Today in 1888, Aston Villa came to an anticlimactic 1-1 draw against Wolverhampton Wanderers as the Football League’s first season began. Eliot Wilson tells us more from his latest historical rabbit hole

Football may be, famously, the beautiful game, but it is also a very old one. So-called “mob football” was being played a thousand years ago in various forms across Europe, and while its riotous and chaotic nature makes the modern discipline appear almost stylised and ritualistic, it was from these antecedents that the rules of association football were distilled.

The formalisation of the sport

The Football Association, English football’s governing body, was founded in 1863 and its first secretary, a Yorkshire-born solicitor with the brilliantly High Victorian name of Ebenezer Cobb Morley, drew up the Laws of the Game which remain in force. It began as a game for gentlemen amateurs, but by the 1880s it was successful enough that, then as now, money swirled around it in tempting abundance. Some clubs began to attract players who were tantamount to professional footballers by discreet or loosely disguised payments, to the disdain of those who fiercely guarded the discipline’s amateur status.

There was also the eternal........

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