The first football clubs

When the first football clubs formed, the idea of a club was borrowed from the wider Victorian tradition of social and sporting associations. Members paid a small subscription, elected officers, agreed a set of rules and arranged matches against other clubs. There were no paid players, no professional managers and no commercial interest. The early clubs were closer to a modern village cricket club than to a professional football club.

What made these early sides important was not their size but their function. They were the units through which the game was organised. Each club had a fixed identity, played to a known set of rules, and could be relied on for regular fixtures. As the game grew, the basic shape of the club — members, officers, regular fixtures, a home ground — stayed the same, even as the size and professionalism of clubs increased enormously.

Sheffield Football Club, founded in 1857, is recognised by FIFA as the world's oldest football club. It was set up by William Prest and Nathaniel Creswick, both former public-school players, and used its own version of football for nearly twenty years before the Sheffield Rules merged with the FA Laws. Sheffield FC has remained in existence since 1857, although it has usually played at much lower levels than the leading professional clubs.

The next group of long-surviving clubs all date from the 1860s. Hallam FC, also of Sheffield, was founded in 1860 and is the second oldest club that has continued playing. Notts County, founded in 1862, is the oldest club to have been a founder member of the Football League. Stoke City traces its founding to 1863, though the exact date is disputed. Queen's Park in Glasgow, founded in 1867, is the oldest club in Scotland and was for many years the leading Scottish side.

The first wave of football clubs in southern England were old-boy clubs — sides made up of former public-school pupils who wanted to keep playing after leaving school. Wanderers FC, the Royal Engineers, the Old Etonians and the Old Carthusians were all clubs of this kind, and they dominated the early FA Cup. Wanderers won the first FA Cup in 1872 and five of the first seven; the Old Etonians won twice; the Royal Engineers once.

The old-boy clubs faded from the top level as the game professionalised. Professional clubs in the north and midlands could attract stronger players, train more regularly and build more settled teams than the old-boy amateur clubs. The last old-boy club to win the FA Cup was Old Etonians in 1882. By the end of the 1880s, the leading clubs in English football were the professional sides of the north and midlands.

Queen's Park, founded in Glasgow in 1867, was the first football club in Scotland and the leading Scottish side for the rest of the nineteenth century. Queen's Park reached the FA Cup final twice in the 1880s, when the competition was open to Scottish clubs, and took part in the first international match against England in 1872 — almost the entire Scotland team was made up of Queen's Park players.

Scottish clubs developed a passing game earlier than English ones. The Scottish style was based on short passes between players, rather than the more individual dribbling tradition common in English football at the time. As paid Scottish players moved south, they brought the passing game with them, and it became the basis of professional English football across the late 1870s and 1880s. Queen's Park itself remained an amateur club for more than 150 years, before turning professional in 2019.

From the 1880s onwards, football clubs began to appear in continental Europe, founded by British workers, sailors and teachers living abroad. Genoa Cricket and Football Club was founded in 1893 in the Italian port city. AC Milan was set up in 1899 by British residents of Milan, originally as the Milan Cricket and Football Club. Le Havre in France, Royal Antwerp in Belgium and Athletic Bilbao in Spain all have similar founding stories.

The same pattern repeated in South America. Buenos Aires Football Club, founded in 1867, is usually treated as the first known association football club in South America. The first leading clubs in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil were often founded by British residents or by local people who had played football at British-run schools. Several later clubs from this pattern became leading sides in their countries.

Club names often tell the story of how the club was founded. The "United" in Manchester United, West Ham United and Newcastle United typically marks a merger of two earlier clubs. "Wanderers" is an old-boy or roaming-club term, used by Bolton Wanderers, Wolverhampton Wanderers and others. "City" usually indicates a club that took on the name of its city in a phase of consolidation. "Athletic" came from the broader sports-club tradition, as in Athletic Bilbao or Wigan Athletic.

Crests carry similar traces. The hammers on West Ham's crest reflect the Thames Ironworks origin. Arsenal's cannon recalls the Royal Arsenal. Celtic's Irish symbolism reflects the Irish Catholic community in Glasgow that founded the club. The fact that these symbols have survived for more than a hundred years says something about how durable the early club identities turned out to be.