England's Oldest Football Clubs 1815-1899 : A new chronological classification of early footballl.
By Martin Westby

Five years ago, I saw for the first time a book called the ‘Football Annual’ that ran from 1868 to 1908. It was started in 1868 as ‘John Lilywhite’s Football Annual’, edited by the FA Secretary, Charles W. Alcock and ‘Published with the sanction of the Football Association’. In each edition Football Secretaries were invited to apply for forms which had to be returned before May in each year, which included information such as when the Club was formed, where the Club Ground was situated and whether they played by Association or Rugby rules; so it included all Football Clubs, be they Association or Rugby Clubs. To ensure that I missed no football clubs I then cross referenced and added clubs that were not listed in the ‘Football Annuals’ but had entered either the FA Cup or were founder members of their local County FA. This gave me a total of 297 English Rugby-playing clubs and 770 English Association-playing clubs, as well as numerous school and military organisations; a lot of which was previously unseen data.

At the end of five years’ research, I was left with over 3,000 pages of data and at a loss as to how to publish the information. In 2017 I decided to extract all the research that applied purely to Sheffield and published a book called ‘A History of Sheffield Football 1857-1889: Speed, Science and Bottom’, which is now in its second edition and is available to purchase from this website. Two years later I published my 620 page distillation of the remaining data and ‘England’s Oldest Football Clubs 1815-1889: A new chronological classification of early football (Folk, School, Military, County, Rugby, & Association)’ was born. As well as a print version I took the decision to also publish my data as a (cheaper) E-book PDF providing a live search function and the ability to click straight through to online resources. (If you choose the PDF option you can open the book on as many devices as you wish and also to print off pages that you find interesting. You will not be able to forward the book in its entirety in order to protect my copyright). If however you prefer the feel of a printed book then that includes the PDF option free of charge.