In March 321 AD, the converted Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine, declared: “On the day of the Sun let the people rest.” His demand that people take the day off would, for billions of us, define the nature of Sundays.
In 1888 in Birmingham, a draper named William McGregor did the same thing for Saturdays, by inventing the Football League.
“I beg to tender the following suggestion […] that 10 or 12 of the most prominent clubs in England combine to arrange home-and-away fixtures each season,” McGregor, who was also an administrator at Aston Villa Football Club, wrote. With those words, McGregor turned football from a disorganised cult into, essentially, the secular religion of modern Britain.
Like many of the true giants of English football history, McGregor was Scottish. Originally from Perthshire, he had moved to Birmingham to improve his business prospects, and, inspired by his brother Peter, set up a drapery. He had happened to get involved with running Aston Villa, who were based near his shop, almost as a hobby. He enjoyed it very much – even occasionally helping out as a stand-in goalkeeper during training.
But he also took it seriously, and he knew that, like the rest of the top teams of the era, Villa had a problem. Interest in football had been growing to the extent that in 1885 clubs had been allowed to turn professional, and so were now expected to pay players regularly. The problem was teams were running out of money.
At the time, football was an organisational mess. Most matches were friendly, and, as we all know from our own WhatsApp groups, any loosely arranged meet-up is vulnerable to all sorts of cancellation pressures. Often leaving it to the last morning, teams would pull out of games for a host of reasons. Even if they did turn up, there was no promise they would play their best side, which would be rather dispiriting for the casual spectator who had maybe heard of the Victorian equivalent of Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé and got only a substitute tosher from Oldham instead.
All this conspired, naturally, to put the crowds off, as did the fact that, save from the FA Cup, there was no narrative to a football season – nothing for supporters to hope for from one week to the next. McGregor realised that, if Villa and others were to keep paying their players, they needed regular, guaranteed gate receipts. And to get them, the fans needed a reason to come back game after game. That reason would be the league.
And so McGregor’s letter was warmly received. He suggested the first meeting to discuss it for 23 March, 1888, and astonishingly, less than six months later, Kenny Davenport of Bolton Wanderers was scoring the first goal in the first season of the new Football League, the first of its kind anywhere in the world.
It was utterly revolutionary. Scotland followed with its own league two years later. At a time when growth in incomes, leisure time and railways had meant any number of sports could have become Britain’s national game, McGregor’s invention ensured it was football that won out.
Why was it so successful? Cleverly, McGregor had ensured it was written into the rules that all teams had to field full-strength sides – although he perhaps never envisaged a club going as far as Manchester City and playing a side so strong they could not actually assemble it within the rules (though the club strongly maintain they have not broken any rules).
McGregor’s stricture meant clubs needed to invest in training, talent-spotting and transfers – giving all sorts of side narratives fans (and newspapers) could follow. It also meant there could be no foregone conclusions, no dead games the supporters could just choose not to bother with. When there had been just the FA Cup, defeat in one game meant the season was up til next year. Now it did not.
Essentially, the first season of the Football League was 12 season-long interweaving narratives. Before long there would be a second division, adding the excitement of promotion and relegation to the drama. Ultimately, the league would expand until there were 92 clubs across its divisions and countless thousands in the pyramid beneath.
You can literally see the legacy of all this from space, in the stands and stadia that sprang up to accommodate the burgeoning interest. Suddenly transformed by the Football League into businesses, clubs took their earnings and began to invest in their grounds. These grounds became new cathedrals for weekly devotion.
At the same time, chairmen were notoriously parsimonious with the amount they paid players. And the difference went back into the stadiums in a virtuous circle: a bigger ground meant more crowds, which meant more money, which could pay for an even bigger ground. McGregor’s own Villa Park – where a bronze statue of him now stands – would eventually end up with the Holte End, which alone could hold over 30,000 people. The club’s plans before the First World War were even more ambitious, with a stadium planned that could hold 104,000.
In his poem “Mr Bleaney”, Philip Larkin refers to how the eponymous everyman “kept on plugging at the four aways” – the league fixtures as the skipped beat of the heart of British life. Over time, league football meant clubs became far more of an essential part of the identity of millions of us than they ever would have been otherwise.
It’s there even before we’re born – picture Smithy and Dave Coaches arguing in Gavin and Stacey over whether baby Neil will support Cardiff or West Ham. Then through bibs that say things like “Tottenham’s Best Dribbler”, arguments with school friends, chats with work mates on a Monday: “I saw your boys took a bit of a hammering”.
And then right through to the other end of life. When my grandad was in a care home, struggling in the swaddles of dementia, he may not always have known who I was when I visited. But he did always want to know about, and talk about, how his beloved Chesterfield FC had done in their most recent game. And I know that this is not a unique experience to me.
The creation of the League resulted in an folding script from 1888 to now, captured in the pages of the Green ‘Un, the Vidiprinter, page 303 of Ceefax – even this very website. And the first line of that script reads: “Based on an Idea by William McGregor, of number 9 Witton Road, Birmingham.”