The Emergence and Development of Association Football: Influential Sociocultural Factors in Victorian Birmingham

This article explores the interdependent, complex sociocultural factors that facilitated the emergence and diffusion of football in Birmingham. The focus is the development of football in the city, against the backdrop of the numerous social changes in Victorian Birmingham. The aim is to fill a gap in the existing literature which seemingly overlooked Birmingham as a significant footballing centre, and the ‘ordinary and everyday’ aspects of the game’s early progression. Among other aspects, particular heed is paid to the working classes’ involvement in football, as previous literature has often focused on the middle classes and their influence on and participation in organized sport. As the agency of the working classes along with their mass participation and central role in the game’s development is unfolded, it is argued that far from being passive cultural beings, the working classes, from the beginnings, actively negotiated the development of their own emergent football culture

Sporting Metaphors and New Marathons: The Vitality of the Victorian Middle-Class Legacy

Influence des activités de plein air de la classe moyenne Victorienne dans l'évolution actuelle de certaines pratiques aux Etats-Unis (marathon astronomique) prouvée par l'emploi du langage sportif à ces activités de loisirs

Behind the Blazer - British middle-class sporting ethics in the twentieth century

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Stoolball: Conflicting values in the revivals of a traditional Sussex game

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An outbreak of Allodoxia: The musical amateur and middle class musical taste between the wars

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Empiricism, theoretical concepts and the development of the British golf club before 1914

Golf took the concept of the club from traditional voluntary organizations along with the ideas of committee structures, mechanisms for ensuring exclusivity and a place, both geographically and socially, for communal conviviality. It became one of the fastest growing recreational activities of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain and the first participant sport to expend and invest large sums of money. By means of a model constructed around the development of the British golf club before 1914, this paper offers a new approach to examining the history of associativity in sport. It uses five concepts of capital – physical, financial, cultural, social, and human – and argues that their formation in the context of club development should not be explored in isolation of each other