This December the Wolves Museum will celebrate the launch of Nick Fishwick’s latest book, after Molineux played a prominent role in the publication's research.
Fishwick’s title, ‘Moving The Goalposts: The Transformation of English Football’, will be launched on Friday 4th December, 6.30pm – an evening which will conclude a shared project between author and football club.
Tickets are priced at £10 each and include full access to the Wolves Museum, as well as a word from the author. Click here to purchase.
Many books on the history game have been published, but this one is different. Moving The Goalposts: The Transformation of English Football is based, not just on other published histories, but on the archives of football clubs, including Wolves, and associations.
Wolves let author, social historian and national security expert Nick Fishwick spend time last summer exploring boxes of accounts and minute books in the club’s museum, learning how the Old Gold dominated football in the 1950s, how it treated its players, fans and the press. He also found other precious pieces of football history: players’ accounts of tours of Europe in the 1930s, the amazing scrapbook of a season by a young female fan, Joan Hawthorne.
Nick takes the story of change in the game way back before the establishment of the EPL, so Wolves are central to the story, having helped change the nature of the elite game in the 1950s.
By investing in floodlights and pioneering mid-week European friendlies like the epic match against Honved in 1954, covered by radio and television, Wolves led British elite clubs to a new focus on Europe: the European Cup, Cup Winners Cup, and other tournaments. The domination of the Football League, which went back to 1888, was destroyed.
Moving the Goalposts looks at elite football but also tells the story of the grassroots. How tribal and passionate village football was; how it meant more to locals than kicking a ball around. How women’s football was never completely wiped out after the FA banned it in 1921, and how women were involved in the game as non-players. How FA rules kept the local game well-regulated, but at the cost of excluding hundreds of thousands of potential players. How this changed, above all by the acceptance of Sunday football in 1960.
With a special focus on Wolves, as well as other major and minor clubs who let Nick study their private archives, this book will help you understand the history of the English game as never before. Old pros are not just ‘legends’, icons: they are real people who experienced glory, fought with their clubs, wept in police courts, died in asylums. The people who ran the game a hundred years ago were pompous and narrow-minded: but they also had real values and dedicated their lives to the game.
Come and find out what English football really was, and how it changed. Join Nick Fishwick at the Wolves Museum for a lively discussion of how and why the English game was transformed on 4th December.
