How so? Because late-Victorian Britain was supremely self-confident, outward
looking and determined to proselytize its own virtues. So wherever the sons of
Empire and imperial commerce went, football went with them-a way both of main-
taining their own standards of fair play in a foreign clime, and of inculcating
them in those unfortunate enough to have been born in less happy lands than Al-
bion. In Italy, the game took root in ports such as Livorno and Genoa where the
English were frequent visitors; in Latin America, it followed British merchants
and railway builders to Argentina, Brazil and Maxico. In the colonies, imperial
civil servants such as J.George Scott, in Burma, used the games of the perfect
sphere to stiffen the backbone of villagers who (if only they knew it) had been
waiting for the manifold blessings of Victorian British society (see Burma box)
.The British even took the game to the nation that, in conventional wisdom, was
long thought to have been immune to its charms. The enormous, forgotten British
migration to the U.S. after the American Civil War meant that football traveled
across the North Atlantic,too. By the 1890s, so many Lancashire textile workers
had settled in Fall River, Massachusetts,that games there routinely drew crowds
in the thousands.
The friends and families that those Lancastrians left behind, meanwhile, were
making their own contribution to football's development. The game's first orga-
nizers may have come from the few schools that educated the Victorian upper cl-
ass, but they were soon overtaken. In 1885, the Football Association legalized
payments to players, and three years later, the world's first professional foo-
tball league was founded, all of its first 12 teams drawn from towns in the in-
dustrial northwest and midlands of England. Within a few years, enormous crowds
were turning out to watch games. As Rogan Taylor, director of the Football ind-
ustry Group at the University of Liverpool, puts it:"The rules were written by
a bunch of guys whose fathers had run the biggest empire the world has ever se-
en,and then they were mugged by the working class of Lancashire. Suddenly there
were 50,000 people at a football match for the sole purpose of hating their ne-
ighbors, smoking fags, betting on it, and getting down five pints of ale before
and after."
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