Effect on Football

Many thanks to David Tillotson (North Yorkshire) for bringing our attention to this and to - Willow Books (Collins) 1988, Rothmans Football Year Books  of League Football the publishers of - The Official Centenary History of the Football League and the men who made it

        Joe Tillotson suggested a Football Association League The major issue that threatened to tear the British football world apart was professionalism. Although not an early supporter William McGreggor, realised its spread was inevitable and he soon lent his voice to it; and a powerful voice it was.

        At a special FA conference he was the only delegate from the Midlands prepared to stand up and openly advocate professionalism, and to admit that his club was paying players. Having helped to secure the recognition of professionalism in 1885, McGreggor was subsequently keen to curb what he feared might be its effect upon both the players and the unity within the game.

        McGreggor was never a rebel and remained a loyal supporter of the FA all his life. But it is as father of the League that McGreggor will always be remembered, and to appreciate how and why he evolved the idea it is important to discover something of McGreggor's life in the 1880's

        Until football took up more of his time McGreggor was a member of the local Liberal Association. Birmingham in those years was a thriving and influential centre of liberal and radical ideas. The need for civic improvements, the betterment of the workers lot, the virtues of temperance, faith and diligence were planks of the Victorian urban life. Football clubs which promoted sport, kept men off the streets, enhanced local prestige and inspired loyalty, ostensibly helped towards these goals - even if they were tainted by the evils of drinking and blasphemy.

        A few doors from McGreggors' shop stood the Liberal club, and a hundred yards further down the road at 91 Alma Street, was the coffee shop of close friend and fellow Liberal and Villa enthusiast, Joe Tillotson (The coffee shop was on the site of what is now the Cross Guns pub car park on Rodney Close)

        Joe Tillotson was a popular referee and lineman who stayed on the League list until he was fifty two, in 1909. He became the President of the Birmingham County FA, and active Liberal city councillor, and lived to the age of eighty eight.

        Joe Tillotson's shop and the Liberal club were popular meeting places where it is believed that the first conversations about the League took place. In fact, according to some reminiscences, it was Joe Tillotson who first gave McGreggor the idea for a regular competition, one winter's night in 1886. Peter Morris's history of Aston Villa (Naldrett Press 1960) says that Joe Tillotson complained 'that Villa supporters were getting tired of watching one-sided friendly games at Perry Barr' McGreggor then discussed the problem with fellow Villa committee men.