How Football Began

"The origins of football’s many codes and their complex relationship to each other has been one of sporting history's great grey areas, dominated by hearsay and invention. No longer. Tony Collins’ cool and illuminating How Football Began brings range, precision and sources to bear on the matter. As is often the case, the truths that emerge are infinitely more interesting than the myths they dispel." - David Goldblatt, Author of The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football and The Game of Our Lives

"Collins takes a fascinating look at the history, development, branching, and codification of football in all of its forms around the world, particularly in the late 19th century … Because the connections between these sports has long been forgotten, Collins weaves a meticulous history of them devoid of myth and speculation. How Football Began charts today’s remarkable global reach and the spectacle of football in all of its forms. Summing Up: Highly recommended." - B. D. Singleton, California State University San Bernardino, CHOICE May 2019

“Collins cleverly untangles the spatial and temporal web of football’s socioeconomic history into a linear medium while also weaving together the perspectives of administrators and the press from archival records with secondary literature to build a map representing the “primordial soup” nature of early football.” - Katrina Cohen-Palacios, York University

"The book is also well-written and comprehensible and gives new insights both for people with practical experiences from football and for researchers, students and others without own experience from the sport itself. I therefore recommend this book to scholars and students of the beautiful game in sport history, sociology of sport, sport development, sport management, as well as for practitioners involved in football in all its forms. It is especially of great interest for readers interested in the early history of football. The book is not about football only, but about the society that created it, and I especially appreciate that women’s involvement in the various football codes is included, which seldom is found in football research." - Bente Ovedie Skogvang, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, idrottsforum.org