In 1939 the Football League made the wearing of numbers on the backs of shirts mandatory, and in 1951 it officially allowed footballs, previously a shade of mud brown that given the state of many pitches at the time must have been extremely unhelpful, to be white. These novelties stand as two steps on football’s long journey to modernity though superficially they have little in common, separated as they were by 12 years and a world war. In fact, however, they were introduced in a single pioneering week during the pre-season of 1927, a time of wild experimentation which appears to have gone forgotten or unnoticed in the game’s many histories and timelines.

Herbert Chapman, who had already won two leagues titles and an FA Cup with Huddersfield Town and was in due course to repeat that feat at Arsenal, has been credited with playing a decisive role in both. In fact he seems to have been supportive but only tangentially involved, with credit for player numbers more rationally belonging with Chelsea’s manager, David Calderhead, his chairman, Claude Kirby, and later with Everton’s William Cuff, and for the white ball with a certain Mr EL Roberts of Kingsland, Shrewsbury.

At the end of July 1927 Roberts, a humble reader, wrote to the Athletic News to “draw the attention of the Football Association and all lovers of the game to the desirability of changing the colour of the football, which I have no doubt whatever will meet with universal approval”. A white ball, he suggested, would not only be more visible but also inherently more exciting. “The attraction would be to see a white globe travelling low and high,” he suggested, “with its twists and turns increasing our interest and excitement as it goes towards the goal.”

Ivan Sharpe, once of Derby County, Leeds United and Watford and a member of Britain’s gold medal-winning football team at the 1912 Olympics, was editing the paper at the time. So taken was he with this idea that in his next edition he not only published the letter in full, but also an editorial at the top of the front page. “A ball of white leather … has advantages for spectators and players,” it read. “On sunny days the players probably would find it more difficult to see than the ball now used, but as the bright days of the English winter, as in the modern summer, are comparatively few, more might be gained than lost. In the murky weather characteristic of the football season it is probable that the white ball would be a very welcome innovation to spectators. The idea seems fanciful, but is worthy of thought.”

This is where Chapman came in. He, along with several other managers, was sufficiently intrigued to test white balls in pre-season friendlies that summer. “We realise the possibilities of the suggestion appearing in the Athletic News,” he said, “and intend to explore them as fully as possible.” He did, however, admit that “I doubt it will ever be done in league matches”. “It certainly is a novel suggestion,” said the FA secretary, Frederick Wall, when challenged to declare it illegal. “There is nothing in the laws of the game to prevent a white ball being used, and as it is a practice game I personally see no objection.”

It wasn’t a completely novel idea. There are records of white-painted balls being used in games dating back to the end of the 19th century, and they were already in occasional use on the continent. Derby had come across one on a pre-season tour of the Netherlands in 1925: when dusk fell during a game against Ajax, making the brown ball hard to make out, a white replacement was thrown on to the field. The tourists kicked it back off again, refusing to play with “a lump of whitewash”. This time, however, the English game was a little more receptive. Only, however, a little.

Reading were among the first to try it, and no one there was particularly impressed. The referee, JV Pennington, said that “it is difficult to express a definite opinion after one trial” but also that “I am satisfied that it would severely handicap the goalkeeper on a bright day” and, puzzlingly, that “a ball painted white is dangerous to players heading it”. The Reading captain, Robert Eggo, sniffed: “I cannot see that a white ball is any advantage, and on a bright sunny day it might easily prove a distinct disadvantage.” Their manager, Andrew Wylie, declared the whole idea “a piece of nonsense – only a fad”.

The Guardian reported that of other trials that weekend, at Clapton Orient it “was a distinct disappointment, with the players complaining of finding difficulty in sighting it in the grey weather”, while at Huddersfield the white paint was swiftly rubbed off the ball, which “assumed the ordinary hue long before the end”, and at Blackpool players “were emphatic in expressing their dislike of the innovation”.

Arsenal played the first half of their game with a ball covered with shiny, enamel paint – the same stuff that was applied to golf balls – and the second half with one with a matt finish. The Athletic News’ correspondent “noticed particularly how the ball showed up against the dark background of the spectators standing on the popular terracing”, and declared “it was obvious that on a really dull day the white ball would be an enormous advantage from a spectators’ point of view”.

Those actually on the field, however, were less overwhelmed. The referee, WT Guttridge, described “one occasion when I entirely lost the ball as it flashed across the white crossbar”, and complained that “I found it even more difficult to follow when it travelled level with the players’ white knickers”. Billy Blyth, the Arsenal captain, said of the enamelled ball that “all the players agree it was impossible to control, slithering off the toe at all angles. So far as visibility was concerned, we could see the ball splendidly when it was on the ground, but it was a strain following its flight at a height.”

