists would significantly not be formed until 1876 and Old Westminster in 1880. In other words not only was off-field, public-school, i.e. upper-class, South English control of the Association game not in place before 1874-7, on-field those public-schools themselves did not take to it until the same, which was by then a decade after its middle-class creation, agreed to be in London, but with timely and crucial contributions from the North, specifically Sheffield.

And nor from the start of the new regime would it go well, despite internationally i.e. against Scotland, with in 1876 only two of the English Eleven having been MPS and just one from Oxbridge, those numbers to the obvious exclusion of others rising in 1877 to eight and five respectively. In 1872-3 the game had crossed the Border. By 1874 we "North British" were already drawing with or beating the Saxons and would do so, with one exception, for much of the next decade and a half. Moreover, whilst the number of clubs in both England and Scotland would expand, by 1874 the number of new formations in the latter was equal to and possibly already greater than the former and by 1876 the totals entered in the FA Cup had been already eclipsed by those in the Scottish Cup. 

Furthermore, by 1881 even without the now enigmatic Sheffield the total once more of clubs in the FA Cup from outwith Southern England had equalled those from within it with a clear gap then emerging and continuing to increase, soon bringing its own problems. Simply put the attitude to sport outwith Southern England was different to London and its surrounds. In the Midlands and the North Association football at club-level had rapidlt become a working-class game, which generated money; money that was one way or another being passed on beyond expenses to what were in all but name professional players. In 1883 Blackburn Olympics, led and coached by Sheffield-born shamateur, Jack Hunter, won the FA Cup beating amateur Old Etonians, Kinnnaird and all. No English, amateur side has ever figured in a final since, indeed the next Southern team, professional or amateur, to take the trophy would be in 1901 and even then in special circumstances.

The Southern responses were two-fold and both would fail one only just and the second miserably. The first was the creation of an elite team in an attempt to prove that the amateur toff could beat the professional labourer at both international and club-level. Corinthian F.C. was founded by the then FA Assistant Secretary in 1882 by when already seven of the English national team were from north of the Watford Gap and just one from an MPS. And in 1886 with nine of its members and four Oxbridge playing as England it achieved a draw against Scotland at Hampden. But there was never a win. That would come for the first time for a decade in 1888 with just four Corinthians and no Oxbridge in the team but eight from Midland and Northern clubs, with one of them a Scot, leading the line. This was as the second response had been in 1885 to try to ban paying to play but it had provoked such a back-lash that a North-South split was so imminent that the decision was taken by those in charge, albeit as a result now only nominally, to row back.  

It might then have been thought that the problems were solved but not so. The financing of still wider-spread professionalisation created their own pressure for the clubs and it just three years later was the major contributory factor to the formation in 1888, always remember by a Scot, of the Football League. And with that an FA for fifteen years under the control of something of an upper-class/upper middle-class, MPS kleptocracy had, shall we say, a more plebeian rival for control of the game that it could not resist then and has failed to do so ever since.      

But there had been and would be more. On the international scene there were now four home-nation Football Associations all originally playing to slightly different rules, which in 1882 had been by agreement standardised. But the English acceptance of professionalism in 1885 threw matters into the air once more. The Scottish game would not accept it for another eight seasons and initially objected to its still "amateur" national team playing a professional one, at which point the Belfast-based Irish FA stepped in. It effectively proposed what would in 1886 become the International Football Association Board, meeting annually to discuss problems of this nature and to change or create new rules and acceptances. Each of the four home nations would have equal voting rights. Scotland lost its professionalisation argument but England lost overall control, would lose still more influence when in 1904 it chose at first to ignore the foundation of FIFA, would do the same again when in 1919 it tried unsuccessfully to strong-arm that same but now expanded FIFA into the expulsion as a punishment for The Great War of Germany and Austria. 

And in the meantime back home the (English) FA would also lose direct and therefore effective control even of its amateur game, Oxbridge included. In 1906 the schismatic Amateur Football Defence Council, to be renamed the following year the Amateur Football Association, broke away from the FA and the two would not be reconciled until 1914 with in 1934 the notably mainly South England organisation becoming the Amateur Football Alliance and remaining to this day quasi-independent.