An interesting piece in the Financial times:
‘David Winner is my friend, even if he is sometimes irritating, and so I can't possibly say whether his new book about English football, Those Feet, is any good or not. This is not a review of the book, which will be published shortly by Bloomsbury, just a discussion of one of its obsessions: the humour of English football. England is not the best football nation on earth, but until recently it was the funniest.
‘English football was funny because it was suffused with grandiose, late-Victorian militarist rhetoric that it could never live up to. Football was about strength, manliness, purity, but Winner shows that the modern game was invented in Victorian public schools to keep boys from masturbating. He proves this beyond argument. The idea was that if boys were out on the field in teams expending energy, they could never be alone to engage in "self- pollution".
‘Winner notes that the personnel of football and the anti-masturbation movement overlapped. Lord Kinnaird, for instance, "perhaps the single most influential individual in the first 60 years of English football", was treasurer of the Central Vigilance Society for the Repression of Immorality. The White Cross League, a purity group that targeted the working class, was a strong early influence on Manchester City. The club, founded by a vicar in 1880, used to play in black shirts with a large white cross.’