by fnnewz
As far as the food truck man is concerned, the land he occupies in Sheffield, England, is boring as hell. For him, the place—in the drab parking lot of a huge home-improvement superstore, its façade clad in lurid orange—isn’t exactly a place where history comes to life.
John Wilson, an academic at the University of Sheffield’s management school, looks at the same site and can barely contain his excitement. This, he said, is one of the places where the most popular sport in the world was born. He doesn’t see a parking lot. You can see the history: the green grass, the sweating players, the cheering crowds.
His passion is sincere, absolute and shared by a small group of amateur historians and volunteer detectives dedicated to restoring Sheffield, best known for steel, coal and as the setting for the film “The Full Monty”, to its rightful place as a place of indisputable birth. of codified, organized and recognizable football.
For now, their attempts have consisted of a walking tour of the city, conducted via a homemade app and some slightly worn license plates. But Dr Wilson and his compatriots have a bold vision of what their efforts could produce: a “digital museum” of Sheffield football history, a sculpture trail and, most of all, a clear and prestigious identity for a city that, in recent times, sometimes had a hard time defining itself.
However, when they seek to use the city’s past to shape its future, they have a “tendency to go off on tangents,” Dr. Wilson warned.
Is not wrong. On the half-hour walk to the parking lot, Dr. Wilson, 65, and two of his fellow enthusiasts, John Stocks, a 65-year-old author and retired English professor, and John Clarke, a 63-year-old retired computer engineer years. , addressed a variety of topics including, but not limited to, social migration patterns in Victorian England, the Netflix series “The English Game,” and the practice of covering walls with crozzle, a waste product from iron furnaces. .
They discussed each digression with joy, diving enthusiastically down each rabbit hole. Like many amateur enthusiasts, they delighted in the detail as much as the sweep.
However, the image they have in mind is clear.
“In the 1850s and 1860s, there were hundreds of teams that played each other in competitive games on fields throughout the city,” Stocks said. By studying Sheffield’s football legacy, he said, the past they have unearthed reveals the city to be “home to the first real football culture anywhere in the world”. They believe that this could also be the key to their future.
But the title “Home of Soccer” (always capitalized and, in flagrant disregard of New York Times style, never “soccer”) is disputed.
It applies semi-officially to Wembley, the stadium in the endless gray expanse of northwest London that is home to both the English national team and the Football Association, the game’s governing body in England.
Visit England, the country’s tourist board, is backing another contender. He describes Manchester as the “Home of Football”, arguing that it is home to two Premier League heavyweights and the National Football Museum. Manchester is also where the Football League, the sport’s first professional competition, was formed.
By comparison, Sheffield’s title bid is distinctly homegrown. There is a brief summary of the city’s role in the formation of the game on its tourist office’s website, and an archive is on display in the “local studies” section of the city library.
“We haven’t been very good at promoting ourselves,” said Richard Caborn, a former city lawmaker and sports minister during Tony Blair’s Labor government. “We’ve never really positioned ourselves to exploit it.”
Sheffield Home of Football, an educational charity set up by Dr Wilson and his fellow travellers, has filled that gap.
“We’ve gone through the history and we have the documentation,” Caborn said. “This is not a claim. “It’s evidence-based.”
Sheffield’s case is compelling. Sheffield FC, the oldest club in the world, was founded here. So was Hallam FC, the second oldest in the world. Hallam’s home, Sandygate, has hosted football since 1860, longer than anywhere else. It was also in Sheffield that the rules of the game that would become football were first written down.
Mr. Stocks and his fellow “obsessives” (as he puts it) get the most satisfaction from finding supporting evidence. It’s painstaking work, trawling through both digital and physical archives, but it’s worth it, he said.
“There are some of us who stay up all night chasing a lead they’ve found,” he said. “I’m not that bad, but I spend a lot of time on it. I have quite a few other projects that I’m supposed to get on with, but the reality is that most of the time I’m doing this.”
Thanks to their work, Sheffield can now, with a reasonable degree of confidence, claim to host world football’s first derby – the match between city rivals Sheffield FC and Hallam on the site of the store’s car park of home improvement), as well as the first corner kick, the first use of the crossbar and the first score of the match.
Stocks has also traced a suggestion that passes were invented in Sheffield, not Scotland, as is widely believed. There are stories of what sounds a lot like professionalism. “We think there is a possibility that the first German team was also founded here,” Dr. Wilson said.
Part of the excitement, they admit, is correcting some of the inaccuracies in what they call the “popular history” of football. Its driving force, however, is the sense that his discoveries may define not only what Sheffield was, but what it might still be.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Sheffield was hit hard by the decline of British heavy industry; Even more difficult than much of the rest of the north of England, Dr Wilson said.
Built on steel and coal, the city was run for years by a left-leaning council that was a cheerful thorn in the side of successive British governments. “They called it the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire,” he said. When factories and mines closed, Sheffield struggled for both investment and identity.
Sheffield’s various modern conceptions have not given rise to any new ones. As the backdrop to the film “Brassed Off” as well as “The Full Monty,” and home to Pulp and Arctic Monkeys, two of the most important British bands of the last quarter century, the city also developed a reputation for its advanced manufacturing. . It is where the world billiards championship is held every year.
However, nothing has ever been fully resolved. “The council is leaning pretty heavily toward music now,” Stocks said. “But it won’t stand. We are not Liverpool. We are not London. “We are not Glasgow.”
Football, however, is different. For him and others, Sheffield’s role in shaping the world’s most popular sport should be its calling card, its claim to fame, not necessarily to attract tourists, but so that it can find its place in the world, can define your sense of identity. be.
“Most people here are only vaguely aware of some of this,” Dr. Wilson said. “They don’t know that we have this unique identity, that this is something we gave to the world. No other city can say that.”
