The globally recognised game of football with it’s billions of revenue has very humble beginnings. The game itself has been played in one form or another for centuries but by the mid 19th century a professional game began to emerge.
The problem was that there was no organisation to coordinate matches and an ostensibly amateur game was being infiltrated by paid professionals in an attempt to help their club’s results. Resentment was growing between those clubs continuing to carry on an amateur game and those seeking to put it on a professional commercial footing.
So it was, on 2nd March 1888, that a director of Aston Villa, William McGregor, wrote to 5 other clubs proposing the creation of a league competition that would provide each member club with a season of guaranteed fixtures for the future. A meeting was held on 23rd March by the clubs in London, on the eve of the FA Cup final, to discuss the proposal. The Football League was formally created on 17th April with 12 founding members.
The Football League continued to grow by the addition of divisions and by a process of promotion and relegation it was possible to rise from the 4th division to the 1st division (the opposite was true for unfortunate less able teams). By the 1991/92 season there were 92 teams playing across the 4 divisions. At the end of that season the 22 clubs of the first division formed a breakaway league called the English Premier league (today 20 clubs play at this level) and it is this league that is televised around the world today.
As football today plays such a large part in people’s everyday life, why not include a little football accessory in your dolls house? We have a pattern available for a knitted 1:12th scale football supporters set, which includes the jumper, scarf and hat shown at the top of this page.