2023-10-16 08:00:15
The first international association football, Scotland vs. England (1872)
One of the main people responsible for the arrival of football in our country was the company El Cable Inglés. And no, it has nothing to do with the department stores of a similar name, it is the local name for the Eastern Telegraph Company, which laid the telegraph cable between England and Vigo, and which then continued its journey to Lisbon, Gibraltar and Malta. Being able to communicate in Morse code at the end of the 19th century was a revolution analogous to what the appearance of the Internet has been for us. And those who came to install the cable to Vigo from Porthcurno, on the south coast of Cornwall, were English engineers who, like so many other workers of the time, had a lot of free time for the first time. The eight-hour schedule provided them with enough hours of leisure to allocate them to practicing sports. Furthermore, the economic and intellectual elite began to consider that training through study and sports could not be separated in pedagogy. The very Anglophile Free Education Institution had introduced football and tennis for its students of both sexes. So following this social trend, a mix of pedagogy and free time, the engineers stationed in Vigo decided to organize a soccer club to play on a recurring basis. Which doesn’t seem to make any sense in a city where no one, except them, practiced that sport.
The key, as in other places, was the port, and the British Navy ships that called there. The English sailors disembarked delighted to be able to compete with their compatriots in ports around the world. Which ended up attracting the locals, and turning football into an internationally known and very popular sport at the beginning of the 20th century. Especially in those areas most influenced by the commercial activity of the British Empire: Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. His mark remains today.
But although it happened in many places at the same time, the case of Vigo is the oldest documented in our country. At least this is what the local writer defends Ramón Cabanelas, relying on his research in the newspaper archive of the Faro de Vigo newspaper. Mentioning a clipping from 1876, which refers to a landing of Her Majesty’s Navy, he identifies that still unknown custom of playing as a team by kicking a ball: «The English have visited us again. They are so kind! They walk like four, step like six and drink like fifty. “They fish, hunt, smoke, paint and play ball according to their use and manner.” He takes the date of the Time.news as a reference to the moment of founding of the Exiles Cable Club, something like the FC of the cable exiles, which the telegraph engineers founded in the Galician port. That would leave in second place, a couple of years later, in 1878, the Río Tinto Football Club, founded at the same time in Spain.
If Riotinto is generally remembered and not Vigo as the origin of football clubs in our country, it is not because of the dates, but because of how different English and Scottish football were in origin. To understand it there is no way to remember the first game in history, played on November 30, 1872, with four thousand spectators, at Hamilton Crescent, United Kingdom. Scots played against English, and the greatest difficulty was agreeing on the rules of the game. Because while the English practiced a sport that mixed the rules of rugby, where the most important thing was kicking and dribbling, and individual action, the Scots had already begun a coordination between players more similar to current football. The Scottish system, which has prevailed, not only gave them the biggest victories, taking Braveheart-style revenge in each match, but it was much more attractive to the public. As the engineers from Vigo played in the English way and the miners from Riotinto in the Scottish way, the activity of those from Huelva became much more popular than that of the Galician city.
A Scottish doctor hired to work in the Riotinto mines had a lot to do with it. William Alexander Mackay He took advantage of the interest in the new sport of expatriates who worked in the mine to encourage outdoor exercise, as a pioneer doctor in relating physical activity and good health. He also held free consultations on Thursdays for anyone who needed medical assistance and could not afford it, which attracted local interest in the foreign doctor and his activities. Very soon they began to attend Dr. Alejandro’s games as an audience, as they would call him from then on. The atrocious accidents in the Huelva mine also gave him the opportunity to become an eminent surgeon, attracting celebrities, politicians and even people to his consultation. Santiago Ramon y Cajal, then close to winning the Nobel Prize in medicine. These good relations with the social and intellectual elite of the country made it possible for them to take a lot of interest in that sports club that would end up founded in the provincial capital in 1889, the current Recreativo de Huelva. With the colors of the flag of his native country, blue and white, a condition that he demanded from the rest of the board of directors, and with his influence getting the queen regent Maria Cristina and a Alfonso XIII still very young, attended one of his first games as an audience.
Recreativo also made history by playing the first soccer match in our country played between two clubs. A year after it was founded it received the letter from the newly created Sevilla FC. The text, brief, contains, in addition to the invitation to play in the city, a singularity: it calls the rival team at five in the afternoon on March 8 “in order to get ahead of the cold of the night.” The weather was not what it is today, but neither was our time zone, if we move it to the current time it turns out that they played at eight. Two parts of thirty-five minutes with a break in between, which therefore ended around nine thirty today, with dinner at ten in the luxurious lounge of the Swiss café. The details are provided by the Time.news, in English, of the Scottish newspaper The Dundee Courier and Argus, which gives us details such as the good condition of the grass despite the abundant rain, or the singularity that one of the players appeared dressed in printed pajamas. He had only been playing for a short time and was unaware of the sport’s usual equipment. The public laughed at him calling him Clown Yugles, generic name with which jugglers and acrobats in circuses were nicknamed. Which did not prevent him from scoring the second goal of victory, with victory for Sevilla, winners 2-0.
The influence of football was going to be enormous in our society from these first centers, restricted to port or railway cities. In addition to the aforementioned clubs, similar ones were formed on the same dates in Málaga, Bilbao, Barcelona, Sant Martí, Gran Canaria, Las Palmas, and also in Albacete, in this case promoted by the railway engineers. And this influence was also transferred not only to sports practice, but also to the sponsorship of the companies with which they were related by work, and to the issue of sports betting. With the Penal Code of 1870 in force, they were strictly prohibited, like any other form of gambling. But the fact that the clubs were strictly English made it easier for them to be governed by their own rules, regardless of national legislation. So much so that in the first match we alluded to in Seville, all the players’ surnames are strictly English or Scottish, such as McCall or Smith. It is not unthinkable that his audience, also English, adopted the usual practice of their country, accompanying the matches with bets. Nor is it true that in the period from the birth of football in Spain until the legalization of betting in 1977, betting continued to be done by agreement between participants, the public, organizers and players. In fact, the current popularization, which has led to them becoming common on the Internet, especially for social gatherings, LaLigawould not be understood without a tradition that was first carried out in secret and then, when legalized, was followed naturally.
It is also relevant that football, as a sport and as a culture, was transferred to the Spanish sphere through the children of English and Scottish expatriates who ended up settling permanently in our country. The telegraph engineers in Vigo are among the first to celebrate marriages with Galician women, and the same occurs in the rest of the cities with clubs. Just at the time when the children of these marriages are of age to be young players, the clubs not only spread throughout the country, but are established as legal entities, some of which are the origin of the current ones. Atlético de Madrid, 1903, is initially a branch of Athletic de Bilbao from 1901, the future Real Madrid appears that same year promoted by the Catalan Carlos PadrósBarcelona FC had done it before, in 1899, or RCD Espanyol, in 1900.
Already in 1902, the first national competition was organized, the Coronation Cup, the future Spanish Championship, organized by the Madrid Football Club, which would have enough success to last and become the current Copa del Rey. In addition, there are numerous regional championships, with Catalonia being the only one capable of organizing them annually, and very active regions in the north, Bilbao and San Sebastián mainly. It is also the moment when the names of footballers become popular for the first time, specifically those of Madrid’s forwards, all three with Catalan surnames, Prast, Giralt, Parages; and of the Barcelona defenders, two of them brothers, Charles and Percival, born here but with a Scottish father. His last name, Wallace, like that of William, the historic Braveheart, seems to want to remind us, in a last nod of fate, that with Vigo or Huelva origins, our football is, above all, like this: a Scottish heritage.
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