In the last few years there have been a concerted attempt by the North of England, mostly coming from Sheffield, to claim ruled-based, organised and inter-club football as its own and to do the same for the association football. In part it has been a justified reaction to the long-term gaslighting by London based on the myth that football in all its iteration, but soccer in particular, has been the product of the Public School. It was not. Football, based on understandings of rules but not standardised written ones, had existed in several forms in several locations in all layers of society but certainly from 1824 with Edinburgh's Foot-ball Club and over the next half century or so that would change. Rugby School for its in-house game did so in 1845. Rugby Union would finally begin to so in 1886 and Rugby League from 1895., whilst the date for round-ball football had been 1857.

And its had taken place in Sheffield to be followed three years later the first inter-club games. But there is a caveat. It was not Association football, not the game we call our own. It and as a London creation did not exist even in its earliest form until 1863. That is hard fact and, despite Sheffield giving it both succour from it inception, support without which the Beautiful Game might not exist today, Sheffield and London FA were not synonymous. For Sheffield it seems to have been and seems still to be a hard pill to swallow, producing much argument on a pin-head. And at the time from 1877 when it was first mooted that the Yorkshire rules would be subsumed into the London ones it took the best part of a decade until acceptance.

And that hesitation proved fatal. The first professional footballer was probably Sheffield's Jack Hunter. But he did not become a professional Association footballer by moving to across the Pennines to Blackburn Olympic until a decade later in 1882. The second and third professional footballers were James Lang and Peter Andrews, both Scots. You can take your pick as to which went South first and to where. But they both ended up, having played only Association football in Scotland, in Sheffield and thus changing code. And that means that the first professional Association footballer were likely Jimmy Love and Fergus Suter, also two Scots, and they went not east of but west, to Darwen in Lancashire. And in doing so they both a reaction to and sign of a phenomenon that a decade later would see the foundation of the Football League, but one without a single Sheffield team in it.

So what had happened to cause this complete change of polarity? And the truth is that it is on the face of it very difficult to tell. Both were developing regions of new industry, with probably Sheffield the more established and advanced and therefore the more wealthy. Yet that might be the clue. Sheffield and Glasgow would begin inter-city matches early. The first was in 1874. But there does not seem to have been a movement of personnel, of people from the White Rose county in the same way as to the Red. One reason may have been simply West with West and therefore stronger cultural links, another that the industries of the latter were shared by Glasgow and near-Glasgow, something that was not then the case with the Steel City. The former might explain the arrival of Anglo-Welshman and mining engineer Tommy Britten at Parkgrove by 1878. and even that of James Gledhill with his Scottish-born mother shortly after. The later might do the same for