Netflix’s 'The English Game' is a Charming Story That Goes Beyond Football

Julian Fellowes turns from Highclere Castle to the football pitch with The English Game, a period drama that ostensibly exists to tell the story of the origins of the sport we Americans now call soccer, but which spends just as much time exploring issues of class and inclusion as it does the art of passing.

The English Game is set in 1878 and follows the story of two very different men. Arthur Kinnaird (Edward Holcroft), the brash, wealthy captain of the Old Etonians, heads a group of generally aristocratic snobs who play football as their general means of exercise and who all sit on the board of the Football Association that makes the rules of the game. Fergus Suter (Kevin Guthrie), a Scottish player from Glasgow, has been hired by a local mill owner and given additional wages to play for the town’s team in an attempt to skirt the rules about involving supposedly “professional” competitors in their previously amateur league and given their decidedly non-aristocratic supporters something to believe in.

The rise of working-class teams is but one of the sea changes in football that The English Game attempts to explore. From paid players and geographically-based travel challenges to hooliganism and merchandising, the growing pains of the sport are laid bare for all to see.