In an ideal world, all historians would spend their careers immersed in a subject, producing articles and monographs, and then after decades of study, write an important and wide-ranging piece of scholarship that helps to redefine the field. This fantasy book would also be short, clearly written, eminently teachable, and utterly engaging from start to finish. With How Football Began, Tony Collins has given us that book.

Through 21 brief chapters, Collins convincingly makes the case that we have been thinking incorrectly about the development of the various codes of football that emerged in the nineteenth century. The fundamental misconception has been to regard soccer, rugby union, rugby league, and the nationally named football games of Ireland, the United States, Canada, and Australia as substantially separate sports as opposed to variations on a single game. To support the opposite perspective, Collins outlines the evolution of each code's rules, details the manner in which players and clubs frequently switched from one code to another, and draws on correspondence between administrators and promoters across national boundaries. In doing so, he shows readers the myriad evolutionary dead ends with which different codes experimented and the numerous influences that led them to emerge in their modern forms.

As each game evolved, Collins argues, proponents wrestled with the same set of concerns, including how to navigate thorny questions of amateurism and professionalism; how to respond to the development of sport into mass spectator entertainment rather than simple pastimes or object lessons in moral manliness; and how each game related to the broader national, imperial, and Anglophone world. While mythmakers and promoters of the various games invented origin stories—most famously William Webb Ellis as the single progenitor of rugby football—and nationalist interpretations of football's evolution such as Walter Camp's insistence that gridiron football was an intrinsically American invention, Collins demonstrates that the games’ evolutions were more intertwined, practical, and prosaic.

Importantly, we are shown how the games mirrored one another in significant ways, such as the reduction in the number of players on the field, increased scoring, and the elimination of prolonged scrummages in which the ball was buried in a pack of massed bodies. Modes of play that might have inculcated valuable lessons about fortitude and teamwork to public schoolboys did not necessarily produce beautiful, spectator-friendly games that would attract paying customers. Thus, Canadian, American, Gaelic, and Australian football all eventually eschewed tight formations in favor of more expansive play. Association football developed open passing and long runs as opposed to close, mass play. The parallel development of the snapback in the North American codes and the heelback in rugby league—both intended to reduce scrummaging—is another key example of ways in which the games followed similar paths to arrive at their current rules.

Building his case through a meticulous examination of the evolution of the rules of each code, Collins offers a compelling argument that in general the codes had many more similarities in the nineteenth century than differences. Even the essential distinction of soccer as a kicking game and rugby as a primarily handling game cannot be extended back to the 1850s and 1860s. Non-experts will be intrigued to learn that tries were not always the primary means of determining a winner in rugby and that the Football Association allowed outfield players to use their hands in certain situations until 1870, seven years after its first set of rules were promulgated. Indeed, the game laid out by the inaugural Football Association rules (or the similarly influential Sheffield rules for that matter) hardly resembled modern soccer despite the administrative continuity of the Football Association from 1863 until today. The original rules included touchdowns (similar to rugby tries or the so-called rouges of Eton's field game) to serve as a tiebreak if goals were equal. There were initially no crossbars on the goals. Players were allowed to catch balls in the air, make a mark, and then take a free kick, as in modern rugby union. Likewise, throw-ins were taken in a very rugby-like perpendicular manner, and everyone in front of the ball was considered offside.

Collins traces the development of modern football from the insular games of the public schools and industrial north of England and Scotland into globe-spanning phenomena. He also emphasizes that despite the ubiquity of soccer now, rugby-style football was in fact the more successful game in the nineteenth century, with more adherents and a greater global reach, as evidenced by its successor games in North America, Australia, and Ireland. He explores why and how the different Anglophone nations came to play their chosen codes of football and finishes by exploring the expansion of the pastime to the rest of the world.

English football fans chant “it's coming home” at international tournaments to lay claim to the game as an emblem of British greatness, despite not experiencing much success on the field. However, Collins argues that it was only in freeing “the sport from the suffocating grip of British Muscular Christianity” (179–80) that soccer was able to emerge as the global game. Understanding how football in its modern forms—like parliamentary democracy or the English language—conquered the world while leaving much of its Britishness behind is an important part of understanding Britain in the postimperial age and countering mythologies of British exceptionalism that fuel current nationalist projects.

In conclusion, How Football Began is a scholarly tour de force disguised as a book you can easily assign to undergraduates. Drawing on the explosion of scholarship on the subject produced over the last few decades, Collins's arguments are forceful and persuasive. While the history of football in all of its varieties still has much untilled ground to cover, I believe this volume will instantly become the authoritative account of modern games’ origins and set the basic framework of debate for many years to come.