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Christmas Cheers

5:00pm Thursday, 17th December 2009

Association Football was born in a Christian country. The posh, ex-public schoolboys who met in a pub in London in 1863, and wrote the Rules of the game, may not have been especially 'religious' - but they had been born and raised amongst Sunday hymns and school prayers. Indeed, many of those who subsequently introduced football with missionary enthusiasm into working class communities were vicars, sometimes called the 'muscular Christians'; and every football fan knows that many of our most famous old clubs emerged from churches.

So it might seem odd that Christmas itself has never been allowed to interfere with the playing of the professional game in UK. In fact, for most of the first hundred years of football, league clubs played the same opposing team, 'home' and 'away', on Christmas Day and Boxing Day;. It made for some long, cold and tedious journeys, both for fans and players, and the turkey was stone cold by the time you got home.

But for many of those flat-capped, working men who stood on the terraces, football was itself a 'festival'; in fact, a 'season' of festivals. On matchdays, you wore strange colours, made 'pilgrimages' to far flung grounds; got drunk and sang songs in choirs of thousands; whilst your attention was focussed on skilled performers who could (occasionally) reveal some 'magic' and make the world appear a wonderful place.

Thousands of those fans who supported the founder member clubs of the world's first professional League worked in the cotton industry; ship-building, iron or heaving coal. Up to half the populations of these towns and cities weren't born there; they were migrants from farms and small villages, moving to the industrial centres for work. In the process, they were leaving behind a calendar of rural high days and festivities reflecting nature's seasons. They soon found themselves living in narrow courts and working through winter, from dark to dark, in great factories. But they also discovered a new, festive, urban 'calendar' awaiting them - the regular processions of League and Cup games. Despite the fact that we play for eight months a year these days, we still call it 'a season' of football. For many in UK, Christmas and football go together, like mince pies and hot, spiced wine.

Most of the world doesn't play football at Christmas time, however, because they don't usually play at all for the whole of December &January. Most of northern Europe shuts down because it's just too cold to play, but in Asia and South America, the main league competitions also come to a climax in November or early December; they don't kick off the new season until March.

Arsene Wenger amongst many has called on the Premier League to take a break in the middle of winter. Coaches' concerns are focussed on players of course, and their desire to give them sustained rest during a season which stretches from August to May.

Fifa too would love to 'harmonise' the world-calendar of football, and as by far the global majority generally conforms to the: 'Start in March - Take a two month break in June/July - Restart in August - Cup Final and League title in September' schedule, then Europe would have to change. But it's not going to happen is it? Fifa first started discussing 'harmonisation' at an Exec Committee meeting in....wait for it...1934!

Even if we, in Europe, eventually installed a mandatory 'rest break' for players in mid winter, who wants a Cup Final in November?

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