The English Game – Netflix’s Exciting Football Series Analysed

The Series

The story opens in 1879 and features three teams, Old Etonians, Darwin and Blackburn. It is not made clear (up to Episode 5 – as far as I have yet watched) whether the last of these is Rovers or Olympic, but the producers seem to have taken a few liberties with the facts. We’re not in U501 territory however. The series follows Etonians and northern factory workers reaching across the class divide to establish the game we know and love today.

The chief protagonists are Arthur Kinnaird, captain and star player of Old Etonians and Fergus Suter newly recruited first Darwen. Kinnaird played by Edward Holcroft was born into an Anglo-Scottish aristocratic banking family in 1847. He was educated at Cheam School, Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating BA in 1869. He worked in the family bank, becoming a director of Ransom, Bouverie & Co in 1870. This bank later merged with others in 1896 to become Barclays Bank of which he was a main board director until his death. He had a remarkable record in the FA Cup, playing in a record nine FA Cup finals. He was on the winning side three times with Wanderers and twice with the Old Etonians, and celebrated his fifth Cup Final victory by standing on his head in front of the pavilion. In the course of his career as a Cup Final player, Kinnaird played in every position, from goalkeeper to forward. It was while playing in goal for Wanderers in the 1877 final that he suffered the indignity of scoring the first significant own goal in football history, accidentally stepping backwards over his own goal line after fielding an innocuous long shot from an Oxford University forward. The match finished 1–1 and Wanderers won with a second goal in extra time. Having inherited his father’s title he was, as Lord Kinnaird, President of the FA for 30 years. He died in 1923, shortly before the opening of Wembley Stadium.

Fergus “Fergie” Suter was born in Glasgow in 1857 and was a stonemason by trade. He played football for Partick FC for whom, in 1878, he played games first against Darwen and then against Blackburn Rovers. Later that year he was persuaded to move to and play for Darwen. Although the game was officially amateur at the time, Suter’s move to England to play for Darwen in 1878 was shortly followed by him giving up his job as a stonemason, allegedly claiming that English stone was too difficult to work and fuelling criticism that he was being paid to play. During the summer of 1880 he caused still more controversy by moving to Blackburn Rovers, a neighbouring town and local rival of Darwen. The move again stirred up accusations of professionalism amid claims that Blackburn had offered him improved terms. Suter’s move inflamed an already testy local rivalry, and bitter games and crowd trouble dogged future Darwen–Blackburn matches for years.

In the podcast Ben compared it to Downton Abbey and both are the brainchildren of Julian Fellowes but really, there the similarity ends. What I will say is that like that other Fellowes creation, it has a cast of strong characters, a compelling plotline that keeps you in its grip. If it was a book, I’d describe it as a page turner. It is not a case of toffs, bad and prols, good although initially Kinnaird and his Old Etonians do come across as privileged individuals with a sense of their own superiority, which of course was pretty true of those of their class at the time.

Equally there are good and bad among the northern characters and the series deals with the darker side of Victorian society, delving into the harsh treatment of a “fallen woman” and the fate of her child born out of wedlock. We also see the effects of a recession in the cotton industry with the mill owners enforcing a succession of wage cuts upon their staff and the reaction that causes. But for myself, I have found characters on both sides of this social divide sympathetic and believable.

The script writers would have us believe that Fergus Suter is as well known to the posh footballers of the south as Kinnaird is to the forelock tugging classes of the north and I suppose with the advent of mass travel and a more widely available print media, perhaps this was the case.

There is much contrast between the sets which range from sumptuous Victorian drawing rooms on the one hand to a dark and dingy northern back street pub on the other and the story moves from grand country piles to ‘respectable’ mill town cottages and a grimy Glasgow tenement. The rural scenes contrast Kinnaird’s Tayside estate of Rossie Priory with its newly planted wood by a picturesque Scottish loch (actually there isn’t one as far as I can see from Google Earth) and the bleak but seemingly much travelled Lancastrian moor between Darwen and Blackburn.

Suter’s transfer to Blackburn is dealt with and is explained by his desire to free his mother and siblings from his drunken, wife beating father. Whether this was actually the case, I do not know but this is a drama and not a documentary.

We also see Kinnaird develop a social conscience, born of his contact with Suter and the other Darwen players. Again, whether such contact is merely a device, I cannot say but when you consider his role in the FA, it does fit albeit perhaps conveniently.

This is not simply a tale about the development of football into the modern professional game, it is a story that weaves into its narrative the lives of different strands of what was a very rigid class based society. We witness the very moving strife of Kinnaird and his wife as they struggle to overcome a personal tragedy, not aided by his buttoned up, stiff upper lip reaction. We also see how Suter deals with his own family’s predicament and warm to them both in the process.

From what I can gather games between Darwen and Blackburn were needle affairs with repeated crowd trouble, aggravated by Suter’s transfer. The Imps and the Codheads aren’t the only local rivals with ‘history’ and remember these two towns are much closer to each other than Lincoln and Grimsby.

You do not have to be a fan of the beautiful game to enjoy this series. My wife and daughter are both watching it avidly and clearly have the hots for Edward Holcroft who plays the lustrously bearded Arthur Kinnaird, openly referring to him as Lord Eye Candy. Students of the Victorian era will enjoy it and social historians will have made the connection with the advent of the railways bringing about a standardisation not only of timekeeping but also the laws of football among so many other things.

One thing they do get wrong is how to say Darwen which I am told is pronounced Darren.

How it ends, I would not tell you even if I could but I cannot for the simple reason that I haven’t got there myself yet.

Enjoy the series!

FOOTNOTE: I am greatly indebted to the Ladybird ‘Easy-Reading’ Book “The Story of Football” given to me in 1965 and which I still treasure and Wikipedia from which entire passages have been shamelessly and ruthlessly plagiarised.