The Wanderers Football Club, ‘The Celebrated Wanderers’, was the first of that elite group of clubs including Blackburn Rovers, Aston Villa, Huddersfield Town, Arsenal and Manchester United, whose names so dominate successive eras of English football. Five times winners of the F.A. Cup, home at some stage of their careers to more than forty English International players and source of legendary administrators such as C.W. Alcock and Lord Kinnaird, the Wanderers are the very epitome of the early, heroic, age of the Association game.
It is surprising, therefore, that until now no comprehensive history of this renowned club has been available to the football enthusiast. ‘The Wanderers F.C.’ remedies that emission, beginning with a survey of the High Victorian milieu in which the Wanderers and its predecessor the Forest club had their origins. It provides for the first time a season by season narrative of the team’s matches based on contemporary accounts, together with a full statistical record of every game played by the club between its formation in 1859 and its disappearance some twenty five years later.
There are also brief biographies of fifty of the most prominent players with notes on others of interest who appeared for the club, among whom are a famous cricketing ‘Doctor’, the founder of West Ham United F.C., the father of an eminent Field Marshal, and the first American to play in an F.A. Cup Final.