Football's Pioneers: Charles Sutcliffe

It is a well-known fact that Burnley was one of the 12 founder members of the Football League. Since then, the Turf Moor club have left an indelible mark on the game, winning the FA Cup in 1914 and two First Division titles in 1921 and 1960, making Burnley the club from the smallest town to win the trophy.

However, perhaps their deepest and most enduring legacy to the Football League came in the figure of Charles Edward Sutcliffe (1864-1939), pictured above on the right, with league president John McKenna and league secretary Tom Charnley.

Initially, Sutcliffe joined Burnley to play rugby before the club switched to the association code. A solicitor by profession, he gave up playing in the mid-1880s but was elected to the committee and later became a club director.

He was also a Football League referee, earning himself a reputation as an obstinate and controversial official. But it was as a league administrator that Sutcliffe built his real reputation. He joined the Football League Management Committee in 1898 and, bar one season served on it, for the rest of his life.

In 1936, he was elected league president and also served on the FA Council. During the league’s first 50 years, more than anyone else, it was Sutcliffe who shaped its direction and the culture of mutuality whereby the richer clubs supported the poorer ones.

Unsurprisingly, Sutcliffe was a passionate defender of both the retain and transfer system and the maximum wage. He successfully defended the league in the Kingaby case in 1912, which had challenged the legality of the transfer system, and drew up emergency regulations to keep clubs afloat during the First World War. Through the newspapers, he was particularly scathing and sarcastic of the wage demands of players, who he felt would bankrupt the game.

After the war, Sutcliffe was the architect behind the league’s transformation from a parochial organisation into a national body of 88 clubs in four divisions by 1923. It was Sutcliffe, along with his son and daughter, who secretively drew up the league’s annual fixture list, based on a complex system of charts and maps. 

As a practicing methodist and a supporter of Burnley’s temperance movement, he held strict moral values, which reflected his Victorian upbringing.

While Sutcliffe was frail in appearance, he had had great energy. Moreover, he shaped, as well as reflected, the early character of the Football League. Blunt and uncompromising, it was these qualities he shared with other league administrators from ‘the harder, Northern school’.