Who Invented the Penalty Kick — and Why English Football Was Insulted By It

A goalkeeper wrote the rule

William McCrum (1865–1932) was a wealthy Ulster linen manufacturer, a member of the Irish Football Association, and — usefully for this story — a goalkeeper, for Milford FC in 1890.

Deciding a match by them raises a separate problem — see the penalty shootout and ABBA.

He had watched a specific problem develop. Defenders were deliberately fouling attackers to stop goals, because the punishment for doing so cost less than the goal it prevented. A free kick from open play was a poor trade for a certain goal denied.

His proposal was simple: if an offence prevents a goal, the restart should restore the goalscoring opportunity rather than merely resume play.

Through the Board, over two years

The proposal was submitted to the June 1890 meeting of the International Football Association Board by the Irish FA’s general secretary and IFAB representative, Jack Reid.

It did not pass. The Board returned to it in June 1891, at the Alexandra Hotel in Glasgow, where the motion was put by an Irish delegate and seconded by an English one.

On 2 June 1891, the penalty kick was approved. It entered the Laws as Law 14 — and it is still Law 14, the same number, more than a century later.

The objection was to the premise, not the punishment

This is what makes the episode worth reading, and it is not really about football.

The English FA’s resistance was not that the sanction was too harsh, or the distance wrong, or the goalkeeper disadvantaged. It was that the rule assumed players would cheat — and the recorded view was that only gentlemen played football, and gentlemen did not cheat.

The press was blunter, condemning the “Irishman’s motion” as a death sentence for the game.

Read plainly, the argument was that a law against deliberate fouling was an accusation. To legislate against something is to concede it happens, and a sport that saw itself as an expression of character found that concession intolerable.

The Corinthians took it seriously enough to refuse

The most remarkable consequence is that some clubs declined to use the new law.

The Corinthians, proud of their amateur ideals, held that a gentleman would never deliberately commit a foul. So their players refused to take a penalty awarded to them, and would not properly defend one given against them.

That is not a protest gesture. It is a club accepting a competitive disadvantage, repeatedly, rather than acknowledge that the rule described anyone like them. Whatever one thinks of the position, it was held at a cost.

And then a handball settled it

The thing that moved the Board was not an argument. It was an incident.

A blatant goal-line handball by a Notts County player, in an FA Cup quarter-final against Stoke City, demonstrated the problem in front of everyone: an offence that plainly prevented a goal, and a punishment that plainly did not restore it.

After that, the Board approved the proposal.

This is how sporting law usually moves, and the pattern recurs across this site — boxing arrived at twelve rounds after a death, and football’s own founding meetings settled the game by banning hacking. Arguments rarely change rules. Incidents do.

What the story is actually about

The penalty kick is now so fundamental that its absence is unimaginable. It was introduced against sustained opposition from the sport’s most powerful federation, on the grounds that it was rude.

The lasting lesson is about how governing bodies reason. The English FA was not defending bad behaviour; it was defending an idea of itself. Once the Notts County handball made that idea untenable in public, the rule passed within months.

More origin questions are in sports history, and the modern Laws in the rules of soccer.