Circa 1680, an early version of football (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Today in 1888, Aston Villa came to an anticlimactic 1-1 draw against Wolverhampton Wanderers as the Football League’s first season began. Eliot Wilson tells us more from his latest historical rabbit hole

Football may be, famously, the beautiful game, but it is also a very old one. So-called “mob football” was being played a thousand years ago in various forms across Europe, and while its riotous and chaotic nature makes the modern discipline appear almost stylised and ritualistic, it was from these antecedents that the rules of association football were distilled.

The formalisation of the sport

The Football Association , English football’s governing body, was founded in 1863 and its first secretary, a Yo

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