At the start of September 1914, less than a month after the outbreak of the First World War, the Football Association (FA), issued a mandate stating that clubs should offer up their fields ‘for use as Drill Grounds’.
In an article in Britain and the World, Brandon Luedtke illustrates a parallel transformation during the First World War: on the home front, the making of the football pitch into a battlefield; at the war front, the reinventing of the battlefield as a playing field.
He highlights that throughout the First World War, the football pitch satisfied many of the very real material and psychological needs of the English war effort.
>>Learn more and read the article from Britain and the World
