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

As far as the man in the food truck is concerned, the patch of land he occupies in Sheffield, England, is about as humdrum as they come. To him, the spot — in the drab parking lot of a sprawling home improvement superstore, its facade plastered in lurid orange — is not exactly a place where history comes alive.

John Wilson, an academic at the University of Sheffield’s management school, looks at the same site and can barely contain his excitement. This, he said, is one of the places where the world’s most popular sport was born. He does not see a parking lot. He can see the history: the verdant grass, the sweating players, the cheering crowds.

His passion is sincere, absolute and shared by a small band of amateur historians and volunteer detectives devoted to restoring Sheffield — best known for steel, coal and as the setting for the film “The Full Monty” — to its rightful place as the undisputed birthplace of codified, organized, recognizable soccer.

For now, their attempts have mustered a walking tour of the city, conducted through a homemade app, and a few slightly weathered plaques. But Dr. Wilson and his compatriots have a bold vision of what their efforts might produce: a “digital museum” of Sheffield’s soccer history, a sculpture trail and — more than anything — a clear and prestigious identity for a city that has, in recent times, struggled just a little to define itself.

As they look to use the city’s past to shape its future, though, they do — Dr. Wilson warned — have a bit of a “tendency to go off on tangents.”