A Game Brought from Britain — The Birth of the Two Great Clubs

In 2010, in South Africa, when the Spain national team lifted the World Cup, the world remembered this country as a ‘kingdom of football.’ Yet trace that passion back to its source and you arrive at an unexpected truth: it was not the Spanish who brought football to Spain. At the close of the nineteenth century, labourers who had come all the way from Britain kicked a ball around in their leisure hours. That ball would grow into a passion great enough to split a nation in two. The long road to La Roja begins with this imported game.

The Ball the Miners Kicked

The story begins in the mines of southern Spain. In the 1870s, labourers of the British firm Rio Tinto Company — which had secured the mining rights to the Río Tinto copper mines at Huelva in Andalusia — crossed over to work there. After their gruelling labour, they gave themselves over to the games of home: cricket, rugby, and football. At almost the same time, a band of Britons working for a telegraph company arrived in Vigo, the port town of Galicia in the north-west. Far from home, they came to be known as the ‘Exiles.’

Thus were born Rio Tinto FC (1878) and Exiles FC, among the very earliest football teams in Spain. No official registration records survive, and they could hardly be called proper clubs. Yet the local Spaniards took eagerly to imitating this unfamiliar game. Students who had studied in Britain, learning football at the public schools before returning home, also played their part in spreading it. A game brought from outside had begun to put down roots in this country’s soil.

Barcelona — From a Single Newspaper Advertisement

In time, the foreign pastime took on the form of a ‘club.’ Its symbols were the births of two colossal clubs.

In October 1899, an unusual advertisement appeared in the Barcelona sports paper Los Deportes. A young Swiss man, Joan Gamper (Hans Gamper), was seeking comrades to found a football club. Eleven men answered the call, gathering at the Solé gymnasium on 29 November. Swiss, Catalan, German, British — men of diverse origins raised the banner of ‘Foot-Ball Club Barcelona’ under their first president, Walter Wild.

This club was never merely a football team. Catalonia, whose regional capital is Barcelona, possessed its own language and culture, and held an identity distinct from that of the central Madrid. Barça came, little by little, to carry the pride of Catalonia on its shoulders, and would in time raise the slogan ‘Més que un club’ (More than a club). What weight this phrase carries will become clear in the next episode.

Madrid — The Pride of the White Shirt

Meanwhile, in the capital of Madrid, things too were stirring. Through the split of a student club called ‘Sky Football,’ born in 1897, the club was renamed Madrid FC in 1901. On 6 March 1902, it was formally founded with Juan Padrós as its president.

The Padrós brothers wished to make football a popular sport, open to every social class. They set the colour of the shirts as white, in imitation of the great English side of the day, the Corinthians. This white shirt would later become one of the most famous kits in the world. In 1920, the club was granted the title ‘Real’ (royal) by King Alfonso XIII, and so became Real Madrid. A club of the capital, and bound to the crown — its origins stood in the starkest contrast to Barça, which bore the defiance of Catalonia.

And the two clubs met each other early. On 13 May 1902, in the semi-final of the Copa de la Coronación, held to celebrate the coronation of Alfonso XIII, Barça beat Madrid FC 3–1 in a match played at Madrid’s old hippodrome. This was the memorable first match of El Clásico, the hottest and longest rivalry in the world. In 1929, La Liga, the national league, kicked off with ten clubs, and it was Barça who shone as the first champions. The stage was set.

The two great clubs, born of a foreign pastime, would in time meet the darkest age in Spain’s history. Civil war, and then dictatorship. It was then that football would turn into a battlefield where politics and identity collided head-on. The story continues into the age of Franco.