The forgotten anniversary of the world’s first football club Edinburgh Foot Ball Club

Today, December 11 2024, is football’s forgotten anniversary.

Exactly 200 years ago, on 11 December, 1824, a 17-year-old student set up the world’s first football club.

Established in Edinburgh, it was known simply as the Foot Ball Club.

But, as the world’s first such organisation, it faced some unique challenges. Undoubtedly, its most serious problem was the lack of any other clubs to play against.

They overcame that challenge simply by dividing the club into two teams and playing against each other.

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Bulletins

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But another problem was a more technical one – the footballs themselves. Because they used pigs’ bladders as inner tubes, the balls tended to burst at an alarming rate. Indeed the club’s still surviving account books record that they often needed to stop play 3 or 4 times each match so as to insert and inflate a new bladder (at up to £4 [In modern values] a throw).

Another challenge stemmed from the nature of the pitches. For much of the club’s lifetime, the only open spaces available were farmers’ fields. However, to keep the pitches clear of cowpats and sheep-droppings, the club had to pay farmers substantial amounts of money to ensure that livestock did not wander onto the pitch, even between matches.

The club’s founder was a 17 year old Scottish law student called John Hope who had just enrolled at Edinburgh University – and for most of the club’s existence (from 1824 to at least 1841), it consisted mainly of law students.

Initially, the club had very few regulations. However, in 1833, Hope created the world’s first known set of football rules, albeit very minimal ones.

However, one of the more innovative rules banned the till then common practice of picking up the ball, rugby style. From that point onwards, in Hope’s organisation, kicking the ball became the sole permitted method of propelling it. The Edinburgh club’s 1833 rules therefore represent the first steps away from what had been the ancestor of both soccer and rugby to something that began to more closely resemble an embryonic form of soccer.

Although Edinburgh’s Foot Ball Club, founded in 1824, was the sport’s first organised club, forms of the game had been played for centuries.

Historians describe the sport played in medieval and early modern times as ‘mob football’. Mob teams were of unlimited size (often more than 100 players in each team) and there were absolutely no rules – and certainly no organised clubs (just mob matches, often between rival villages)

What’s more, in mob football, the pitch could be hundreds of metres long and had no defined borders. Matches tended to be so disorderly and often violent that the authorities frequently had to ban them.

Predominantly, medieval and early modern ‘mob football’ was played by rural farm workers and urban apprentices.

But, by around 1800, the sport had been adopted by more middle class school boys, in some of the more prestigious often private educational institutions like Eton, Rugby, Harrow and Edinburgh’s (non-private, yet socially elite) High School (now the city’s Royal High School).

John Hope, the founder of the 1824 Foot Ball Club, had attended that latter school – and his love of the game there had then inspired him to set up that historic first club which staged more than 500 matches and, over the years, recruited at least 300 players.

“Hope is a largely forgotten figure in British history, but his role in setting up the world’s first football club was of huge significance,” said Andy Mitchell, co-author of the only book ever written on the subject (1824, the World’s First Football Club)

As football spread across Britain in the 1840s and 1850s, it remained a predominantly middle class sport – partly because it was still a mainly participatory game, rather than a spectator one, and playing it cost participants substantial amounts of money, largely to pay for grounds and balls.

But, from the late 1860s onwards, the game began to change from a mainly participatory sport to a predominantly spectator one. As a result, a much wider public became interested in the game – and, consequently, it gradually became more working class than middle class. Indeed, to start accommodating the sport’s spectators, the world’s first purpose-built stadium was constructed in 1873 in Hampden Park, Glasgow.

Today, 200 years after John Hope founded his Foot Ball Club, the game (now worth over £60 billion worldwide) transcends class and other social and political barriers and boasts literally hundreds of thousands of clubs (including 4400 professional ones) in virtually every country on earth.

“Hope was a remarkable and complex individual,” says Andy Mitchell, a Scottish sports historian who spent ten years as Head of Communications at the Scottish FA and 20 years as a Media Officer for UEFA.

Not only did Hope found the world’s first football club, but he also threw himself into philanthropic work, setting up an anti-alcohol youth movement (the British League of Juvenile Abstainers), personally financing evening classes for 30,000 working class young people and organising a vast anti-alcohol youth rally, attended by 20,000 children.

Hope was also involved in military initiatives. He set up a teetotal company of the War-Office-sponsored Edinburgh Rifle Volunteers (where all his volunteer troops had to sign an anti-alcohol pledge) – and, in 1860, he set up the British League Cadets (nicknamed the Water Rats, because, as its ethos was teetotal, they mainly drank water!). The organisation – the world’s first uniformed youth movement – later inspired the emergence of other uniformed youth movements including the Boys Brigade, the scouts and the schools-based Combined Cadet Force.

However, Hope also appears to have been self-obsessed, intolerant and dictatorial. Although he played football as part of a team, he was, in his wider life, not really a team player. Like many others of his era, he became extreme in his religious views, especially in his attitude towards Catholicism. In 1850 he helped to establish the strongly pro-Protestant Scottish Reformation Society ‘to resist the aggression of popery’- and a year later he helped organise speeches by extremist preachers – including at least one who believed that Ireland’s mid-19th-century Great Famine (which killed a million people) was the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy. Hope also launched an anti-Catholic newspaper – The Banner of Truth.

He appears to have held equally strident views in family matters and in politics.

He became estranged from all his siblings, who distanced themselves from him because they thought he was trying to dictate how they should live their lives.

As a Conservative party worker, he was accused of physically intimidating voters at a polling station (and in one incident the police had to be called in to restrain him).

And as an independent member of Edinburgh City Council, he was likewise not universally popular. Other councillors apparently found it difficult to get on with him – because of his ‘headstrong manner’.

Hope dedicated his life to football, social reform, teetotalism, religion and politics. He was both a social reformer and a bigot – a not uncommon combination in his era. He was totally absorbed by his public roles and never married.

His devotion to young people, his love of uniforms, his dedication to exercise and his loyalty to empire, helped pave the way for several other slightly later Victorian social entrepreneurs – like Sir William Alexander Smith (founder of the Boys Brigade) and Robert Baden Powell (founder of the scouting movement).

But it was Hope’s 1824 Foot Ball Club that ultimately helped fundamentally transform global culture on a scale he almost certainly would not have thought possible.