The English Game (2020) by Wr. Julian Fellows (review)

When Blackburn Olympic reached the finals of the 1883 FA Cup against the Old Etonians, it signified the class warfare that dominated the game in the early years of its codification. Blackburn was a working-class team from the northern county of Lancashire. A team made up of cotton weavers, spinners, machine operatives, plumbers, and a dental assistant, Blackburn represented the oncoming of a new, and professional, age of soccer. In the southern part of the country, in London, the Old Etonians represented the ruling elite. A team of professors, politicians, clergy, and lawyers, the Old Etonians helped codify a once disorderly game into a sport of rules constituted by an ethic of amateurism. At the end of regulation time, the game was tied 1–1. Blackburn suggested they play extra-time rather than a replay because of the costs of their travel. Old Etonians agreed, but to their dismay, Blackburn scored the winning goal and became the first working-class team to win the FA Cup.¹

Fergus Suter, popularly known as being one of the first professional footballers in the world, did not play in this game. Instead, he was probably back in Blackburn with his other teammates from Blackburn Rovers, the local rivals of Blackburn Olympic.

In the new Netflix six-part drama The English Game, creator Julian Fellowes recounts the birth of professional football through a historically fictionalized account of the career of Fergus Suter. In the series, Suter plays, incorrectly, for Blackburn Olympic, alongside the likes of Jack Hunter, an English international, who actually played in the 1883 FA Cup with Olympic. Aside from this collapse of historical specificity, The English Game does a fine job exploring the dynamics of early English football, including the radical labor struggles, debates about professionalism and amateurism, stylistic and tactical disputes, and the construction and contestation of gender norms.

The first episode situates the audience in 1879 Darwen, England, a northern cotton-mill town in the county of Lancashire. By this time, football had developed into a bastion of amateurism and elitism on the one hand yet had gained increasing popularity among working-class communities as a legitimate form of professionalism on the other. In the opening scenes, we are introduced to James Walsh, the owner of Darwen's cotton mill and the Darwen Football Club, of which many players work at the mill as weavers. Darwen was a tight-knit town, and the football team and the mill were the two institutions that represented the working-class ethic of the local community. Throughout the episode, this sense of community is complicated when Walsh offers Fergus Suter and his teammate from Partick FC, Jimmy Love, professional contracts as a means to bolster their roster before the team's first-ever quarterfinals in the FA Cup against the Old Etonians. Not only are some of the Darwen players suspicious of Suter, Love, and Walsh, but so are the members of the board of the Football Association (FA), namely, Francis Marindin, Alfred Lyttleton, and to a lesser extent, Arthur Kinnaird—all of whom the show depicts as teammates on the Old Etonians. When the two clubs meet in the quarterfinals, Darwen's newest additions, Suter and Love, help the team tie the Old Etonians. Following the match, Darwen wants to play extra time to determine the winner, but the Old Etonians refuse and force Darwen to play in a rematch in London. Darwen is outraged and tries to forgo the rematch because of the financial burden it will cost to travel from Lancashire, but the Old Etonians hold firm.

During the series, Darwen's nightmares become a reality when the global and local conditions surrounding the cotton market affects Walsh's mill. In a meeting among an elite orbit of bankers, football administrators, and the Cotton Masters' Club—a group of cotton-mill owners-members decide to cut workers' wages by 5 percent to save money in the midst of the declining cotton market. This decision jeopardizes...