Between them, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay have won ten of the 22 FIFA World Cups contested going back to 1930. Uruguay’s victories at the 1924 and 1928 Olympic football tournaments also count as ‘world championships’. So, how did the tiny River Plate nation and its two much larger neighbours come to dominate world football just decades after football arrived in their countries?
Let’s meet the British pioneers who brought football to South America.
Argentina
The first recorded Association rules football match in Argentina was played on 20 June 1867 at the Buenos Aires Cricket Club in the upmarket Palermo district of the capital city. As the venue suggests, this was very much a British community affair, initiated by Yorkshire-born siblings Thomas and James Hogg.
Alexander Watson Hutton
It was not for another two decades that football would become part of the education system with Glasgow-born Alexander Watson Hutton introduced football to his Buenos Aires English High School. In 1891, a league was established in the Buenos Aires area among the British community, initiated by another Scot, Alec Lamont, a teacher at St. Andrew’s School. This league was the first such competition outside of Britain or Ireland and featured just five teams.
Argentine Association Football League (AAFL) was not played in 1892, but Watson Hutton revived it a year later, founding what is now the Asociación de Fútbol Argentina (AFA). Watson Hutton’s own side – the Buenos Aires English High School – had to rebrand as ‘Alumni’, as the other sides felt the school was advertising itself, and went on to dominate the early 1900s.
By now, the local-born criollo population – typically of Italian and Spanish heritage – was taking a keen interest in the game of the locos ingleses (‘crazy English’ – Latin Americans tend to misunderstand the difference between ‘English’ and ‘British’). By 1913, the criollos had their first champion in Racing Club, donned consciously in the sky blue and white stripes of Argentina.
For more on Watson Hutton, listen to my podcast on the roots of Argentinian football.
Isaac Newell
While Alexander Watson Hutton is regarded as ‘the father of Argentine football’, 300km north, Kentish-born Isaac Newell had also introduced football into a school that he had established in Rosario in 1884.
Newell believed that physical education should complement academic studies, and his students were so inspired to play football that Isaac’s son Claudio established Newell’s Old Boys in 1903 so they could keep playing.
For more on Isaac Newell, including an interview with his great-great-granddaughter, Margarita, check out this podcast [link]. There is a campaign to get a statue of Isaac Newell’s erected in his home town of Strood.
Visiting British sides came to Argentina in the early 1900s, including Southampton and Nottingham Forest, who impressed the Independiente owner so much that he adopted their red shirts. By the 1920s, Argentine sides had caught up and regularly beat English and Scottish touring sides.
Uruguay
Another Kentish man was instrumental in launching the game in neighbouring Uruguay. Demographically and culturally, Uruguay is very similar to Argentina. Its agriculture had drawn British expatriates to build infrastructure, including railways and sewage works, and to provide the financing to enable Uruguay’s rapid growth.
William Leslie Poole from Bromley, Kent, England, was another educator who found himself in South America. He taught at Montevideo’s English High School and became involved in the Albion Football Club, Uruguay’s first and oldest soccer establishment. Poole was more than just a player; he was a referee and an organiser. He was a leading figure in the foundation of what is now the Asociación Uruguaya de Fútbol (AUF), the nation’s football association.
Poole is considered the ‘father of Uruguayan football’, although many other northern Europeans were instrumental in the Uruguayan game’s beginnings. These include the German Henry Lichtenburger, who established Albion as simply ‘Football Association’ in 1891, and Scotsman John ‘El Yoni’ Harley, who many credit with teaching the ball-playing centre-half position while playing for both the Central Uruguay Railway Cricket Club (CURCC – now Peñarol) and the national side.
Poole, Lichtenburger, and Harley are buried in Montevideo’s well-kept British Cemetery along with other influencers in early Uruguayan football. Poole is also remembered with a small public space near the AUF’s present-day headquarters.
Brazil
While the credit of ‘father of Brazilian football’ is often attributed to Charles Miller, born in Brazil with Scottish heritage and educated at Southampton in England, where he first encountered football, there are other key influencers.
While in England, Miller turned out for the famous touring amateur side, Corinthians, whose later 1910 tour of Brazil would inspire the creation of the Corinthians Paulista club. Miller returned to Brazil with balls in 1894 and set about establishing the game in and around São Paulo, although football was largely restricted to the upper classes.
Meanwhile, in Rio de Janeiro, Thomas Donohoe from Refrewshire in Scotland, also set up football matches at the Bangu factory in which he worked. He was organising five-a-side games in Rio de Janeiro in April 1894, six months before Miller’s first game. A 4.5m-high statue of Donohoe was erected in Bangu ahead of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Bangu Football Club, founded in 1904, a decade after Donohoe introduced the game, was the first club in the city to break down racial and class barriers.
Also key to the development of the game in Rio de Janeiro was the Anglo-Brazilian Oscar Cox, who had learned the game while studying in Lausanne, Switzerland. Cox’s family were diplomats, so he mixed in the same social circles as Charles Miller. Cox had arranged the first formal match in the state of Rio de Janeiro in September 1901 and took a Carioca XI to play Miller’s Paulista XI in Sāo Paulo the following month in the first match between sides from those two key Brazilian cities.
Cox founded the Fluminense Football club on 21 July 1902, switching the club’s colour from grey to the now-famous maroon, white and green two years later. Cox led Fluminense to win the first Campeonato Carioca (Rio State Championship) in 1906. Oscar’s brother Edwin also turned out for Flu, and led the goalscoring charts as his side won the 1908 edition. Modern-day Fluminense fans celebrate their club’s British roots by displaying Union Flags in the maroon, white, and green club colours at their matches.
Meanwhile, Corinthians Paulista fans support their ‘old brother’ club, now called Corinthian-Casuals in the ninth tier of England’s football pyramid. The two clubs played each other in 2015 in São Paulo and London-based Brazilians swell the numbers at Corinthian-Casuals’ King George’s Field, adding a unique flavour.
