First Football Match In Spain

The first official football match in Spain between two sides playing under the rules of the English FA took place in Seville on 8 March 1890 at the Hipódromo de Tablada. It was contested between the two oldest clubs in Spain, Recreativo de Huelva and Sevilla FC.

With the exception of two Spanish players on the Huelva team and another two players on the Seville team, all the players on both sides were British. Sevilla FC became the first team to ever win an organized match in Spanish football history with its 2–0 victory, through goals by Rickson and "Clown Yugles", a player so-called due to his appearance on the pitch in "night dress".

Background

Modern football was introduced to Spain in the late 19th century by a combination of mostly British immigrant workers, visiting sailors, and Spanish students returning from Britain. In the late 1870s, various English workers scattered throughout the peninsula began to establish informal groups that were dedicated to different recreational practices, from which the first Spanish football teams were born, such as Exiles Foot-Ball Club in Vigo (1876) and Río Tinto Foot-Ball Club in Huelva (1878), two cities opened to the world through the sea that had kept a close trade and industrial relations with Britain. There are reports of games between Rio Tinto and Huelva in 1882, but none of these teams were officially established, so there is no legal record of their existence. The first legally established Spanish football club was the Cricket and Football Club of Madrid, founded in October 1879 under the protection of King Alfonso XII.

Rio Tinto FC catalyzed the ('Ball Game Society') in 1884, which organized football games between the club's members and later against crews of English ships that docked in the port of Huelva, with the earliest known example of this dates to March 1888, when the club played football and cricket matches against the mariners of a merchant ship called ''Jane Cory''. This society developed into the oldest official football club in Spain, Recreativo de Huelva, founded in December 1889 by two Scottish doctors of the Rio Tinto Company, Alexander Mackay and Robert Russell Ross. Just a month later, on 25 January 1890, Sevilla FC was founded by a group of young British residents in Seville. This early British influence is reflected in the fact that the club was named "FC" and not Sevilla CF (''club de fútbol'').

Sevilla FC organized several "kickabout" matches between the club's members, usually a Sunday 70-minute five-a-side match, but as soon as they learned of the existence of a Recreation Club 80 miles away in Huelva, they decided to invite them for a football match. To that end, on 25 February 1890, Isaías White Méndez, the then secretary of Sevilla FC, wrote a letter to the president of the Huelva club, which was published three days later in the ''La Provincia'', a now-extinct Huelva newspaper. A few days later, on 3 March, some members of the Recreation Club, which had never played a football match of any kind, gathered at the ''Hotel Colón'', and ultimately decided to accept Sevilla's invitation.

Squad

On the morning of 8 March 1890, 22 members of Recreation Club took the mail train in a four-hour journey to Seville, arriving there under a torrential rain. On the other hand, Sevilla FC fielded a mixed team of workers from the Seville Water Works Company and Johnston's shipping company, including Rickson, W. Logan, the Welton brothers, Isaías White, and captain Hugh MacColl, a native from Glasgow who had come to Seville's Water Works as a marine engineer. Except for two Spaniards on each team, the other 18 players were all British-born, mostly Scottish.

Regarding the equipment, the players displayed a motley appearance, wearing all kinds of costumes and clothes for all tastes. For instance, Sevilla's left-winger, who had never belonged to any athletic club, stepped into the pitch in a nightdress "in the shape of a fantastically patterned suit of pyjama". He was thus mocked with waves of laughter and shouts, being quickly nicknamed Clown Yugles, a reference to Clown Juggler, an infamous character from the circus world of Spain. The newspapers of the time do not reveal the identity of Yugles, but it mentions that he is from "our left-wing", and according with Sevilla's future line-ups against Huelva in the next two years, Isaías White and one of the Welton brothers are the only players who both played on 8 March and featured as left-wingers around that time (at the time, there was no such thing as wing-backs), and in fact, White is the son of the co-owner of the Portilla, White & Co., one of Spain's largest foundries at the time, and a rich man has a higher chance of being the one who usually sleeps with a fancy pyjama than not.

Overview

The match took place at 16:45 on Saturday 8 March 1890 in a steady downpour, at the Tablada Hippodrome (horse racing track), also known as ''Hipódromo de la Sociedad de Carreras de Caballos''. Admission was free and there were around 120 spectators, mostly curious residents and friends of the town's football players. The game was refereed by Sevilla's president Edward F. Johnston, who was also the British vice-council in Seville.

The match lasted two-halves of thirty-five minutes. Rickson and Yugles scored the only goals of the match as Sevilla claimed a historic 2–0 victory, thus winning the very first match in Spanish football in which two sides played under the rules of The Football Association. The result was partly attributed to the fact that the Huelva players were tired from their travel and had never played a football match before.

Final details

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Aftermath

After the match, Sevilla FC, in what the Brits dubbed as the third half, marked this historic occasion by holding a large banquet in the saloon of a Suizo restaurant called Swiss Café Seville, hence honoring their opponents and guests with dinner. However, Clown Yugles was further mocked after falling off his chair.

The game received a lot of international publicity, including a match chronicle in the 17 March issue of the Scottish newspaper ''The Dundee Courier'', written by an anonymous journalist, who detailed the aspects of the game, including the type of equipment, the name of the referee, the result and the goalscorers. However, this was not the first chronicle of a football match played in Spain, since nine months earlier, on 29 June 1889 in Bilbao, two English teams ( Barmston Rangers FC and a team of sailors from four different ships) played a charity match to raise funds for the widow of the Cymbeline crane manager.

Seville fans continued to enjoy football, which was particularly popular among the youth. In fact, following the success of the first match, the clubs decided to play a return fixture three weeks later, on 7 April 1890, this time in Huelva, in front of a crowd of between 400 and 500. Sevilla FC fielded Edwin Plews; Hugh MacColl, G. T. Charlesworth; Robert Duncan Thompson, H. Stroneger; W. Logan, Henry Welton, Isaías White, J. Poppy, P. Merry, and Thomas Guedes; they opened the scoring after 25 minutes thanks to a goal from Gilbert Reid Pollock, who apparently came on as a substitute for an early injury, thus becoming the first-ever player to score an away goal on Spanish soil. This time, however, Sevilla went on to lose as Huelva's side, fortified by "some athletes from the British colony of Rio-Tinto", fought back to win 2–1. In total, they played six games between 1890 and 1893, home and away, in which they also fielded the likes of the Lindberg brothers (Hanaldo and Juan), William MacAndrews, Chabannan, Butler, and Félix Vázquez de Zafra, the latter being originally a member of the Huelva Recreation Club.

A plaque recently placed in Tablada has a memorial about this important football match.

Disputes

On 3 May 1890, the Scottish newspaper Glasgow Evening Post stated: "It was the Astillero team that actually played the first game in Spain (about six months ago), and not the Seville team". This statement directly contradicts the report made by ''The Dundee Courier'', which described the Seville match as "the first football match in Spain". Glasgow's remarks, however, turned out to be incorrect and it was most likely a result of a healthy rivalry between the Scottish communities in Spain regarding which one of them was the first to play football.

See also

* First football match in Portugal
* First football match in Sweden
* 1894 Bilbao students v British workers football match
* Football in Spain

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:First football match in Spain
Sport in Seville
Sport in Spain
1890 in association football
19th century in Spain