The English Game

Note 1: This review contains spoilers. So do the Wikipedia pages and Google results of the characters involved. You have been warned.

Note 2: As with most historical dramas and biopics, some facts were modified for dramatic effect.

Personal rating: 7/10

Football fans around the world know all too well the pain of having the season hang in limbo as COVID-19 does a number on the planet. After all, as Darwen mill owner James Walsh says in the first episode, “Football feeds the soul when nothing else in their lives will do it.”

But just how much do us passionate supporters know about the origins of the game? In the 1870s, football was an amateur sport of the wealthy where graduates of a few elite colleges made up the realistic competition for the Football Association Challenge Cup (known today as the FA Cup). The board members of the Football Association were in fact players of these teams, who gave the sport a structure and rules, and also worked to ensure football remained ‘their game’. All in all, circumstances unrecognizable to the global phenomenon executed by professional athletes that it is today.

So, how did we get here?

Based on a true story, this historical drama miniseries set in late 19th century England covers the transition of football from a game for elite amateurs to a professional sport that paid players and everyone — working class and wealthy alike— delighted in witnessing. That, and a lot more.

This is a story about football, but also about the class divide, complicated family relationships, and the functioning of late 19th century England. As football evolves, so do the people responsible.

On seemingly opposite sides of the same coin lie the two characters around whom the narrative revolves. On one side is Fergus Suter, a footballer from Scotland who is drafted to join Darwen FC on a wage (against the rules at the time, which stated that no player should be paid to play football) along with his friend and teammate Jimmy Love. On the other is Arthur Kinnaird of the Old Etonians, regarded as football’s first star player and son of a wealthy banker.

While the central narrative follows the ‘signing’ of Suter and his friend Jimmy Love and their endeavour to become the first working class players to win the FA Cup, knocking Arthur and his pals off their perch is a gargantuan task — after all, the amateur elite not only formalized the game, but control it too. The working class has other things to worry about as well, such as back-breaking work leaving them too knackered to train and rest properly, and pay cuts by mill owners.

The men also have personal demons they must conquer. Fergus is committed to rescuing his mother and sisters from his abusive father and regards any consequence to further that end as mere collateral damage, while Arthur struggles to convince his father and wife that football isn’t a tarnish on his person. This means facing hard choices — Should Fergus leave Darwen FC to join Blackburn, a hated local rival, for enough money to rescue his family and a better chance at the FA Cup? Should Arthur risk long-time friendships and his relationship with his father to champion the working class and support his wife’s cause?

This isn’t football-laden storytelling (You’d certainly do well to watch The Damned United or Fever Pitch for something like that), which sometimes works against it as the series has a knack of exploring each subplot so deeply that you forget there’s a sport that needs changing. Or perhaps that’s the point — there are pressing demons to exorcise today, the game can wait (Sorry, Liverpool fans).

Eventually, Suter is able to cast away his dark past, grow attachment for the community that he has become a part of and put down roots, win the FA Cup for the working class and convince the elite that added competition can only be good for the sport. Kinnaird — thanks in no small part to football — is able to empathize with the common man’s struggles, puts his faith in working class businesses that would’ve never seen light of day otherwise and works to open up the game to the masses, acknowledging that formalizing the game does not give the wealthy ownership of the sport.

And thus came about the beginning of football as we know it today — Competitive, uplifting, and for everybody. That is how the Beautiful Game earned the adjective.