A high ball, of the brown leather variety, is lofted into the area during an Aston Villa match at Villa Park circa 1928. Photograph: London Express/Getty Images

“We made the experiment as an experiment, and we are not going on with it,” declared Chapman. “I would not go so far as to say it was unsatisfactory, but it was not successful enough to justify any departure from tradition.”

The league season kicked off with balls unchanged and that, it seemed, was that. “The probabilities are that we have heard the last of the white football,” read an editorial in the Burnley News. “A proposal that seems to have had its origin in the craze for novelty, it only required the light of actual experience to demonstrate its futility. On Saturday the white ball was used on several grounds, and in all cases the experiment may be said to have been a complete failure. The experiment has met with a chorus of condemnation, and we may take it for granted that the white ball has been kicked for the last time.”

Calderhead had been one of the white ball’s vocal critics, perhaps because he was concentrating on alternative innovations, with his Chelsea side preparing to experiment for the first time with the use of numbered jerseys in a trial match the following Monday. Though it had been witnessed in a couple of amateur internationals at club level this was a true first, and though Calderhead declared it “certainly helpful, particularly from the spectator’s point of view” he said he was “not certain if it is worth putting it up to the Football Association council”.

This too had a hostile reception. Sidney King, manager of West Ham United, said numbers made “players look like horses and jockeys”, while Tottenham Hotspur’s Billy Minter said that “in my long experience of football, I have always found the crowd able to pick out any man after a glance at the programme”. Walter Hart, Birmingham president, declared it “hideous” and Wall, on behalf of the FA, declared the idea “very undesirable and unnecessary”. Chapman, a good friend of Calderhead’s, was a lone supportive voice. “I don’t see how the idea can be otherwise than useful,” he said, even if “the innovation would hardly be necessary”.

A year later both Chelsea and Arsenal wore numbers in their first league games of the season. That day the great football writer James Catton wrote an article in support of the novelty. “The objects of every club should be to play the game and give the greatest possible pleasure to those who throng the seats and terraces,” he wrote. “It is difficult to understand why some clubs are strongly objecting to a proposed change which is of great help to everybody on all occasions. The convenience of the public should be paramount.”

Not likely. Though Chelsea surveyed 700 fans after their game and received unanimous support for numbering, and the Guardian reported that “the spectators approved of a practice that should have become general years ago” because “the personality of a scoring forward in a ‘crush’ goal is not always revealed by the shape of his back”, the League immediately banned them. Chelsea, though, did not give up, and in 1929 wore numbers on a tour of Brazil, earning the nickname Los Numerados.

“I can see nothing whatever against the numbering of players and I hope to see this agreed at the annual League meeting,” their chairman, Claude Kirby, said in 1928. “League football has many new and powerful rivals to contend with, and we cannot afford to miss any opportunity of popularising it. I am convinced that thousands of casual spectators would become regular followers if they had this easy means of identifying players.”

His fellow chairmen were unmoved, but the idea never went away. There was some support at the FA, whose honorary treasurer, Arthur Kingscott, had seen numbers in use while acting as tour manager on a trip to Canada in 1926 and returned to declare that “at first I did not like the idea” but that “in the end I came to the conclusion that it was an excellent idea, and it enabled the crowd to follow closely the movement of every player”.

In January 1933 Tottenham were allowed to wear numbers for their FA Cup third-round match against Watford, which they won 7-1, and that March they were worn in a trial match between England’s first and second XIs at Fratton Park, leading to larger versions being used in the FA Cup final the following month between Everton, who wore 1-11 starting with the goalkeeper at No1 and ending with the outside-left, and Manchester City, who took 12-22 starting with their outside-left and ending with their goalkeeper, Len Langford, at No22.

The idea was debated and rejected by the Football League later that year (“What the advantage would be it is hard to conceive,” sniffed the Times) and the next time numbers were seen at Wembley was in 1939 (“It makes the game so much easier to follow that one wonders why players in League matches are not also allowed to be numbered,” enthused the Times), a couple of months before the league finally made them compulsory, the motion proposed by the Everton chairman, new league president and long-term numbering advocate, William Cuff, and carried by 24-20.

Shirt numbers are worn in the FA Cup final for the first time in 1933. Manchester City wore 12-22 and Everton, who won 3-0, took 1-11. Photograph: Daily Herald Archive/SSPL via Getty Images

White balls would get their turn, though they had to wait a while. The late 1940s saw several colour-based oddities, with the winter of 1946-47, the snowiest of the 20th century, prompting Southend to paint their touchlines red and Reading to turn their goalposts blue, and soon alternatives to brown leather balls were being considered once again.

