Who makes the rules? How Scottish football secured its independence
A report in The Scotsman on the 133rd annual meeting of the International Football Association Board (IFAB) which took place in Aberdeen on 2 March 2019 may well have passed many readers by. Nevertheless, it was a meeting with far-reaching consequences for the sport, because it approved changes to the rules of association football (also known as ‘soccer’ nowadays) which will be adopted by national associations across the globe. It may appear curious that IFAB, which is the worldwide custodian of the rules of soccer, comprises delegates from only five organisations: each of the four UK ‘home’ football associations and the global governing body for soccer, FIFA.
This surprising fact provides a tantalising glimpse of the history behind the growth of the sport in the 1870s and 1880s in which the Scottish Football Association (SFA) played a pivotal role, and which was mirrored in many respects by its rugby counterpart, the Scottish Football Union (SFU; The SFU was renamed the Scottish Rugby Union in 1924.) In both cases, the determination of the SFA and SFU to remain independent of the English-based governing bodies, the Football Association (FA) and the Rugby Football Union (RFU) during their sports’ formative years initiated a series of events which resulted in the creation of administrative structures on which the expansion of both codes of football would be built. In doing so the SFA and SFU established themselves as popular and important national institutions within late-Victorian Scottish society.
A shared beginning
The history of the early years of soccer and rugby is very much a shared one, as the organisers of each code sought to formalise and increase participation in their sport. Indeed, the first rugby international came about as a direct result of the reaction of Scottish rugby enthusiasts to a series of exhibition soccer matches organised by the FA secretary, Charles Alcock. This series, designed to encourage the spread of interest in the round ball game, and advertised as ‘internationals’, commenced in 1870 between supposedly representative teams of Scotsmen and Englishmen in London. The selection
