The world's first football club already had a set of written rules decades before the FA was established in England and Scotland, researchers have discovered.

Sports historians have uncovered new information which sheds light on the early days of the beautiful game first played by the Foot-ball Club of Edinburgh.

The club was established in 1824, a long time before the formation of the Scottish Football Association in 1873 and its English counterpart in 1863.

Its team was drawn from the Georgian and Victorian professional classes in the Scottish Capital and played a much cruder version of the world's favourite sport.

Players of the day were allowed to push and shove each other and the club was long thought to have had little influence on how football came to be played.

But sports historians Andy Mitchell and John Hutchison have discovered that it had a "far-reaching web of influence" as the children of members would go on to captain Scotland.

James Kirkpatrick, and FA Cup winner with Wanderers FC in 1877, was the first captain of Scotland in an unofficial international match against England and the son of Foot-ball club member Charles Sharpe Kirkpatrick.

And the first captain of the Scottish rugby team, Francis Moncrieff, was the son of Foot-ball club member James Moncrieff.

The Edinburgh team also developed a basic set of playing rules in 1833 by the founder John Hope.

John Hope, a 17-year-old student lawyer, attempted to refine football by establishing a set of six rudimentary rules which included a ban on tripping opponents and defined a playing area with goalposts.

These rules predate the Cambridge University rules of 1848 which are generally seen as the earliest attempt at codifying football and contain many of the same principles.

The new study into the Edinburgh team pored through more than 200 boxes worth of documents put together by John Hope which have newly been digitised by the National Records of Scotland.

Football historian Andy Mitchell says the new findings show that the club's influence on the modern game was much wider than initially thought.

He said: "Thanks to this analysis, we can now demonstrate that this was not just a quirky, historically-isolated football club for gentlemen in one particular city, but one which spawned a close-knit web of interests and relationships which had a significant influence on the early and long term development of the game of football, and on Scottish society in general.

"The club was more influential than at first appears.

"It's been hard to draw very strong ties between the club and the birth of codified football in the 1850s and 1860s, but we are establishing those links now.

"Football was socially respectable from quite an early period and was far from a mob game. It was widely played by respectable people.

"Our research is ongoing, but the Foot-ball Club of Edinburgh clearly developed an ethos of football which was passed down from father to son, creating a sporting culture that extended later in the century throughout Edinburgh and further afield."

The Foot-ball Club of Edinburgh had 324 members throughout its 17-year history with many going on to become lawyers as well as bankers, ministers, doctors and army officers.

John Hope established the club amid hopes of playing a similar sport to the one he had played as a child.