A look into the life of one of football’s most visionary men, Herbert Chapman. He took Huddersfield and Arsenal to unprecedented success in the pre-WWII era.

14 miles from the birthplace of the oldest surviving club in the world is Kiveton Park. This small town in South Yorkshire has a coal-mining tradition dating back to the Middle Ages, with Kiveton Park Colliery one of the earliest deep mines in the world. Up until 1994, when all the mines shut down, the town was one of the hubs of industry. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that Herbert Chapman’s father, a miner, moved his family there from Derbyshire in 1869.

“Kiveton Park could claim to have been a cradle of two revolutions, one industrial and the other sporting, and beyond question it is the birthplace of at least one great man, widely considered the father of football as we have come to know it.”

– Patrick Barclay, The Life and Times of Herbert Chapman

Humble beginnings

Herbert Chapman, playing for Sheffield Wednesday circa 1904