This is one of the first academic studies of football history in the German language. The book compares the development of football in Britain to the German–speaking countries; expands the material on the history of football in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria using new primary sources; outlines new avenues for future research, e. g. concerning the genderedness of football and the game's impact on emotions. The book's first three chapters are on football as an elitist game and the cultural transfer from Britain to the continent, on football as the people's game, and on football and money. They show that the development in Germany followed Britain, but with a delay of some three to four decades. This is true for the game's adoption in elitist schools, for the founding of the first clubs by academics, for football's popularisation, and for the (highly debated) emergence of professionalism. There were, however, some major differences, mainly due to the opposition against football by the already established and strongly nationalist cult of gymnastics in the German-speaking countries. Further chapters analyse the relationship between football and emotions, the game's role as a focus for national, regional and even confessional identities, and the attempts to use it as an agent of class struggle by socialist and communist workers' sports movements in the inter-war period. The last chapter analyses football's genderedness by recapitulating the history of women's football and by a critical assessment of the most common sociological and anthropological theories on hooliganism, most of which conceptualise hooligan violence as an aberration of masculinity. The epilogue considers football's part in modern literature.