Historical Change: The Influence Of Football On Society

“The Beautiful Game” -more commonly known as, soccer, football, or futbol- is the world’s largest sport. Almost 300 million people around the world play soccer, and the amount of people who watch the sport worldwide is even more astonishing (Muller). With it being the most popular sport, it happens to be the national sport of over 60 different countries and is played by 200 different countries (Muller). There was obviously a great amount of influence this sport had on people who made it get so big. The spread of football as well as the unification it brought to people was also very dramatic. Football specialists believe that modern football was born in England and the game gained popularity from there, however, the true art of kicking a ball

But how can the birth of modern sport been seen as a part of a wider process of historical change? England, which is where the sport developed and thrived is a prime example of how football can be seen as a wider process of historical change. Through the beautiful game, there have been many signs of unification and how the game has brought historical change to the land. “There has been a preference for working on the structure and culture of working-class sport, which derives from the wider Marxist-influenced traditions of social history associated with such figures as Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm. This working-class bias led to greater concentration on the northern industrial towns of England than on the south, especially London, which has been surprisingly neglected. Alongside professional football and speculation over the extent to which soccer teams became symbols of new kinds of urban community, the valuable research of Tony Collins and others has explained how the game of rugby was divided along class lines.” (Dietschy, 85). Football has brought neglected towns wealth and flourishment with the introduction of clubs and organizations from football. Also, “class is undeniably a powerful theme in European sport and finding a sensitive way to use it to cross national boundaries would be a major contribution,” so using

Industrialization was at a peak when football was gaining a lot of popularity by the average person. This was a time where in late-Victorian England that industrialization was taking place and a new group of workers that were provided jobs from it were creating their own culture of football (Kitching, 601). While on breaks or just after their work day, groups of working men would gather to play football, unifying the working class with a new interest and hobby. Along with the working and lower class, the upper class now had a new commodity to spend their money on: football teams and organizations (Baker, 241). This would later become the biggest subject in England as many people invested millions of dollars into the founding of football clubs, recruiting players, building stadiums, etc. This was all possible due to industrialization in England, making rich people even richer to create clubs, and the poor people talent to get into these clubs with a new