In the last few years there have been a concerted attempt by the North of England, mostly coming from Sheffield, to claim all ruled-based, organised and inter-club round-ball football as its own. It is, of course, not true but in part it can be justified as a reaction to long-term, London-based gaslighting by means of the myth that football in all its iterations, but soccer in particular, has been the product of the English, mainly Southern English Public School. It was not. Football, based on understandings of rules, had in no doubt several forms in several locations in all layers of society but certainly from 1824 with Edinburgh's Foot-ball Club standardised written ones are known to exist. Then Rugby School for its in-house game codified in 1845 although Rugby Union would only finally begin to do so in 1886, Cambridge's rules stem from initially 1848, with more Public Schools putting pen to paper at various stages over the next decades. This whilst the date for the round-ball is 1857.

And it, the putting to paper of round-ball Rules, had taken place in Sheffield to be followed three years later the first inter-club games. But there is a caveat. Whilst it was round-ball it was not Association football; not the game we now 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 its inception, support without which the Beautiful Game might not exist today, the Sheffield- and London FA-games are not synonymous.

For Sheffield that seems still to be a hard pill to swallow, today producing much pin-head dispute. Even then it would be problematic. From 1877 when it was first mooted that the Yorkshire rules would be subsumed into the London ones, and it would be that way round, although there is still argument to the contrary, it took the best part of a decade of resistance until acceptance. And that resistance proved almost fatal. The first professional, round-ball footballer was probably Sheffield's Jack Hunter. But he did not become a professional, Association footballer until a decade later in 1882 by moving, and very successfully, across the Pennines to Blackburn Olympic. The second and third were James Lang and Peter Andrews, each a Scot. 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 "amateur" Scotland, also in Sheffield and thus changing code. And that means that the first professional Association footballers were likely Jimmy Love and Fergus Suter, also two Scots, and they went not east of but west, to Darwen in Lancashire and perhaps just earliest of all, Archie Hunter i Birmingham at Aston Villa. And in doing so they were all 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 itself might be the clue. Sheffield and Glasgow would begin inter-city matches early. The first was in 1874. Lang and Andrews would in 1876 both be head-hunted, North to South, from these encounters. But there does not seem to have been any similar movement of personnel from the White Rose county to the Red Rose one or vice versa until Jack Hunter a half dozen seasons later and by when Scottish players were heading, particular to North East Lancashire, if not exactly in a flood, then in numbers.

One reason may have been simply natural and augmented by the railway West with West, West Scotland to West England and vice versa, and therefore stronger cultural links, with another that the textile industries of the latter were shared by Glasgow and near-Glasgow, something that was not the case with the Steel City. The former might explain the arrival of Anglo-Welshman and mining engineer Tommy Britten in Glasgow at Parkgrove by 1878, note south to north, and even that of James Gledhill albeit his Scottish-born mother shortly after, yet no equivalents from the other side of the Pennines, the latter, for example, the permanent move of the Rankine brothers, north to south, from Cambuslang to Bacup.

But whatever the reason fact is that by 1878 Sheffield was in a state of schism and more or less collapse that would last a decade, whilst North-East Lancashire would be in receipt of first Love and Suter, two comparative novices, and then the far more experienced Hugh McIntyre and Peter Campbell, both of Rangers, both Scottish Cup finalists, both internationalists. And that was to be only the start.

The clubs of the area north from Bolton to Clitheroe, east-west from Nelson to Preston, founded from 1871 onwards, would from 1880 become a magnet for Scottish, on-field talent. The number of them would rise from eleven at the start of the decade to in 1885 seventy-four, when throughout professionalism, for these young men were one way or another being paid-to-play, was seen, although may not have entirely been even by FA rules, as illegitimate. And this attraction for players from North of the Border, even as clubs came and went, Merseyside became numerically increasingly important and the Football League founded in 1888 with Preston North End initially dominating, would continue for another decade, seemingly peaking at just short of one hundred in 1892-3, incidentally up 50% from the previous season.

And the sharp rise also was to coincide with some resurgence in Sheffield - Wednesday had reached the FA Cup Final in 1890, a bad mauling at the hands of Preston neighbour, Blackburn Rovers - but real emergence further north still and of Sunderland, founded by a Scot. It would be League champion in 1891-2 and again in 1892-3, but in both seasons with seventeen Scots on the books. And, as Wednesday finally recruited Caledonians, this time succeeding in taking an FA Cup in 1896, the Wearside precedent would be replicated by Newcastle United, founded as such only in 1892, a team that would, by again Scot, Frank Watt, be moulded by again drawing on Jocks to become in the first decade of the 20th Century another that was League dominant.