This book offers a study of how football became in the 1870s a global sport that was played by high school students on several continents. It provides a horizontal perspective that focusses on the spread of football in the 1870s from its English cradle to Germany, the United States, and Argentina. It will be the very first account of football that does not treat this sport in isolation but brings together the phenomenon of football with the conditions in nineteenth-century high schools and the crisis of urban living and, thereby, explains why this sport was so willingly and quickly accepted into various societies and cultures around the globe.

Football was part of the social reform movement that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century in response to the social ills of urban life. Adults and children spent more and more time inside badly ventilated buildings. Beginning in the 1870s, social reformers and teachers called for the introduction into school curricula of physical exercises that could be conducted on the meadows and sport fields outside cities.