Football and the British Empire

Association football is the most popular sport on earth. The FIFA World Cup is watched by more people than any other event in human history; an estimated 3.5 billion watched at least part of the 2018 Russia tournament, and 1.5 billion watched the 2022 Qatar final. Yet the game the world now plays was codified in London in 1863, and it was carried to the four corners of the earth by the British Empire. The FA Cup final at Wembley in May 2024 — Manchester United v. Manchester City — was, in cultural terms, the latest episode of a story that began in the Freemasons’ Tavern, Great Queen Street, on 26 October 1863, when the eleven London and suburban clubs that founded the Football Association sat down to settle the rules of the dribbling game.

The Empire’s role in this story is double. The British invented the codified form of the game and they exported it, through the world’s largest free-movement regime of the nineteenth century, to every continent. But the Empire also lost control of the game almost as soon as it had exported it. By 1930, when FIFA staged the first World Cup in Montevideo, the British home nations had not entered; by 1950, when they finally did, the footballing centre of gravity had moved decisively to the south of the equator. Argentina had been playing since 1867, Brazil since 1894, Uruguay since 1880s. The game the world plays is a British invention. The game the world plays best is a South American one.

The Public Schools and the Codification of the Game

The association game was not invented in 1863; it was named. The dribbling game had been played in English public schools since at least the 1820s, and the 1848 Cambridge Rules — drafted at Trinity College, Cambridge — were the first systematic attempt to reduce the game’s many local variants to a single written code. The 1848 Rules survive in a single manuscript held at Magdalene College; they were the immediate ancestor of the FA’s 1863 Laws of the Game.

The public schools were the original laboratories. Rugby School gave its name to the carrying game; Eton, Harrow, Winchester, and Charterhouse produced variants of the dribbling game that were later reconciled in the FA Laws. The 1863 moment at the Freemasons’ Tavern was, in form, a public-school settlement: the eleven founding clubs were almost all metropolitan, the rules they agreed were an attempt to clean up a game that had been played for two generations in a near-anarchic profusion of local codes. The 1871 introduction of the FA Cup, the 1885 legalisation of professionalism, the 1884 foundation of the International Football Association Board — these were the institutional innovations that turned a London gentlemen’s game into a world sport.

The Export of Football

The export followed the British trade diaspora. The Calcutta Football Club was founded in 1872, four years before the Calcutta Cricket Club’s centenary, by British jute and tea men. The first recorded match in Australia was reportedly played in 1850 between the New South Wales garrison and Sydney residents. The Western Province Football Club in Cape Town was founded in 1869; the Buenos Aires Football Club, the first in South America, in 1867; the São Paulo Athletic Club in 1888. By the 1890s, as Brian Stoddart argued in Pioneers of Culture (2017), the British sporting diaspora was denser than the British administrative diaspora, and football was its principal currency.

The Indian case is the most striking. The Durand Cup, the Mohun Bagan tournament, and the IFA Shield (founded 1893) gave the Indian game an institutional structure by the 1890s. Mohun Bagan’s 1911 IFA Shield victory over a British regimental side — the first time an Indian club won the Shield — is, in Indian sporting memory, the equivalent of the 1932–33 Bodyline series or the 1983 Cricket World Cup: the moment the imperial game was reclaimed. The 1948 Olympic gold medal, won by the independent Indian team in London, was the political confirmation.

The African export was slower, and it was the most imperial in form. Football took root in the Gold Coast in the 1880s, in Nigeria through the Lagos Cricket Club and the Lagos Athletic Club, in Egypt through the British and European communities of Alexandria and Cairo. The South African Football Association was founded in 1892, the Egyptian FA in 1921, the Nigerian FA in 1933. The 1957 founding of the Confederation of African Football, and the 1957 African Cup of Nations, were the institutional moments of African football’s decolonisation.

The Foundation of FIFA and the British Absence

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association was founded in Paris on 21 May 1904, by the FFs of France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. The British home nations were conspicuously absent. England joined in 1905, Wales in 1910, Ireland in 1927; Scotland held out until 1946, four years after the Tartan Army’s famous 2–0 victory over England at Hampden in 1943. The British suspicion of FIFA was partly the suspicion of the French, partly the suspicion of the foreigner, and partly the structural disinterest of a football culture that had its own cup, its own league, its own home international championship, and its own network of clubs. The British invented the international cup competition. They did not want to enter one.

The British position on the World Cup was the position on FIFA in compressed form. The 1928 IFAB decision in principle to recognise a four-yearly world championship was the first step; the 1950 entry into the Brazil World Cup was the second. The British performance in 1950 was, in the British sporting memory, the nadir: Scotland lost 1–0 to the United States in a 1–0 result that the Daily Express failed to report; England lost 1–0 to the same opponents; both were eliminated in the first round. The 1966 World Cup, won at Wembley by England against West Germany 4–2, was the corrective; it was also, as the 1966 photograph of Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick and the bare-chested Wembley crowd makes clear, the imperial moment of British football.

The Decolonisation of the Game

The Empire’s grip on the international game loosened in three stages. The first was the 1950–1966 period, in which the South American and European nations (especially Hungary, then West Germany and Brazil) established their technical and tactical pre-eminence. The second was the 1970s, in which African football — buoyed by Pelé’s Santos touring the continent in 1967, by the 1970 African Nations Cup victory of the Sudan, and by George Weah, Roger Milla, and Abedi Pele — entered the world stage. The third was the 2000s, in which the global game’s economic centre of gravity moved decisively to the Premier League and the Champions League.

The 2026 World Cup, to be held in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with an expanded 48-team format, is the institutional expression of the post-imperial game: a fixture organised in three former settler colonies, with the imperial centre now reduced to one full member of a 48-team tournament. The 2022 Qatar World Cup, won by Argentina against France, was the first World Cup held in the Middle East; the 2010 South Africa World Cup was the first held in sub-Saharan Africa. The British Empire no longer plays. The football it exported still does.

The Empire’s Football Legacy

The most honest assessment of the Empire’s football legacy is, perhaps, Stoddart’s: the British invented the form, exported it with imperial confidence, and lost control of it within a generation. The football the world now plays is recognisably the football the FA codified in 1863 — the same pitch, the same laws, the same offside rule, the same penalty. But the cultural centre of the game, the technical innovation, the tactical imagination, and the political weight have all moved south and east. Brazil’s five World Cups, Argentina’s three, France’s two, Spain’s one, Germany’s four — and England’s one, in 1966 — are a rough chart of the global game.

The 2022 World Cup final, watched by 1.5 billion people, was, like the 1930 final, a game between Argentina and a former European imperial power. The British were not playing. The football was theirs.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of football and empire has been transformed, since the 1980s, by the work of Brian Stoddart (Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response, 1988; Pioneers of Culture, 2017), James Nauright (Sports, Cultures, and Societies, 2004), and the contributors to the Oxford Handbook of Sports History (2010). The earlier celebratory accounts — the centennial history of the FA (1963), the FIFA centennial history (2004) — have been supplemented, and in places supplanted, by the more critical accounts of the post-colonial generation. The unresolved question is the same one Stoddart posed: how to weigh the imperial invention against the global game it produced, and how to credit the colonial achievement without forgetting the imperial invention.

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