English Game highlights class clash in early football

By Muhammed Enes Calli

ANKARA (AA) - Watching alternative programs, documentaries, television series or classic football games is a good way for lovers of the game to re-establish normalcy since matches were paused because of the coronavirus.

The English Game, a six-episode drama series on Netflix, has come along with perfect timing for football lovers eager to watch something related to the sweet science while in self-isolation.

The series takes the audience to late 19th century England in early days of the football while displaying the role of class conflicts to understand the origins of the game.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Danish director Birgitte Staermose, said she and fellow series director Tim Fywell, talked quite a bit about how to make it interesting for fans and non fans alike.

''Anybody who likes period drama can watch it. If you like historical fiction, it is interesting for you. Even if you don’t watch football games, this series would be interesting for you. Because it is tied to the class struggle in England at that time. It is also primarily a drama with the football,” she said.

- Story mostly true

The English Game is on a true story about how a mill company football team, Darwen FC in Lancashire, transferred a talented Scottish footballer Fergus Suter, played by Kevin Guthrie, to play against the Old Etonians in the FA Cup, an upper-class football team.

Suter was known as the first paid professional player in the history of football while Old Etonian's players believe football should be played by gentlemen belonging to the upper class.

Old Etonian had been dominating the game until the late 19th century and were against players receiving payment from clubs. But football became popular among the working class and they were ready to fight to take control of the game from the upper class.

We follow development of the game from the point of view of two players from two different teams representing two different classes.

Much of the story is based on true events but the creators of the series took license to make changes.

"Some facts we changed to fit the TV format so you can tell the story with six parts you can’t get repetitive,’’ Staermose said. "The story is how professional football came about because the northern football team started to pay players from Scotland to play for them. The story is until the point where the series starts -- no Northern team had won the FA Cup. The series is also about how football was an upper-class sport at the beginning, how it found its way through professionalism and became a working-class sport. All that is true and that's the story.’"

We see the different FA Cup finals combined in the series. At the end, Suter lifted the cup after his team, Blackburn Olympic, defeated Old Etonian 2-1 in extra time in 1983. But in reality, Suter did not play that final but he lifted the cup the following year when the Blackburn Rovers defeated Queen’s Park 2-1.

- Football is difficult to film

Staermose is not a football fan but it did not prevent her from directing the sports series.

''I can be directing a murder story, but I am not walking around murdering people in my free time. As a director, you have to be in a lot of worlds that are not your worlds, that is what you do. You have to be curious about something,” she said. "We looked at a lot of sports movies and series to try to figure out how to make it exciting. l filmed physical sports which is quite specific that you have to be organized differently. If you film a dramatic scene, you have to choreograph the action, In this case, make sure that the actors had to look like the football players."

She stressed that fans always worry about the ball while watching matches but she needed to feature different things on the pitch for the series.

"When you watch a lot of sports films and TV shows, they end up showing very little of sports because it is quite difficult and time-consuming to do it well. That's the biggest obstacle,” she said, while acknowledging football is difficult to film.

''If you have somebody kicking a ball in a certain way that's going to become a goal, you know you want that to look really impressive, also a dramatically impressive. You have to make things visual,” she said. ''We have a drama also focused on how the players felt. The reality is not dramatic. It would have been impossible to tell the story of the traumatic way if we had kept exactly told the only matches. This is not a documentary, it is a fiction,” said Staermose.

- Reflection of class struggle seen in birth of football

The English Game features the effects of capital on football by unfolding the class clash in the late Victorian-era.

Some working-class players started to get paid to play but this caused a problem for rich players since they see the game only as a hobby.

The growing popularity of football among the lower class and passion for the game had been underestimated by rich players. The tension between teams and players is also reflected in the class conflict in the country.

''The story tells about how football was able to unite the working class around something that gave them pride. Some workers' lives were incredibly grim and the conditions under which they worked were extremely difficult.

''Football was something that gathered around the workers and they could become part of an identity with this game. For the upper class, it was a way to pass time and I think for the lower class it became much more a matter of pride, dignity and the sense of strength in the community,’’ she said,

The upper classes laid down the formal rules of the game in the 19th century but the numbers of teams -- including working-class teams -- in the FA Cup had increased and the game spread across parts of the country through the late 1800s.

- Differences physiques led to new playing styles

The series also features how economic conditions of working class players affected their style on the pitch.

''All the Old Etonians -- the team of the upper-class people -- were big and muscular and all the Darwen players – workers’ team-- have to be smaller and skinnier than the Etonian because of nutrition. So, Darwen players were able to move faster on the pitch," said Staermose.

In the second episode of the series, Fergus Suter from the Darwen team taught passing game strategy to his teammates to take advantage of being smaller and skinner than their opponents.

This shows how the class differences shaped the development of the game at the time.