Page:Football, The Association Game.djvu/15

 CHAPTER I.

treatise on latter-day football would be incomplete without a sketch of the events which led to the formation of the Football Association. The modern revival of football, indeed, practically dates from the inception of that organization, the largest of the many societies which now direct the forces of football. The institution of the Association, as a matter of fact, marked the first attempt to bring the many different sects into which football players were then divided under the control of one central body. Forty years ago there was little or no football outside the public schools. In some of them it still lingered, the survival, in a modified form of course, of the rough and semi-barbarous sport of the last century. Even in the majority of these, though, it only occupied a comparatively inferior position, regarded merely as a part of the curriculum of physical training. An occasional visit of a team of Old Boys would arouse a little excitement, but only of a transient character, and with the arrival of spring the schoolboy's fancy would lightly turn to thought of other games. What was worse,