THE BEAUTIFUL GAME’S TARDIS-BENDING JOURNEY THROUGH TIME
SoccerBooks UK. November 2025
In an era where soccer dominates global sports culture, Brendan Murphy’s “The Game That Would Be King” arrives as a revolutionary text that challenges everything we thought we knew about the beautiful game’s origins. This meticulously researched volume doesn’t just push back the timeline of soccer’s history, it explodes it, taking readers on an ambitious journey through a millennium of sporting evolution.
Murphy, already established in the soccer history sphere through his work on Sheffield FC, brings both scholarly rigour and narrative flair to this sweeping chronicle. His background as both an academic and storyteller serves him well, as he weaves together complex historical threads into a compelling tapestry that spans continents and centuries. The book’s greatest strength lies in its ability to contextualise soccer within the broader spectrum of ball games throughout history.
Murphy skilfully establishes connections between ancient Egyptian ball games and mediaeval British folk football, while also giving voice to lesser-known variants such as trapball and knappan. Rather than presenting these as mere curiosities, he demonstrates how each contributed to the evolutionary chain that led to modern soccer. Particularly fascinating is Murphy’s treatment of the mediaeval period, where he illuminates the complex relationship between folk games and social order. The author’s exploration of how these early ball games reflected and sometimes challenged the political and religious structures of their times adds crucial depth to what could have been a mere catalogue of historical sports.
The writing style is refreshingly accessible for such a scholarly work. Murphy is gifted at bringing historical figures and events to life, peppering his narrative with well-chosen anecdotes and contemporary accounts that provide colour and context. His description of mediaeval match days, complete with contemporary accounts of chaos and celebration, makes these distant events feel immediate and relatable. Where some sports histories can become bogged down in statistics and dry facts, Murphy maintains momentum through careful pacing and thematic organization. The book’s structure, moving both chronologically and geographically, helps readers understand the parallel development of different ball games across cultures while maintaining focus on soccer’s eventual emergence as the dominant form.
The inclusion of previously unpublished research and newly unearthed historical documents makes this book not just a comprehensive overview but a genuine contribution to sports scholarship. Murphy’s work will likely serve as a foundational text for future studies in the field, while remaining accessible enough for the casual sports enthusiast. One minor criticism might be that the book occasionally ventures into tangential territories—the detailed explorations of hockey, hurling, and other concurrent sports sometimes threaten to overshadow the main narrative. However, these diversions ultimately serve to illustrate the interconnected nature of sporting evolution and enrich our understanding of how soccer emerged as the preeminent global game.
“The Game That Would Be King” is more than just a sports history—it’s a cultural archaeology that reveals how deeply games are woven into the fabric of human civilization. For anyone interested in soccer, sports history, or the evolution of human recreation, this book is an essential read that illuminates the past while enhancing our appreciation of the modern game.
In an age where soccer’s future is being shaped by technology and globalisation, Murphy’s examination of its past provides valuable perspective on how the sport has continuously adapted and evolved. This book stands as a testament to soccer’s enduring ability to reflect and shape the societies that play it, making it a vital addition to any serious sports library.
BRENDAN MURPHY REWRITES THE ORIGIN STORY OF FOOTBALL ITSELF
Irish Post. 7 January 2026
The Game That Would Be King sets out to do something audacious: rewrite what we think we know about the origins of soccer. Brendan Murphy’s new work, published by Meyer & Meyer Sport earlier this month, is part scholarly odyssey, part time-traveller’s guide, charting the evolution of ball games over five millennia. The journey stretches from ancient Egypt to Mesoamerica, through the Greeks, the Chinese dynasties, and the Roman Empire, before arriving in medieval Britain and, crucially, Ireland, where much of the real action begins. Kicking a ball, it seems, was a ubiquitous pastime.
Murphy traces a family tree of games long forgotten: trapball, stoolball, the wonderfully named “camping” and “knappan”, with hockey, hurling, baseball, bowling, tennis and golf stepping into view along the way. Exotic cousins — baggataway, knattleikur, soule, calcio — are part of the story too, although possibly not in evolutionary terms; just evidence that playing ball seems to have been with us, in most areas of the world, for a long time. Soccer remains centre stage, but the wider cast gives the book its colour, strangeness and charm.
For Irish readers there is particular interest. Large portions of the research delve into hurling’s antiquity and its role as arguably Europe’s earliest post-Roman field sport. Murphy mines political and literary sources to show how, over centuries, an Irishman striking a ball could, in the wrong company, be seen as subversion. Newspapers bristle with official suspicion, and the author threads these social and political echoes through the narrative with care.
There are fascinating digressions too, not least Murphy’s reiteration of evidence that elements of Norse mythology may have sprung from Irish oral tradition, supported by the striking statistic that 43 per cent of Iceland’s first settlers came from Ireland and Scotland. This, of course, is not new research, and has been attested to before. “The Irish brought to Iceland their literature and their learning – of which the Scandinavians had nothing,” said Halldór Laxness, Iceland’s Nobel Laureate in Literature. “Without the sagas we would just be another Danish island.”
Packed with oddities, anecdotes and ephemera, The Game That Would Be King is a dense but engaging work — likely the most comprehensive history of early ball games yet assembled, described in the publisher’s words as “a revolutionary text”.
SPORTS BOOKS THAT TELL THE STORY OF IRELAND’S GAMES AND GAMEMAKERS
Irish America Magazine. Winter 2025
Irish sport is seldom just about the field of play. It’s often tangled up with history, migration, religion, class, politics, pride, heartbreak (inevitably) and occasionally unfettered joy . . . Murphy mines political and literary sources to show how, over centuries, an Irishman striking a ball could, in the wrong company, be seen as subversion. Newspapers bristle with official suspicion, and the author threads these social and political echoes through the narrative with care.