2023-10-03 07:42:02
Barcelona “It’s a mystery, really,” explains Diogo Faria, historian and member of Porto’s communications department, when you ask him about Virgilio Da Costa, one of the founding members of Barça’s European rival. Some things are known about his life, but little. Until recently, his name was one more on the old list of Porto’s first partners. “We have his name on the list of founding members, but in all the specialized works on the history of the club he does not appear beyond that list,” says Faria, a scholar who knows Barcelona because he visited it a lot on his trips to do a doctoral thesis on the trade of the Kingdom of Portugal in the 16th century. Passionate about history, he now looks after that of Porto.
But it is difficult to find more details about Virgilio Da Costa, a man who unites the past of both dragoes, nickname by which Porto is known, like Barça. An investigation by Fernando Arrechea and Eugen Scheinherr for the Football Notebooks of the Spanish Football History and Statistics Research Center (CIHEFE) made it possible to discover in 2017 that a Portuguese had already played for Barça more than a century ago. And to the surprise of many, this first Portuguese of Barça also turned out to be one of the founding members of Porto. Born in Porto on September 23, 1881, Virgilio Da Costa Neves lived first-hand the first years of life for the Catalan and Portuguese club. But his name was forgotten.
Da Costa Neves was an industrial technical engineer who studied from 1900 to 1905 at the University of Applied Sciences Hochschule in the city of Mittweida (Saxony), where he befriended a young German who years later would go to live in Barcelona for reasons labor: Udo Steinberg, one of the key figures in Catalan sport at the beginning of the century, since he participated in the creation of the Real Club de Tennis Barcelona. In addition, he was manager and player of Barça in the first years of the club’s life, where he scored the first goal against Real Madrid in 1902 and launched the first school for children: a seed that would eventually become La Farmhouse, more or less. Steinberg, an industrial technical engineer like Da Costa, had arrived in Barcelona in 1899, where he ran the company La Maquinista Hispania.
It was he who recruited Da Costa, who would play for Barça as a right winger from 1903 to 1906. The Portuguese arrived from Hispania, another now-defunct club in the city, and for many years his identity was a mystery, since the last name appeared misspelled. Sometimes Acosta or D’acosta, which created doubts about his nationality. One of the clues followed to discover that he was Portuguese was the satirical magazine Shot! of the 20s, where they published a joke, years after the player’s passing, that said: “They had a Portuguese called D’Acosta [sic]a close friend of an Englishman called Harris…”
Da Costa would have discovered football in Germany playing at the Mittweidaer Ballspiel-Club, before starting to be seen by Barcelona with the help of Steinberg and playing both with Hispania and with Barça. He made his debut with the Barcelona club on November 29, 1903 in the Catalan Championship against a club called Joventut. They won 3-0. Barça, however, finished fourth in that first edition of the Catalan Championship, in the midst of a crisis of results. And Gamper, who came to coincide in some games with Da Costa, ended up hanging up his boots. That season 1903/1904 the Portuguese played seven games and scored one goal. In the 1904/05 season, on the other hand, he did not play a single game, which is why it is suspected that he went back and forth from Barcelona, probably from Germany. He reappeared playing three games in the 1905/06 season, all between February and March, when he scored three goals. In fact, it does not appear in the few photographs of those years.
Return to Portugal
Da Costa would play his last match for Blaugrana in a friendly in 1906 and, apparently, he did not continue to be linked to Barça, as he is still linked to Mittweidaer. In fact, he came to form a section of ex-players of the German club who traveled around the Iberian Peninsula. His track is lost once he returns to Porto to work probably as an engineer. And it was precisely in 1906 that Porto was born. Well, there is some debate. In the city more than one defender that the club was founded in 1893, when the young merchant António Nicolau d’Almeida fell in love with football in England. What did Nicolau d’Almeida trade? Well, Port wines, of course, are always highly valued in the United Kingdom. It was he who led the creation of a club that even played a match against Club Lisbonense in the fight for a cup given by King Charles I. Now, the club closed its sails shortly after and it was not until 1906 that a group of young people resumed the project. The visible face was José Monteiro da Costa, a horticulturist who studied in the United Kingdom, who we know traveled around Spain and visited Barcelona with his father. Monteiro became the first president of the entity. And one of the first partners was Virgilio Da Costa. “Much remains to be known about the foundation of the club. We know from the memories of a founder that many of the first members knew very little about football. Not even the rules. Football was a novelty, in 1906, only those who had lived or studied abroad”, defends Ricardo Serrado, historian and author of a book on the births of Portugal’s great clubs. “We know that the founders of Porto were clear about one thing. They wanted their club to be the standard bearer of the whole city. To defend Porto and its region. That’s why they take the name and the coat of arms of the city. And over time, especially once Pinto Da Costa comes to the presidency, Porto’s discourse is strengthened as a defender of the north compared to the Lisbon clubs, which have become a symbol of the powerful,” adds Serrado.
From the Figo case to the Joãos
For decades, Barça ignored the existence of this footballer, and it was thought that the relationship with Portugal was born in the 60s, when Jorge Alberto Mendonça arrived, born in Luanda (Angola) on September 19, 1938 when this land it was a Portuguese colony. The son of a Portuguese civil servant married to an Angolan woman, Mendonça trained at Sporting de Portugal, a club from which he moved to Deportivo de la Coruña. He then shone at Atlético de Madrid, but as a striker for Barça, from 1967 to 1969, he did not finish shining partly because of president Narcís de Carreras, a devout Catholic, who decided to remove him from the team when it became known that he was a Jehovah’s Witness.
The relationship with Portugal, in fact, has been marked by the Figo case. When he arrived in 1995 from Sporting, it was almost a novelty to have Portuguese players at Camp Nou. When he left, he stopped being a beloved player to be the great Judas. Nor has it helped that at Real Madrid Portuguese players like Mourinho or Pepe have made their fortunes with provocative attitudes against Barça. The relationship between Barcelona and Portugal, however, has had good moments, such as that of the current sporting director, Deco, when he was a player. Men like Vítor Baía, Fernando Couto, Simão, Quaresma, André Gomes, Semedo or Trincão have defended the Barça shirt with more or less luck. Now that Barça returns to Portugal to play in the field where Messi made his debut in 2003, he does so with Joãos, Félix and Cancelo, playing well. Following the path opened 120 years ago by Virgilio Da Costa.
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