By the late 1880s professional footballers were playing international matches and clubs were competing for the FA Cup. Rule changes had given the game all its distinctive features. The last big piece of the jigsaw was league competition.
At the time fixtures were often anything but “fixed”. Shambolic was a more apposite description. Postponements or cancellations were commonplace, and the game was crying out for organised fixture lists, not least because spectators who turned up to find there was no game were bound to feel aggrieved. Regular matches were also vital to meet a club’s overheads, which now included players’ wages. The establishment of a competitive league was the brainchild ofWilliam McGregor, a Scot who had relocated from Perthshire to Birmingham and ran a draper’s shop. McGregor had no track record as a player, but his decision to join the board of his local club, Aston Villa, was to have a profound effect on the game.
12 teams contest new league competition
On 2 March 1888 McGregor wrote to Blackburn, Bolton, Preston and West Bromwich Albion about the prospect of forming a league, and naturally he also sounded out his own club on the idea. Throughout the spring of 1888 a series of meetings took place to tlirash out the details and agree a name for the new body; the Football League. 12 teams were incorporated as founder members.
These were the original five clubs that McGregor contacted, together with Accrington, Burnley, Everton, Derby County, Notts County, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Stoke. Other clubs, including Nottingham Forest, had also been keen to join, but the dates set aside for the matches, which were to be held on a home and away ba. sis, meant that only 12 teams could be accommodated. Teams would be awarded two points for a win and one for a draw, a system which was to endure for almost a hundred years.
McGregor became the Football League’s first president, and the opening matches were played on 8 September 1888.
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