Ebook: How football began: a global history of how the world's football codes were born

Introduction -- 1. The failure of the Football Association -- 2. Before the beginning: folk football -- 3. The gentleman's game -- 4. Sheffield: football beyond the metropolis -- 5. The end of the universal game -- 6. From the classes to the masses -- 7. Glasgow: football capital of the nineteenth century -- 8. The coming of professionalism -- 9. Kicking against the pricks: women and football -- 10. Rugby football: a house divided -- 11. Melbourne: a city and its football -- 12. Australian rules and the invention of football traditions -- 13. Ireland: creating Gaelic football -- 14. Football and nationalism in Ireland and beyond -- 15. American football: the old game in the New World -- 16. Canadian football: between scrum and snapback -- 17. Rugby League football: from people's game to proletarian sport -- 18. The 1905-07 football crisis in North America -- 19. The 1905-07 football crisis in world rugby -- 20. Soccer: the modern game for the modern world -- 21. The global game.;"This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world. The book explores how the world's football codes - soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic - developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses."--Publisher's description.