Take a walk around Manchester city centre at the weekend during the football season and you won’t need to ask which of the city’s clubs are playing at home. Legions of fans will be spilling from trains, trams and buses in shirts, hats and scarves of either red or blue. Fans travel from all over the world to watch United and City and to sample the pubs, restaurants and cultural sights of the city.

Since 1965 Manchester United have had the highest average attendance of any English football club for 47 out of 54 seasons (Liverpool being the only other club to claim that title). Manchester City’s recent riches and success has also seen them become a tourist destination for people wanting a taste of what the Premier League has to offer.

Big matches and footballing success might be common in Manchester today but the city has not always been the force in the national game that it is today. Modern association football has its roots in Britain’s public schools, many of whom had their own football games each with their own sets of rules. When football was first codified and the Football Association formed in 1863 it was amateur Southern clubs with roots in the public schools as well as universities who dominated the game. Within eight years the FA had grown to 50 member clubs and created the first football competition in the world, the FA Cup. Naturally given the background of the founders this competition was dominated by middle class teams.

However, by the 1880s the tide was turning. The opening of public parks in the mid 19th century gave ordinary people space for sporting activities and the Factory Acts of 1847 and 1850 reduced the working week giving working people more time to spend at their leisure. Football clubs formed in industrial communities of the North and the Midlands and they were to become dominant over their Southern public school rivals. Blackburn Olympic, a team made up of factory workers, won the 1883 FA Cup Final 2 – 1 beating cup holders Old Etonians who had narrowly overcome Blackburn Rovers 1 – 0 in the previous year’s final. Rovers would go on to win the next three cup finals and it was pressure mainly from Lancashire clubs that would lead the FA to formally legalise professionalism in July 1885. This meant that clubs could now pay their working class players who did not have the means to carry on playing the game just as a hobby. The 1880’s also saw the formation of the Football League with the initial meeting held in Manchester but no Manchester clubs were invited to participate.

The rest of the Victorian era would be dominated by clubs from the North and the Midlands. FA Cup Final attendances rose, going from 2,000 for the first final in 1872 to 25,000 in 1892 with all but one being held in London at The Oval, home of Surrey County Cricket Club. By the 1890s it was decided that the Oval was no longer suitable for the number of spectators being attracted and the 1893 final was moved to the Fallowfield Stadium in Manchester, a new athletics stadium opened by Manchester Athletics Club in May 1892.



An aerial view of Fallowfield Stadium

That year’s finalists were Wolverhampton Wanderers and Everton. Wolves had overcome Bolton, Middlesbrough, Darwen and Blackburn Rovers on their way to the final while Everton saw their way past West Brom, Nottingham Forest, Sheffield Wednesday and Preston North End after two replays. Manchester United’s precursor Newton Heath were knocked out by Blackburn in the first round while City’s precursor Ardwick didn’t even make it that far and were eliminated in the preliminary round. A week before the final Everton rested their first team and sent a team of reserves, including two debutantes, to play Wolves in a league match. Everton ran out winners at 4 – 2 and so went into the cup final as strong favourites.

The day of the final saw trainloads of fans arriving from the Midlands and Merseyside but the majority of the crowd was made up of neutrals from the Manchester area showing that despite their local clubs’ lack of successes, Newton Heath being relegated that season and Ardwick facing financial collapse the following year, there was an appetite for football in the city. Kick off was scheduled for 3:30pm but queues were already forming by 11:30am and by 12:30pm nearly 5,000 people were already in the ground. An exhibition match between two schoolboy teams played on the full size pitch ninety minutes before the final was witnessed by 20,000 fans, a record for a youth match at the time and more than had watched 17 out of the last 21 FA Cup Finals.

By kick off the attendance swelled to an official figure of 45,000 making it the largest attendance of any cup final to date. It was estimated that in fact over 60,000 attended the game with even the official figure being many thousands more than the ground could cope with. With this in mind it’s not surprising that the 192 policemen on duty that day struggled to keep order as fights broke out in the crowd and there was lots of fan encroachment onto the pitch. Many fans at the rear of the crowd struggled to see any of the action with some launching missiles at those at the front urging them to duck down. At least one missile ended up striking a journalist on the head and drawing blood.

Crowds at the FA Cup Final 1893

On the pitch, after the players had battled to get past the surging crowds, Everton found the conditions difficult for their passing game and were outplayed by a more physical Wolves side. The only goal of the game came in the second half as Wolves captain and England international Harry Allen won it for the Black Country club 1 – 0.

