Rob Hopkins: pre-oil age football

My thanks to Peter Cross for sending this in.  Here is a fascinating taste of how football worked before the age of cheap oil. Football today is hard to imagine without its huge carbon footprint and its dependence on dazzlingly sophisticated communications technology.  Man Utd’s climate change-aware defender Rio Ferdinand, recently said “we travel week in week out. We’re in France one week, Spain the next. How do you get around that? I’m yet to be told – unless you can enlighten me?”  Well here’s a story that could contribute to that conversation.

This is a picture of the football team of the Fox public house in Felpham near Bognor Regis, in West Sussex in 1911.  In front of the team is a football on top of a box.  The box was used to transport a pigeon to away matches.  According to Peter, at the end of the game the result was written on a small piece of paper and sent by pigeon to the Bognor Regis Observer.  A strategy that Rio might like to adopt as he attempts to interest Man Utd in reducing their carbon footprint?