New Perspectives on Association Football in Irish History

This book assesses association football’s history and development in Ireland from the late 1870s until the early twenty-first century. It focuses on four key themes-soccer’s early development before and after partition; the post-Emergency years; coaching and developing the game and supporters and governance. In particular, it examines key topics such as the Troubles, Anglo-Irish football relations, the failure of a professional structure in the Republic and Northern Ireland, national and regional identity, relationships with other sports, class, economics and gender. It features contributions from some of today’s leading academic writers on the history of Irish soccer while the views of a number of pre-eminent sociologists and economists specialising in the game’s development are also offered. It identifies some of the difficulties faced by soccer’s players and administrators in Ireland and challenges the notion that it was a ‘garrison game’ spread mainly by the military and generally only played by those who were not fully committed to the nationalist cause. This is the first edited collection to focus solely on the progress of soccer in Ireland since its introduction and adds to the growing academic historiography of Irish sport and its relationship with politics, culture and society. The chapters were originally published in a special issue of Soccer & Society.

Conor Curran is Irish Research Council Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and has taught sports history at De Montfort University, Leicester. He has published two books, The Development of Sport in Donegal, 1880-1935 (2015) and Irish Soccer Migrants: a Social and Cultural History (2017).

David Toms is an independent scholar based in Norway. Previously, he taught sports history at University College Cork and his monograph, Soccer in Munster: a Social History, 1877-1937 was published in 2015.