I’d been researching the roots of football for my debut book, Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World. During the process I got thinking about the most influential and significant football clubs. It’s hard to narrow them down to a shortlist, but here are a few suggestions and I’d be welcome to hear yours with the reason behind your choice.
Criteria: The club must have had a significant influence on the development of football in its country or beyond at a point when there was still some ‘evangelism’ to be done. It doesn’t even have to exist anymore but must have a legacy.
Let’s start…
The world’s oldest existing Association football club isn’t here just because it’s the oldest, but also because it was critical in the early development of the game. It was founded in 1857 – six years before the establishment of the Football Association – and played by its own rules (along with those of the FA) for its first two decades. While Sheffield FC was not there at the first few meetings of the FA, it was involved in the setting down of the Association Rulebook.
It was also a beacon for the Association game in the north. In 1867, when just four clubs attended an FA meeting, founder Ebenezer Cobb Morley considered closing the FA down it was Sheffield FC that helped keep the fire alive.
The club might be in the seventh tier of English football now, but its cultural and historical significance is huge.
Listen to our podcast with Sheffield FC chairman, Richard Tims.
Founded a decade after Sheffield FC, the Spiders are Scotland’s oldest club. Unlike the dribbling style of the English game of the 1860s – often still a ‘gentlemen’s game’ south of the border – Queen’s Park FC pioneered the passing game.
Although the club switched to black and white hoops soon after its foundation, Scotland wears blue because of Queen’s Park, when the club provided every single member of the national team for the first official international against England in 1872.
Queen’s Park FC provided the world’s first black international footballer – Andrew Watson – and were also key evangelists of the game abroad, playing games in Ireland and Denmark.
Listen to our podcast on the roots of Scottish football.
Although the club only existed for just over a decade, it was Blackburn Olympic that upset the original order of the ‘gentlemen’s game’ by becoming the first working class and the first northern team to win the FA Cup in 1883.
If you watched the Netflix series The English Game, you’d have seen a fictionalised account of this cup run for a club called ‘Blackburn’ featuring Fergus Suter, who actually played for cross-town rivals Blackburn Rovers. Olympic didn’t have a single Scot in their FA Cup-winning line-up; just nine Lancastrians and two Yorkshiremen, including former England skipper Jack Hunter.
However, while Olympic cracked the old order, it was Rovers who ultimately prevailed, winning the next three editions of the FA Cup. Olympic couldn’t quite adjust to the competitive environment of the new professional era of the late 1880s and folded in 1889.
Listen to our podcast on Blackburn Olympic’s epic FA Cup run.
No one travelled as far and wide in football’s early decades as Corinthian FC (now Corinthian-Casuals FC). Its tours to South Africa, Central Europe, Scandinavia and both ends of the Americas are legendary.
Former Corinthians include the aforementioned Andrew Watson, all-rounder Charles Burgess (CB) Fry, Charles Wreford-Brown – who first coined the word ‘soccer’ – and an appearance for Charles Miller, the ‘father of Brazilian football’.
Not only did the club inspire the creation of Sport Club Corinthians Paulista of São Paulo, but it also left trophies to be contested, for example in Hungary and Sweden.
Listen to our podcast on the Corinthians.
Women’s football had existed in Britain decades before the women of the Dick, Kerr & Co. factory in Preston, Lancashire, got together to form a football team during the First World War. Within a few years, the Dick, Kerr Ladies had raised thousands for wounded service personnel, played the first women’s international match versus France in 1920, and played in front of a 50,000-plus crowd at Goodison Park.
When the Football Association banned women’s matches taking place on FA-affiliated grounds in 1921, Dick, Kerr Ladies played on where they could – touring the US in the 1920s and kept going right up until the 1960s. The FA lifted the ban in 1971.
What would the women’s game have looked like had it been allowed to flourish in the 1920s?
Listen to our podcast on the history of women’s football.
Nacional is one of Uruguayan football’s duopoly alongside Peñarol. The two enjoy the longest-running cross-city derby in South America. The club is significant on a number of fronts. While Nacional is the third-oldest existing club in Uruguay after Albion FC and Peñarol (founded as the Central Uruguay Railway Cricket Club – CURCC), both older clubs were formed by British emigres. When Nacional was formed on 14 May 1899, it became the first football club in Latin America to be founded by local-born criollos.
