On a quiet, cold, Autumnal night in Victorian London, at the Freemason's Tavern in Great Queen Street, near Covent Garden, London, the protagonist Ebenezer Cobb Morley was about to change the world of sport. 
This has nothing to do with Great Expectations or Oliver Twist, but it is the beginning of the Football Association. On this day in 1863, eleven clubs and schools, led by Morley, met for the first time to create a standard set of rules (later more known as Laws), for newly formed clubs to follow into the future. Yes there have been considerable changes but this was the birth of the great game.
There had been games of various forms using a ball (of varying shapes) on a space with goals to achieve against an opposition, sometimes of unknown numbers and on unknown spaces.
By the 1820s, students at Public Schools and Universities began to think about rules!
There were forms of "catch and run" games, massive scrums, dribbling games and big boots but eventually at Cambridge University, in 1848, the Rules and ten years later, the Sheffield Rules attempted to "mould" the mass into a civilised, dribbling game. The boys at Charterhouse school in London were well ahead of the masses! The rules said you could not "run with the ball", but catching was still permitted. The game was close to the present day Aussie Rules by this time.
Meanwhile the Blackheath and Rugby codes preferred full on handling and hacking!
Schools, universities and clubs stuck to their own rules, so eventually, JC Thring at Uppingham School drew a number of rules in 1862, to create what he called "The Simplest Game". It did not catch on but the idea of "unity" appealed and so in October 1863, representatives from Kilburn, Barnes, The War Office, Crusaders , Perceval House, Crystal Palace, Blackheath School, Kensington School, Surbiton and Blackheath met in Central London to agree the new rules, unifying all the varieties to form the Football Association.. needless to say there were rifts and Blackheath withdrew by Christmas pursuing the handling version which would soon become RUGBY! The William Webb Ellis myth of picking up the ball during a "football" game at Rugby School in 1823 is just that. When catching was finally outlawed in 1866, the game of football was "rolling", so to speak and the FA gained momentum.
The Football Association, English football's governing body, was formed in 1863. 'Organised football' or 'football as we know it' dates from that time. Ebenezer Morley, a London solicitor who formed Barnes FC in 1862, could be called the 'father' of The Association.
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