Association football and the administrators who made it, c. 1863–1914

The game of ‘association football’ or ‘soccer’ emerged as an English amateur pastime, to metamorphize into the ‘world’s game’. In this historiographical contribution we consider the formative history of football by highlighting the entrepreneurial role of the amateur administrators who imported the logic of bureaucratic organization from other sectors, identifying their influence on the entities which govern and organize the sport. We demonstrate that the emergence of administrative structures was key to the development of professional sport in England and beyond.