Nacional can also claim to have had the world’s first hincha – football super fan. Miguel Prudencio Reyes Viola was hired by Nacional to inflate its balls on matchday. As such, he was known as ‘the puffer’ – el hinchador. His enthusiastic shouts of ‘¡Arriba Nacional!’ broke through the austere crowds of early 1900s Montevideo.
So, the term hincha stuck for football fans in the Spanish language.
Alumni Athletic Club was formed in the 1890s by players of the English High School in Buenos Aires. The school had been founded by Glasgow-born Alexander Watson Hutton, who many consider as the father of Argentinian football. The team that would become Alumni Athletic Club was a founder of the Argentine Association Football League (AAFL), which revived an earlier attempt at a competition in Argentina, the first such league outside Britain or Ireland.
Alumni was disbanded in 1913, but in its two-decade existence it won the fledgling Argentine championship ten times, as well as number of cross-River Plate cup competitions against Uruguayan opposition.
Alumni also hosted British touring teams, including Southampton and Nottingham Forest. Its 6-0 defeat to Forest inspired the president of Independiente to switch the club’s colours from white to red.
Like many other Carioca clubs, Vasco da Gama’s football branch sprang out of a rowing club. In the early 1920s, the club won the local Rio de Janeiro championship fielding black and working-class players at a time when class and race divisions were rife in Brazil.
Many of the elite clubs demanded Vasco exclude those players deemed ‘unsuitable’ or they threatened to ban Vasco from joining their new association. Vasco refused, with its president Dr. José Augusto Prestes issuing what’s known as the ‘historical response’ to the elite clubs’ demands.
Eventually, agreement was reached, and Vasco’s position helped widen opportunities for black players, including Leônidas, who appeared at two World Cups in the 1930s.
Read the full story of Vasco’s ‘Historical Response’ here.
Athletic Club de Bilbao is not the oldest club in Spain, but it is possibly the most significant in its early years. The club was formed by a merger of two teams that came together to compete in the first cup competition in Spain – La Copa de la Coronación (Coronation Cup) in Madrid in 1902. The team won that trophy, and won the first two editions of the Copa del Rey (King’s Cup) in the following two years.
Athletic Club’s original San Mamés stadium was the first purpose-built football stadium in Spain and the first goal scored there was netted by Rafael ‘Pichichi’ Moreno, whose legacy lives on in the name of the trophy awarded to La Liga’s top scorer.
Athletic Club’s Madrid-based sister club became the organisation we now know as Atlético de Madrid. Athletic Club instilled its cantera system in 1912 to only field players with a Basque connection, and it’s done OK with this policy; Athletic Club is one of only three clubs never to have been relegated from Spain’s top division, along with Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.
Poor old Genoa – stuck on nine Italian titles for almost a century and one scudetto short of being able to wear a star above its badge for winning ten scudetti. Italy’s oldest existing club was pivotal to getting football organised in the north of the peninsula, driven by James Richardson Spensley from Stoke Newington, East London.
Spensley helped found the Italian Football Federation (now FIGC) in 1898 and organised the first Italian championship in May that year. Genoa won that four-club tournament in Turin, which was played over a single day.
The club won more titles under Englishman William Garbutt in subsequent decades, but a tenth title looks a long way off.
Not only was Hajduk Split a key beacon of light for an occupied nation during World War II, but the club is also credited with introducing ultrà culture into Europe. A few members of the team and traveling Hajduk fans recounted the tails that the Yugoslavian side had experienced at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil. Inspired by the atmosphere created by Brazilian fans, Hajduk Split fans formed Torcida, the first and oldest organised fan group in Europe.
This culture of songs and tifo eventually filtered throughout Europe, but Hajduk fans made it happen. *NB Hajduk does not feature in my book, Origin Stories, as it just focuses on the time up to 1930.
Learn more about Hadjuk Split in our podcast.
For more on football’s early days, check out our Pioneers section, or get hold of my book Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World.
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