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In The First Half Of The Nineteenth Century Football Survived Mainly Within ...

In the first half of the nineteenth century football survived mainly within the upper class public schools and universities, where the codes that define the modern sports of association football and rugby football were first developed. By imposing rules and conventions on school sports that previously were perhaps no less disorderly than their street and village antecedents, reform-minded schoolmasters such as Sir Thomas Arnold of Rugby sought to inculcate qualities of discipline, courage and leadership among pupils. Slowly, as successive generations of pupils graduated from education into adult life, the popularity of sports such as football and rugby spread beyond the schools and universities, and clubs started to form. At a landmark meeting of representatives of a number of London and suburban clubs in October 1863, English football's present-day governing body, the Football Association (FA), was established (Walvin, 1994).
English football's two most durable and important club competitions both emerged soon afterwards. Fifteen clubs first contested the FA Cup during the winter of 18712. The Wanderers, a team comprising players who had attended the leading public schools and Oxford or Cambridge Universities, defeated the Royal Engineers in the first final, watched by 2,000 spectators. During the 1880s, football's geographical centre of power shifted away from the predominantly southern ex-public school and ex-university clubs, towards teams based in manufacturing towns and cities in the midlands and the north west. Enlightened factory owners and employers, many of whom were themselves graduates of the public school system, began to see the benefits for workplace morale and productivity of regular Saturday afternoon holidays, which created the opportunity for the development of organised forms of working-class leisure activity. The league finally achieved a membership of magnitude comparable to the combined strength of the present Premier League and Football League (92 teams) shortly after the First World War. In the 1921 season, 22 teams from the Southern League were added to the existing two-division membership (which had by then grown to 44 teams) to form the new Division 3 (South). In the 1922 season a new Division 3 (North) was created, initially comprising 20 teams, but with membership increased to 22 two seasons later.
At the macro level, a number of economists have argued that the attractiveness to spectators, and therefore the revenue-generating potential of any sports league, depends on the maintenance of a reasonable level of competitive balance.

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