The English Game is a British historical sports drama TV-show developed by Julian Fellowes for Netflix. The English Game tells the story of two real players, the pioneers of English football: aristocrat Arthur Kinnaird, President of Barclays Bank and future head of the FA, and the Scottish stonemason Fergus Suter, who is considered the first professional footballer.
The main conflict in The English Game is the confrontation between aristocratic teams, which determined the first football rules based on ball games, popular among students of elite schools and universities, and working-class teams massively created in different cities of England. It is clear that the workers had neither the strength nor the means to train so much as the aristocrats could afford. The team owners began to pay the best players and poach them from other teams, which did not please the aristocrats, who believed that getting paid for playing football was unethical and contrary to the game's essence.
Key games featured in the series are the 1879 FA Cup semi-finals, in which the Darwen Club from Northern England met the Old Etonians Club, formed in 1871, as well as the 1882 FA Cup Finals.
The English Game shows the first professional players, the sportswear of those times and the sportswear industry's birth, first transfers, player rent, the first soccer ad, the first stadiums (cricket fields), the first football broadcasts. The English Game is an incredibly interesting six-episode miniseries that shows how it all started.