This week’s ‘Rugby Reloaded’ looks at the new Netflix series about the early years of English soccer ‘The English Game’. Does it present an accurate account of the rise of working-class teams in soccer and the importance of Scottish players to the game? Or is it ultimately a romantic defence of the British class system and a distortion of the history of football? The episode also sheds new light on the ‘Scotch Professors’ and the ‘shock of the new’ that football represented at the turn of the 1870s. For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.
