An English City Gave Soccer to the World. Now It Wants Credit.

As far as the person within the meals truck is anxious, the patch of land he occupies in Sheffield, England, is about as humdrum as they arrive. To him, the spot — within the drab car parking zone of a sprawling house enchancment superstore, its facade plastered in lurid orange — will not be precisely a spot the place historical past comes alive.

John Wilson, an instructional on the University of Sheffield’s administration faculty, appears on the similar website and may barely comprise his pleasure. This, he mentioned, is without doubt one of the locations the place the world’s hottest sport was born. He doesn’t see a car parking zone. He can see the historical past: the verdant grass, the sweating gamers, the cheering crowds.

His ardour is honest, absolute and shared by a small band of newbie historians and volunteer detectives dedicated to restoring Sheffield — finest identified for metal, coal and because the setting for the movie “The Full Monty” — to its rightful place because the undisputed birthplace of codified, organized, recognizable soccer.

For now, their makes an attempt have mustered a strolling tour of the town, carried out by means of a do-it-yourself app, and some barely weathered plaques. But Dr. Wilson and his compatriots have a daring imaginative and prescient of what their efforts may produce: a “digital museum” of Sheffield’s soccer historical past, a sculpture path and — greater than something — a transparent and prestigious id for a metropolis that has, in latest occasions, struggled just a bit to outline itself.

As they give the impression of being to make use of the town’s previous to form its future, although, they do — Dr. Wilson warned — have a little bit of a “tendency to go off on tangents.”

He will not be mistaken. In the half-hour stroll to the car parking zone, Dr. Wilson, 65, and two of his fellow fanatics, John Stocks, a 65-year-old retired English instructor and creator, and John Clarke, a retired laptop engineer who’s 63, touched on a spread of topics that included — however was not restricted to — social migration patterns in Victorian England, the Netflix collection “The English Game” and the observe of topping partitions with crozzle, a waste product from iron furnaces.

They mentioned every digression with glee, eagerly diving each rabbit gap. Like many ardent hobbyists, they reveled within the element as a lot because the sweep.

The image they’ve of their minds, although, is evident.

“In the 1850s and 60s, there were hundreds of teams, playing each other in competitive games, on pitches all over the city,” Mr. Stocks mentioned. In learning Sheffield’s soccer legacy, he mentioned, the previous they’ve unearthed reveals the town as “the home of the first real football culture anywhere in the world.” That, they imagine, may additionally be the important thing to its future.

But the title “Home of Football” — all the time capitalized and, in flagrant disregard of New York Times type, by no means “soccer” — is a contested one.

It is semiofficially utilized to Wembley, the stadium within the infinite grey expanse of northwest London that’s the headquarters of each the English nationwide crew and the Football Association, the sport’s governing physique in England.

Visit England, the nation’s vacationer board, backs one other contender. It describes Manchester because the “Home of Football,” on the grounds that it hosts two heavyweights of the Premier League and the National Football Museum. Manchester can also be the place the Football League — the game’s first skilled competitors — was shaped.

In comparability, Sheffield’s candidacy for the title is distinctly homespun. There is a quick précis of the town’s position within the recreation’s formation on the web site of its vacationer board, and an archive is on show within the “local studies” part of the town’s library.

“We’ve not been very good at promoting ourselves,” mentioned Richard Caborn, a former lawmaker from the town and the minister for sport underneath Tony Blair’s Labour authorities. “We’ve never really positioned ourselves to exploit it.”

Sheffield Home of Football, an academic charity established by Dr. Wilson and his fellow vacationers, has stepped into that void.

“We’ve been through the history and we have the documentation,” Mr. Caborn mentioned. “This isn’t a claim. It’s evidence-based.”

Sheffield’s case is compelling. Sheffield F.C., the world’s oldest membership, was based right here. So, too, was Hallam F.C., the world’s second-oldest. Hallam’s house, Sandygate, has been internet hosting soccer since 1860, longer than wherever else. It was in Sheffield, too, that the foundations of the sport that might turn out to be soccer had been first written down.

Mr. Stocks and his fellow “obsessives” — his phrase — draw the best satisfaction to find the supporting proof. It is painstaking work, trawling by means of each digital and bodily archives, however value it, he mentioned.

“There are some of us who will stay up all night chasing down a lead they’ve found,” he mentioned. “I’m not quite as bad as that, but I do devote quite a lot of time to it. I have quite a few other projects I’m supposed to be getting on with, but the reality is that most of the time, I’m doing this.”

Because of their work, Sheffield can now, with an affordable diploma of confidence, declare to be house to the primary derby match in world soccer — the assembly of metropolis rivals Sheffield F.C. and Hallam on the location of the house enchancment retailer’s car parking zone — in addition to the primary nook kick, the primary use of the crossbar and the primary match report.

Mr. Stocks has additionally tracked down a suggestion that passing was invented in Sheffield — not in Scotland, as is extensively believed. There are accounts of what sounds an terrible lot like professionalism. “We think there’s a chance the first German team was founded here, too,” Dr. Wilson mentioned.

Part of the fun, they admit, is correcting a few of the inaccuracies in what they name soccer’s “folk history.” Their driving drive, although, is the sense that their discoveries can outline not solely what Sheffield was, however what it would but be.

In the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties, Sheffield was hit laborious by the decline of Britain’s heavy industries; even more durable than a lot of the remainder of northern England, Dr. Wilson mentioned.

Built on metal and coal, the town was run for years by a left-leaning council that was a gleeful thorn within the facet of successive British governments. “They called it the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire,” he mentioned. As the factories and mines shuttered, Sheffield struggled each for funding and id.

The numerous trendy conceptions of Sheffield haven’t yielded a brand new one. The backdrop for the movie “Brassed Off,” in addition to “The Full Monty,” and residential to Pulp and the Arctic Monkeys, two of the defining British bands of the final quarter-century, the town additionally developed a fame for superior manufacturing. It is the place, yearly, the world snooker championship is held.

Nothing, although, has ever fairly settled. “The council are leaning into music quite heavily now,” Mr. Stocks mentioned. “But it won’t stick. We’re not Liverpool. We’re not London. We’re not Glasgow.”

Soccer, although, is totally different. To him and the others, Sheffield’s position in shaping the preferred sport on the planet ought to be its calling card, its declare to fame — to not entice vacationers essentially, however so it could discover its place on the planet, can outline its sense of self.

“Most people here only have a vague awareness of some of it,” Dr. Wilson mentioned. “They don’t know we have this unique identity, that this is something we gave to the world. No other city can say that.”