England’s Oldest Football Clubs: A chronological history of Association football told through the story of early football clubs.
To enable me to write these two books on Association football, I had to first analyse the thousands of English football clubs that were founded between 1857 and 1889, by researching the Football Annuals of that era. The ranking of all English Association Football Clubs from 1857 to 1889 (current and defunct) has never been done before because for you to find out that your team is, say, the 13th oldest in England and the oldest in your county has been impossible because, to do that, all the other thousands of football clubs have also to be assessed.
That full reclassification is now complete and the findings were too extensive for one volume so I started with my first book :
‘A History of Sheffield Football 1857-1889: Speed, Science and Bottom’ http://bit.ly/2qYw0r0
The second book is now available that covers all Association and Rugby football clubs from 1857 to 1889:
England’s Oldest Football Clubs 1815-1889 :A new chronological classification of early football (Folk, School, Military, County, Rugby, & Association)
I run a website called ‘Soccerbilia’ that specialises in vintage football newspapers, periodicals and magazines and they carry a rich contemporary story of how the game and clubs grew, giving a story of the game that has not been written before.
