Sheffield author's book about football on the home front during World War One is said to be a first

Alexander Jackson’s Football’s Great War explores how the game experienced, reacted to and was shaped by the first great national crisis to profoundly affect it.

Published by Pen and Sword Books, it is said to be the first book to cover the story of football on the English home front during World War One, filling an important gap in histories of football, wartime sport and civilian life.

The publisher says the structure and fabric of the game were challenged during the war, with fundamental questions asked about its place and value in society.

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Jackson’s book demonstrates that contrary to many views, the game did not disappear with the FA’s ban on professionalism in 1915.

Instead, he argues it remained an important part of everyday life for millions of people – but who experienced and viewed it during wartime conditions and values.

Jackson is a curator at the National Football Museum in Manchester and has researched and published widely on the history of English football. He was lead curator for the 2014 exhibition, The Greater Game: Football and the First World War.

Born in Sheffield, he has inherited his family’s allegiance to Newcastle United.

His new book argues that the FA’s ban on professionalism in 1915 represents an important but unexplored part of both the game’s history and the cultural conflicts that characterised wartime British society.

It uses new and unused material and images from the collections of the National Football Museum, the FA and the English Football League. The book costs £25.