Dave’s Football Blog

So this article by David Winner for the Times is about two years old, but I stumbled upon it last week, and because it delves right into the heart of modern football origins — and because it talks at length about masturbation — I had to share it with all of you. After all, this explains so much about why Association football discourages the use of hands…

OF ALL THE CLICHÉS ABOUT FOOTBALL, few insult the game’s founding principles more flagrantly than “the beautiful game”. Ruud Gullit’s idea that football should be “sexy” is even more preposterous. For the vigorous and visionary Victorians who invented the game, sexiness and beauty were the last things they wanted.

The game they created was rough and imbued with martial virtues. It was played by sturdy, lion-hearted men using heavy leather balls in thick, ankle-high boots in seas of mud. The Victorians preferred pluck and strength to sensuality and creativity. Their aim was to teach boys how to be “manly”.

Yes, this is soccer he’s talking about, people. This was the football game that would make a man out of you. It’s hard to imagine soccer, the football code that allows for the least physical contact between players, as a rough-and-tumble game that 19th-century Victorians used to stamp out any form of “effeminacy” in their boys — and by “effeminacy,” we mean wanking…

(In the 1860s,) Moralists gave warning that the nation was on the eve of an “age of voluptuousness and reckless immorality”. Because sex was considered beastly, Englishmen were continually urged to “master the beast”, as if their bodies were like the wild animals of Africa.

And these people still managed to procreate? It’s a wonder football even exists, doesn’t it?

There were plenty of sexual terrors to choose from: prostitution, syphilis, the (non-existent) “white slave trade” and homosexuality were all feared as great moral and social evils.

Shhhh! Don’t tell Wayne Rooney…

Strangely, what worried the late Victorians most was masturbation, which was imagined to be a mental sickness that maimed and killed and was seen as a mortal threat to nation and empire. Stamping out “self-abuse” thus became one of the central obsessions of the age. It was also a crucial factor in the birth of football. The idea was that if sport could keep boys busy and healthy, a range of sexual and social problems would melt away and Britain would become a land of the chaste, pure and noble-minded.

However, if you touched that ball with your hands, you were a wanker, and thus, you were no longer chaste and pure like every real man should be. (This means you, Brady Quinn.)

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. Even the eventual split between soccer and rugby stemmed from (what else?) an argument about masculinity.

When the game split into rival codes (rugby and association) over the legality of “hacking” (shin-kicking), both sides deployed arguments about “ manliness”. (J.C.) Thring claimed that hacking was unmanly and that football was rough enough to do without it. The representative of the Blackheath club, voicing a prejudice against supposedly highly-sexed foreigners that would last for more than a century, claimed that banning hacking would so emasculate the game that even Frenchmen would be able to play it.

Heavens! Frenchmen playing football? How utterly shocking!

Yet somehow, the giant bundle of Victorian-era sexual neuroses that was Association football still became the world’s most popular football game. Perhaps the fact that Great Britain had a world-spanning empire had something to do with that. Still, I would love to see the reaction of some of those old Victorians to the modern game, especially now that the good people of Brazil injected a little South American sensuality into it and transformed it into jogo bonito. Can you imagine those paragons of perceived virtue in attendance at, say, the Beach Soccer World Cup today? It might be the most entertaining speechlessness in recorded history.

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