An English city gave football to the world. Now it wants credit.

As far as the man in the food truck is concerned, the plot of land he occupies in Sheffield, England is about as mundane as it gets. To him, the place – in the drab parking lot of a sprawling home improvement superstore, its facade plastered in lurid orange – isn't exactly a place where history comes alive.

John Wilson, an academic at the University of Sheffield's management school, looks at the same spot and can barely contain his excitement. This, he said, is one of the places where the world's most popular sport was born. He doesn't see a parking lot. He can see the history: the green grass, the sweating players, the cheering crowd.

His passion is genuine, absolute and shared by a small group of amateur historians and volunteer detectives committed to restoring Sheffield – best known for steel, coal and as a film setting.The full Monty” – to its rightful place as the undisputed birthplace of codified, organised, recognizable football.

For now, their efforts have resulted in a walking tour of the city, conducted via a homemade app, and a few slightly weathered plaques. But Dr. Wilson and his compatriots have a bold vision of what their efforts could deliver: a 'digital museum' of Sheffield's football history, a sculpture trail and – more than anything else – a clear and prestigious identity for a city that has lately , struggled a bit to define herself.

While they want to use the city's past to shape its future, they have – warned Dr. Wilson – a bit of a tendency to go down the wrong path.

He's not wrong. During the half-hour walk to the parking lot, Dr. Wilson, 65, and two of his fellow enthusiasts, John Stocks, a 65-year-old retired English teacher and author, and John Clarke, a 63-year-old retired computer engineer, touched on a range of topics including – but not limited to – social migration patterns in Victorian England, the Netflix series 'The English Game' and the practice of covering walls with crozzle, a waste product from iron furnaces.

They discussed every digression with glee and delved eagerly into every rabbit hole. Like many avid hobbyists, they enjoyed the detail as much as the scope.

However, the image they have in their minds is clear.

“In the 1850s and 1860s there were hundreds of teams playing against each other in competitive matches, on fields across the city,” Mr Stocks said. In studying Sheffield's football legacy, he said, the past they have unearthed shows that the city is “home to the first real football culture anywhere in the world.” According to them, that could also be the key to his future.

But the title “Home of Football” – always capitalized and, in blatant disregard for New York Times style, never “soccer” – is controversial.

It is semiofficially applied to Wembleythe stadium in the endless gray expanse of north-west London that is the headquarters of both the England national team and the Football Association, the governing body in England.

Visit England, the country's tourism board, is backing another contender. It describes Manchester as the 'home of football' because it hosts it two heavyweights of the Premier League and the National Football Museum. Manchester is also where the Football League, the sport's first professional league, was founded.

By comparison, Sheffield's bid for the title is distinctly domestic. The game's website contains a brief description of the city's role in the creation of the game tourist Officeand an archive can be seen in the city's 'local studies' department library.

“We haven't been very good at promoting ourselves,” said Richard Caborn, a former city lawmaker and sports minister under Tony Blair's Labor government. “We never really positioned ourselves to take advantage of it.”

Sheffield Home of Football, an educational charity founded by Dr. Wilson and his fellow travelers, has stepped into that void.

“We've gone through the history and we have the documentation,” Mr. Caborn said. 'This is not an allegation. It is evidence-based.”

Sheffield's case is compelling. Sheffield F.C. the world's oldest club, was founded here. That was also the case Hallam FC, the second oldest in the world. Hallam's home, Sandygate, has been playing football since 1860, longer than anywhere else. The rules of the game that would become football were also written down for the first time in Sheffield.

Mr Stocks and his fellow 'obsessives' – his word – derive the greatest satisfaction from finding corroborating evidence. It's painstaking work, sifting through both digital and physical archives, but worth it, he said.

“Some of us stay up all night looking for a clue that we've found,” he said. “I'm not that bad, but I do spend a lot of time on it. I have quite a few other projects to work on, but the reality is that this is what I do most of the time.”

Thanks to their work, Sheffield can now, with a fair degree of confidence, claim to be the home of world football's first derby match – the meeting of city rivals Sheffield FC and Hallam on the site of the hardware store car park. as well as the first corner kick, the first use of the crossbar and the first match report.

Mr Stocks has also tracked down a suggestion that passing was invented in Sheffield – and not Scotland as is widely believed. There are stories of what looks very much like professionalism. “We think there is a good chance that the first German team was also founded here,” said Dr. Wilson.

They admit that part of the tension is correcting some inaccuracies in what they call the “people's history” of football. Their driving force, however, is the sense that their discoveries can define not only what Sheffield was, but what it could still be.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Sheffield was hit hard by the decline of British heavy industry; even more difficult than much of the rest of northern England, said Dr. Wilson.

Built on steel and coal, the city was for years governed by a left-wing council that was a cheerful thorn in the side of successive British governments. “They called it the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire,” he said. As the factories and mines closed, Sheffield struggled with both investment and identity.

The various modern views of Sheffield have not produced any new ones. The city was the setting for the films 'Brassed Off' and 'The Full Monty' and home to Pulp and the Arctic Monkeys, two of the defining British bands of the past quarter century. The city also developed a reputation for advanced manufacturing. . It is the place where every year the world snooker championship is being held.

However, nothing is ever completely settled. “The council relies quite heavily on music now,” Mr Stocks said. “But it doesn't stick around. We are not Liverpool. We are not London. We are not Glasgow.”

Football, however, is different. For him and the others, Sheffield's role in shaping the world's most popular sport should be its calling card, its claim to fame – not necessarily to attract tourists, but so that the sport can find its place in the world, its sense of self.

“Most people here are only vaguely aware of some of it,” said Dr. Wilson. “They don't know that we have this unique identity, that this is something that we have given to the world. No other city can say that.”