A ‘funeral card’ for Everton sold to fans on the way out of the ground

After the match Everton lodged a complaint with the FA saying that the crowd had impeded their game and the venue was not fit to host such a high-profile match. The FA dismissed their protests and the result was allowed to stand.

The crowd problems at Fallowfield saw it being reported as a fiasco. A report of an England international by the Derby Daily Telegraph held a week later at the Athletic Ground in Richmond would report that “The arrangements proved wretchedly inadequate, and the reporters saw even less of the game that at Fallowfield for the FA Cup Final last week.” The FA had woefully under-estimated the hunger for football in Manchester with this period being the beginning of the big modern gates that we would recognise today.

Of course in Wolverhampton they celebrated their team’s first ever cup triumph with one speculative local builder building a row of houses close to Wolves’ original home of Dudley Road and naming them Fallowfield Terrace. The gate posts of each house in the terrace had a stone replica of the cup and each house was also given a name plate featuring the name of one of the victorious Wolves team.

Extant name plates on Fallowfield Terrace in Wolverhampton

Fallowfield would stage no further FA Cup finals but it did host two FA Cup semi-finals in 1894 and 1899 showing the FA did not consider the 1983 fixture a failure and that they were still eager to to demonstrate the attractiveness of their competition in a region where rugby was still a major attraction. They might also have been motivated to show that they weren’t just a Southern-focused organisation and that their competition held precedence over local Fa Cup competitions such as ones in Lancashire, Birmingham and Staffordshire.

It wouldn’t be until 1904 that any team from Manchester would lift the cup when Manchester City, who rose from the ashes of Ardwick, did so against Bolton Wanderers after the final moved back to London to be played at Crystal Palace. League success would finally came to the city when United finished as champions four years later.

While top-tier football at Fallowfield was finished two rugby league Challenge Cup finals were contested there in 1899 and 1900 and a rugby union international between England and Scotland in 1897. Athletics, the grounds original purpose, and cycling would also be held there. Manchester University bought the stadium in the 1960s and it was demolished in 1994 to make way for Richmond Park Halls of Residence.

A student football game at Fallowfield, 1985

Richmond Park Halls of Residence

References

Sewell, Albert – The Observer’s Book of Soccer

Nicholson, C; Nicholson, R; Metcalf, R – Flying Over an Olive Grove: The Remarkable Story of Fred Spiksley – A Flawed Football Hero

Waller P. J. – Town, City, and Nation: England, 1850-1914

James, Gary & Day, Dave (2014) The Emergence of an Association Football Culture in Manchester 1840–1884, Sport in History, 34:1, 49-74

James, Gary & Day, D (2015) FA Cup success, football infrastructure and the establishment of Manchester’s footballing identity, Soccer & Society, 16:2-3, 200-216

James, Gary (2018) The origins debate – how soccer triumphed over other forms of team sports in Manchester, Soccer & Society, 19:1, 89-106

Benkwitz, Adam & Molnar, Gyozo (2017) The emergence and development of association football: influential sociocultural factors in Victorian Birmingham, Soccer & Society, 18:7, 1027-1044

Attendances England average – https://www.european-football-statistics.co.uk/attn/nav/attnengleague.htm

WOLVES V EVERTON 1-0 (ENGLISH FA CUP FINAL: MARCH 25, 1893) – https://playupliverpool.com/1893/03/25/wolves-v-everton-1-0-english-fa-cup-final-march-25-1893/

Fallowfield Stadium 1892-1994 – https://rusholmearchive.org/fallowfield-stadium-1892-1994

How Manchester’s lost stadium rivalled Old Trafford and Maine Road as city’s greatest sporting cathedral – https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/nostalgia/fallowfield-stadium-fa-cup-manchester-14611565

Harry Allen bio – http://www.englandfootballonline.com/TeamPlyrsBios/PlayersA/BioAllenH.html

History of Football – The Origins – http://static.fifa.com/about-fifa/who-we-are/the-game/index.html

History of Football – The Global Growth – http://static.fifa.com/about-fifa/who-we-are/the-game/global-growth.html

Fallowfield (Manchester) – Saturday 25th March Wolverhampton Wanderers 1 Everton 0 – https://web.archive.org/web/20080723205147/http://www.fa-cupfinals.co.uk/1893.html