Of particular importance on the white ball’s road to acceptance was a televised match between England and Italy at White Hart Lane in 1949 when a white ball was used in fading light towards the end at the insistence of the Fifa president, Sir Stanley Rous, who felt that “against the background of high stands at White Hart Lane the ordinary ball becomes almost invisible in the air when the night is falling”.

After that game the league’s secretary, F Howarth, sniffed that “I do not think the ball offered many advantages over the ordinary one”, but it had been well received by the watching public and the FA resolved to keep experimenting: in February 1950 England B played Switzerland B at Hillsborough with a bright yellow ball being used in the first half, and a garish orange one in the second. The big push came the following year, the first to see top-level competitive floodlit football. It was under lights that the white ball really, in every sense, shone.

In 1951 the League permitted their use, but their introduction was haphazard. Initially most games started, according to tradition, with a brown ball, a white one being brought out only if it got a bit gloomy – the Guardian described the latter stages of one Chelsea game that year as being “like watching a ping-pong ball bobbing about in a darkened room”. But there was a catch. Back in 1927 one ball manufacturer was quoted as saying that it was, in his opinion, “practically impossible to make a white football”. By 1951 a solution had been found, which involved a different tanning process, the application of a layer of white paint, and then a layer of cellulose. The first layer made the ball white, the second protected the first from damage. It also, and quite accidentally, protected the ball from water: traditional versions might increase in weight by as much as 20% on a wet day, but white ones remained impervious. It was a discovery that was to change the game.

It certainly changed some games. In 1951, for example, an amateur international between England and Wales was tied at 1-1 with 15 minutes to play and the two teams battling to hoof a sodden leather ball around a muddy pitch, when a white ball was called for. England duly skipped to a 4-1 victory.

In 1952 the Sunderland Echo asserted that the ball particularly helped players who were “smaller in build and favouring a short-passing game”.

“Big players given an advantage on mud declare that this compensates them for the start and finish of the season when conditions favour smaller men,” it wrote. “They insist that the light ball, used as a counter to mud, penalises them.”

In 1953 the FA recommended that white balls should be used from the start or not at all, though this remained at the referee’s discretion. That November, Hungary showed quite how much it assisted more technical players when they put a white ball into the England net six times at Wembley.

The greatest possible advert for their use came with the arrival of another Hungarian team the following year, for what must surely rank among the most important friendlies in the history of the game, most probably at No1. The match between Wolverhampton Wanderers and Honved was to inspire L’Équipe to propose a European Cup, which started in 1955, and an eight-year-old George Best to become a Wolves fan, as an estimated 12 million people watched the BBC’s broadcast of the second half, a rare glimpse of televised football beyond the FA Cup final and occasional internationals.

With his team 2-0 down at the interval the Wolves manager, Stan Cullis, sent his groundsmen and apprentices (including a 15-year-old Ron Atkinson) out at half-time to drench the pitch with water, and with the resulting bog frustrating the swift-passing Hungarians his side utilised more direct tactics to battle back to a thrilling, dramatic 3-2 victory.

The 1958 World Cup was the first to utilise a white ball, and the battle was effectively over, the sympathies of supporters made crystal clear two years later when the later stages of Burnley’s title-clinching 2-1 win over Manchester City at Maine Road were soundtracked by both sides’ fans singing “white ball, white ball” as they strained to keep track of the brown one.

Pelé, right, and his Brazil team-mates had no problem with the white ball, beating hosts Sweden 5-2 in the 1958 World Cup Final. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

Back in 1927, the often outspoken and always readable Derby Telegraph columnist bylined An Outside Right took aim at footballing novelties. “I am among the large army of football enthusiasts who regard the attempt to introduce such innovations as white balls and identity numbers for players as the mere vapourings of people who are not happy unless they are being given something novel. There is nothing wrong with the game. Let us get on with it. Players ought to be numbered, should they? Here is a proposition put forward by someone who, like the sponsor of the white ball idea, ought to see an optician, and yet wishes to evade that expense by football helping him out.

“The one great objection to players being numbered is that spectators would take a superficial, rather than an intelligent, interest in the game. Under existing conditions spectators have to exert their powers of observation and intelligence in order to follow correctly the play and the players. Make this [too] easy for them and there will be no fun in it. Man is a hunter; half the fun is in the actual hunt. I am against anything that makes football too easy a spectacle to watch and follow. Football will soon go to the dogs if the football administrators give ear to the faddists.”

Over the 90 years since those words were written the football administrators haven’t just given ear to the faddists but eyes, nose and mouth as well. Heaven knows what he would have made of the modern game, but an Outside Right would surely admit that he got this call wrong.