Book Excerpts

Although the modern Play-Offs were introduced in the mid 1980s, the concept’s roots stretch back to the very beginnings of league football in England when a similar idea was used some ninety-odd years before. William McGregor, the Scottish founder of the Football League, was influenced by the model used by American sports such as baseball in which playoffs were employed to determine the Championship from the outset in the 1880s. The adaptation of the system was distinctively British in its execution as it concentrated on the movement between divisions rather than determining the champions.

The Football League was founded to provide some order and meaning to the stream of friendly matches that were being played, but had no ultimate purpose. Phil Shaw pointed out in his piece on McGregor for The Football League’s 125th anniversary that “as a spectacle, the league was hamstrung by a chronic lack of organisation”. There were far too many occasions when clubs pulled out of their fixtures at the last moment because either they had a better offer or they simply could not be bothered to turn up. It was a little like some of the more haphazard Sunday morning football experiences than a gathering of the lead- ing clubs in the country. Such disorganisation adversely affected the revenues of the clubs and the spirits of the fans who had grown tired of watching one- sided friendlies or were frustrated by the number of ‘no shows’. So McGregor’s brainchild of “a regular and fixed programme” of matches was born, with the main aim of bringing order where there was previously chaos. In many ways this need for a new structure that would reinvigorate the moribund state of the game had close parallels with the issues faced in the mid 1980s. Both situations required strong action that could provide a sense of direction and purpose.

In 1892, four years after the Football League was formed, the League expanded into two divisions to accommodate a further dozen clubs. The powers that be, led by McGregor, wanted to encourage movement between the divisions and decided to give the teams from the lower division the opportunity of reaching the top division. The ethos of promotion was an important facet established at the very beginning of this extra division and this is where English football was different to those American leagues from which the concept of playoffs were originally copied. Although there was to be no automatic promotion at first, but rather a series of one off ‘test matches’ pitching the bottom three teams from the First Division against the top three teams from the newly-formed Second Division to determine the final places in the respective leagues. The joint involvement of teams from both divisions was repeated in the first two years of the 20th century Play-Offs, and so it is possible to trace the lineage of the modern Play-Offs back to Victorian times and acknowledge the precedent set from more than a hundred years ago, albeit in a slightly different format.

Some themes that have come to characterise the modern Play-Offs were also prevalent back in the late 19th century, such as those clubs who were perennial failures, the yo-yo teams that spent their time criss-crossing between divisions and even Iain Dowie’s rather 21st century concept of ‘bouncebackability’. They all manifested themselves in the McGregor era only to reappear a century later, proving one of the sport’s eternal truths – football is cyclical. One of the first of these test matches in 1893 featured Newton Heath, the team that spawned Man- chester United, who preserved their First Division status by overcoming Second Division Champions, Small Heath (the team that would later become Birmingham City) over two legs. So even in these earliest of days of league football and well before the reign of Alex Ferguson, Manchester United had the edge on their rivals.

The following year, Newton Heath were not so fortunate and ended up losing to some upstarts from the lower division. Liverpool had just joined the league, won the tie and thus one of the great rivalries of English football was born. Although Liverpool’s tenure in the top flight lasted just one season as they lost out to Bury in the 1895 test match, they came straight back up the following year via the new version of test matches which had been turned into mini leagues involving four teams playing each other home and away. With these fluctuating fortunes over successive seasons, it could be argued that the Liverpool of the mid-1890s were the original exponents of a yo-yo club, exhibiting both resilience and a dash of ‘bouncebackability’.