English city wants to be recognized as the birthplace of football – 02/16/2024 – Sport

As far as the food truck man is concerned, the patch of land he occupies in Sheffield, England, is as dull as it sounds. For him, the location – in the parking lot of a large building materials store, with the facade plastered in a sinister orange – is not exactly a place where history comes to life.

John Wilson, an academic at the University of Sheffield’s business school, looks at the same spot and can barely contain his excitement. This, he said, is one of the places where the world’s most popular sport was born. He doesn’t see a parking lot. He can see the story: the lush green grass, the sweaty players, the cheering crowd.

His passion is sincere, absolute and shared by a small group of amateur historians and volunteer detectives dedicated to restoring Sheffield – best known for steel, coal and as the setting of the film “The Full Monty” – to its rightful place as the undisputed birthplace of codified, organized and recognizable football.

For now, his attempts have included a walking tour of the city and some slightly weathered signs. But Wilson and his compatriots have a bold vision of what their efforts could produce: a “digital museum” of Sheffield’s football history, a sculpture trail and, most of all, a clear and prestigious identity for a city that has, in recent times, struggled a bit to define itself.

But as they seek to use the city’s past to shape its future, they have, Wilson warned, a certain “tendency to go off on tangents.”

He’s not wrong. On the half-hour walk to the parking lot, Wilson, 65, and two of his fellow enthusiasts, John Stocks, a 65-year-old retired English teacher and writer, and John Clarke, a 63-year-old retired computer engineer, were thrilled to hear talk about a range of topics that included patterns of social migration in Victorian England, the Netflix series “The English Game” and the practice of covering walls with crozzle, a residue from iron furnaces.

They discussed each digression with glee, eagerly diving down each rabbit hole. Like many ardent enthusiasts, they reveled in the details as much as the scanning.

The image they have in mind, however, is clear.

“In the 1850s and 60s, there were hundreds of teams playing each other in competitive games, on fields all over the city,” Stocks said. By studying Sheffield’s football legacy, he said, the past they unearthed reveals the city as “home to the first true football culture anywhere in the world”. This, they believe, could also be the key to their future.

But the title “Home of Football” – always capitalized and never “soccer” – is contested.

It is applied semi-officially to Wembley, the stadium in the endless gray expanse of northwest London that is home to the England national team and the Football Association, the sport’s governing body in England.

“Visit England”, the country’s tourism board, supports another candidate. It describes Manchester as the “Home of Football”, claiming it is home to two Premier League heavyweights and the National Football Museum. Manchester is also where the Football League — the sport’s first professional competition — was formed.

By comparison, Sheffield’s title bid is clearly homely. There’s a brief summary of the city’s role in shaping the game on its tourism board’s website, and an archive is on display in the “local studies” section of the city library.

“We haven’t been very good at promoting ourselves,” said Richard Caborn, a former city lawmaker and sports minister in Tony Blair’s Labor government. “We never really positioned ourselves to explore it.”

The Sheffield Home of Football, an educational charity set up by Wilson and his traveling companions, filled that void.

“We looked at the history and we have the documentation,” Caborn said. “This is not a claim. It is based on evidence.”

Sheffield’s case is compelling. Sheffield FC, the oldest club in the world, was founded here. The same happened with Hallam FC, the second oldest in the world. Hallam’s home, Sandygate, has hosted football since 1860, longer than any other venue. It was also in Sheffield that the rules of the game that would become football were first written.

Stocks and his “obsessive” colleagues — his word — derive the greatest satisfaction from finding supporting evidence. It’s hard work, sifting through digital and physical archives, but it’s worth it, he said.

“Some of us will stay up all night chasing a lead we found,” he said. “I’m not that bad, but I put a lot of time into it. I have some other projects I should be doing, but the reality is, for the most part, I’m doing this.”

Because of his work, Sheffield can now, with a reasonable degree of confidence, lay claim to being the site of world football’s first derby, the meeting of city rivals Sheffield FC and Hallam on the site of the building materials store car park, as well such as the first corner, the first use of the post and the first match report.

Stocks also traced the suggestion that the pass was invented in Sheffield – and not in Scotland, as is commonly believed. There are reports of what looks a lot like professionalism. “We think there’s a chance the first German team was founded here too,” Wilson said.

Part of the excitement, they admit, is correcting some inaccuracies in what they call the “popular history” of football. His driving force, however, is the feeling that his discoveries could define not just what Sheffield was, but what it could still be.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Sheffield was hit hard by the decline of British heavy industries; even tougher than much of the rest of northern England, Wilson said.

Built on steel and coal, the city was run for years by a left-leaning council that was a thorn in the side of successive British governments. “They called it the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire,” he said. As factories and mines closed, Sheffield struggled for both investment and identity.

Sheffield’s various modern conceptions have not produced a new one. The setting of the film “Brassed Off” as well as “The Full Monty”, and home to Pulp and the Arctic Monkeys, two of the defining British bands of the last quarter century, the city has also developed a reputation for advanced manufacturing. It is where, every year, the world snooker championship takes place.

Nothing, however, was ever resolved. “The board is leaning heavily on music right now,” Stocks said. “But it won’t catch on. We’re not Liverpool. We’re not London. We’re not Glasgow.”

Football, however, is different. For him and others, Sheffield’s role in shaping the world’s most popular sport should be its calling card, its claim to fame, not necessarily to attract tourists, but so that it can find its place in the world. can define your meaning in life.

“Most people here are only vaguely aware of it,” Wilson said. “They don’t know that we have this unique identity, that this is something we gave to the world. No other city can say that.”