This is great news for the 19th century Blackburn Rovers, but is less good news for viewers who want to see Season 2 of The English Game. With most of the story told in these six episodes, and Julian Fellowes soon to be busy on The Gilded Age for HBO, it looks like this may be the only season of the series that we are getting. However, there are a number of plot points that could be spun off into another season.
What happened at the end of The English Game?
The Netflix series ended with Fergus Suter (played by Kevin Guthrie) lifting the FA Cup as part of his team, Blackburn Rovers, after an episode which saw him fighting the FA to get them to overturn their decision to disqualify his team for paying him to play.
One of the big themes of The English Game has been the power of a collective, whether that is the mill workers who went on strike to stop a big wage cut, or the soccer teams that had to learn to work together to win the game, and this paid off in Episode 6 of the show. After Fergus went to appeal to the FA and admitted to being a professional player, the organisation upheld its decision to ban his team from the final.
However, at that point, his colleague James Walsh (Craig Parkinson) offered the FA an ultimatum: If they disqualified Blackburn, then he had got all of the northern working class teams to say that they would leave the FA too and create their own league.
Realising that this would leave the FA as a competition between a handful of public school teams, and with a little pressure from Arthur Kinnaird (Edward Holcroft), the FA let Blackburn play in the final. In that final, they won in extra time, another addition to the game brought in by Blackburn—in the first episode of The English Game, a request for extra time in a game was denied.
Aside from their triumphs on the pitch, the characters of the Netflix show also had some success in their personal life. Alma Kinnaird (Charlotte Hope) revealed to Arthur that she was pregnant again after her miscarriage earlier in the season, while Arthur’s father finally learnt to be proud of his soccer-playing son. Fergus too had some success dealing with his father, after he finally kicked the drunken abuser out of his family home.
The episode then ended with a number of title cards that said what happened to the characters since the events of The English Game that takes us up to the present day where soccer is a sport played worldwide. These comprehensive title cards suggest that writer Julian Fellowes does not want to do another season of the show—after all, much of the potential plot of that season has already been used up in these title cards.
However, were The English Game Season 2 to happen, the show could follow more of the personal lives of its main characters, following for example Alma’s pregnancy or Arthur’s struggles as the head of the FA in later years.
The English Game is streaming on Netflix now.
