The spread of football across South America

Britain had close trading ties with South America in the nineteenth century, particularly with Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. British companies built and ran railway networks across Argentina and Uruguay. British shipping lines used Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro and Santos as major ports. British schools served the expatriate communities in those cities, and British teachers and engineers were common in the capitals.

Football arrived with those communities. British residents played among themselves, set up clubs and arranged matches against other British groups. Many of the earliest clubs in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil were British-founded. From there, the game spread quickly into the local population, and within a generation it had become as much a part of South American identity as it was British in its origins.

Buenos Aires Football Club, founded in 1867, is usually treated as the first known association football club in South America. It was set up by British residents and played among themselves and other British-led clubs in the city. The first organised league in Argentina was founded in 1891, and a more lasting league followed in 1893 under Alexander Watson Hutton, a Scottish teacher who had moved to Buenos Aires in 1882.

Hutton's English High School in Buenos Aires became a key feeder for Argentine football. Several of his pupils went on to found their own clubs, including Alumni, which won the league multiple times in the early twentieth century. The growth of Argentine football from a British expatriate game into a wider sport happened very quickly — by the 1900s, Argentine-born players were the majority at most leading clubs, and the league was among the leading competitions in South America.

Uruguayan football developed along similar lines to Argentine football, with British workers in Montevideo and the railway networks playing a central role. The Central Uruguay Railway Cricket Club was founded by British railway workers in 1891 and later became Peñarol, one of Uruguay's two leading clubs. Nacional, the other half of the Montevideo rivalry, was founded in 1899 by Uruguayan students who wanted a local rather than British-led club.

Uruguay's national team became one of the leading sides of the 1920s. Uruguay won the Olympic football tournament in 1924 and 1928, the leading global football tournaments before the World Cup began. When the first World Cup was held in 1930, Uruguay was the host, and won the tournament. Relative to its population, Uruguay was an unusually strong football nation during this period.

Charles Miller was born in São Paulo in 1874 to a Scottish father and a Brazilian mother. He was sent to school in England, where he played football, and returned to São Paulo in 1894 with two footballs, a set of rules and the practical knowledge needed to set up matches. Miller is widely credited with introducing organised football to São Paulo, and he played in the first organised matches there in the mid-1890s.

Football took longer to spread in Brazil than in Argentina or Uruguay, and the early game was more clearly divided between the British and Brazilian elite communities and the wider population. Black and mixed-race players were initially barred from most leading clubs. As the game spread beyond the elite leagues in the 1910s and 1920s, that segregation broke down. By the 1930s, Brazilian football had its own distinctive style and a national side capable of competing with leading international teams.

The Argentine Association Football League, the forerunner of the modern Argentine FA, was founded in 1893. The Chilean federation followed in 1895, the Uruguayan in 1900, and the Brazilian after a longer period of regional rivalry. By the early twentieth century, the major football-playing countries in South America had begun forming national associations.

The continental confederation, CONMEBOL — the Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol — was founded in 1916, in Buenos Aires. It is the oldest of the six FIFA continental confederations. CONMEBOL's first tournament, the Campeonato Sudamericano de Fútbol, ran from 1916 and later became the Copa América, the oldest senior international football tournament that has continued into the modern game.

As Argentine, Uruguayan and Brazilian football moved beyond their British founders, they developed a style that became distinct from the European game. South American football was generally more technical, with closer ball control, more dribbling and more flair than the more direct English game. Players from across the social spectrum played from a young age, often in street games where the conditions favoured individual skill over physical strength.

That style fed back into the world game. Argentine and Uruguayan players competed in European leagues from the 1920s onwards, and South American national sides won several World Cups. Brazil's style in particular — sometimes called joga bonito, the beautiful game — became one of the defining traditions of international football, especially through the Brazil sides that won the World Cup in 1958, 1962 and 1970.