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'A gentleman's game played by Gentlemen': The FA cup, amateur and professional footballers in Victorian England

Mike Freeman

Sporting Traditions2017article
ABDC C
Weight
0.26

What the paper says

A commonly held view is that football is 'a gentleman's game played by ruffians', a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde. An analysis of the early Football Association (FA) Cup winning teams shows this view to be incorrect. This paper examines the Oxford University team that won the FA Cup in 1874, and a member of that team, Reverend A. H. Johnson. Johnson was a typical sporting gentleman amateur of the Victorian era, excelling at several sports, educated at public school and Oxbridge. Gentleman amateur teams dominated the first ten years of the FA Cup competition, but the growth of professional teams in northern England resulted in the demise of the amateur team's dominance. This paper also examines the transition to the recognition of professionalism by the FA and the eventual establishment of the Football League. New evidence shows the financial and geographical factors that assisted the dominance of the gentleman amateur teams in the first ten seasons of the FA Cup, before northern teams assumed supremacy.

Cite this paper

@article{mike2017,
  title        = {{'A gentleman's game played by Gentlemen': The FA cup, amateur and professional footballers in Victorian England}},
  author       = {Mike Freeman},
  journal      = {Sporting Traditions},
  year         = {2017},
}

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'A gentleman's game played by Gentlemen': The FA cup, amateur and professional footballers in Victorian England

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Evidence weight

0.26

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.00 × 0.4 = 0.00
M · momentum0.20 × 0.15 = 0.03
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.