The evolution of football passing in nineteenth-century Britain

Abstract

Passing is a fundamental and frequent activity in the modern game of association football, which has been exemplified by teams such as Barcelona, Manchester City and Spain. Yet, its development has not been researched in detail. There are match reports of passing in 1860s Sheffield and it would appear that passing and combination play were a natural development of competitive territorial games. Football in the mid-nineteenth century was often conducted in a pack with individual players dribbling the ball; yet, this strategy proved ineffective compared to combined play with players positioned across the playing field. The tactical developments in the game were interlinked with the evolution of the rules and particularly the offside rule which was different in Sheffield and Scotland compared to the Football Association’s more stringent rule employed in London. This encouraged passing and forward kicking sometimes with long balls which also encouraged heading.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Wilson, J. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4109-3093 Stocks, J. Wood, S. Clarke, J.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2025 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in The International Journal of the History of Sport is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Keywords:	Passing; combination football; team formations; heading
Dates:	Submitted: 30 July 2024 Accepted: 4 April 2025 Published (online): 12 May 2025 Published: 19 February 2025
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Management School (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	24 Sep 2025 09:35
Last Modified:	24 Sep 2025 09:35
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Informa UK Limited
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1080/09523367.2025.2495072
Related URLs:	Author
Sustainable Development Goals:
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:232123

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The evolution of football passing in nineteenth-century Britain

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