144 years. This was the length of time between 1848, when the first unified rules of football were drawn-up at Cambridge University, and 1992, when the Premier League was launched. These years constitute the great bulk of England's football history, and yet today they are largely disregarded by a media that appears to see 'Premier League history' as the only history of English football that counts.
144 Years is a book that attempts to redress this by taking the reader on a journey through the facts of English football from its Victorian beginnings through to the point in 1992 when it became a product for subscription TV. By then football in England had already seen it all, and this book provides ample evidence to support that claim. All of the game's major changes are covered, as are a host of incredible, and often long-forgotten, feats and failures, together with many of the strange realities and crazy happenings from football times past.
With plenty of alternative perspectives and a wealth of hard-to-find details dug out from obscurity, 144 Years is both a facts book and a history book, as well as a statement on why we should never forget the long, rich and powerful life English football had before 1992.
I was born and grew up in south London and began collecting football reference books as a teenage schoolboy in the late-1970s. This gave me access to a wealth of football facts and stats long before it was possible to search for such things online. As for going to games, I attended my first professional football match in 1976, began going more frequently in 1978, and then regularly when I became a Wimbledon supporter in 1980 (at the time Wimbledon were a Fourth Division club with little potential). Aside from a brief hiatus between 1999 and 2002, I have been watching Wimbledon ever since, and over the years have attended matches in all of the top nine tiers of English football and in every round of the FA Cup from the preliminary round to the final. In doing so I have visited more than a hundred different football grounds.144 Years is my first book and is the product of an almost half-century-long addiction to football facts.
