IV.

The Spread of Football

This adoption took place rapidly in Europe and many other parts of the world in the closing years of the 19th century. British soldiers, sailors, colonial servants, businessmen, engineers, and teachers exported the game worldwide, as they did cricket and other games and sports. The pattern was the same. They would produce a ball and start a game and then encourage the locals to join in.

In Vienna there was a large British colony that was responsible for creating the first Vienna football club and the Vienna Cricket and Football Club, from which FK Austria derived. The Austrian, Hugo Meisl, a member of Vienna Cricket Club and secretary of the Austrian FA (founded in 1904) was to have a very wide influence on the development of football in Europe and was the main force behind the Mitropa Cup (the prototype of modern European club events) and the Nations’ Cup competitions. Denmark was another European country to take quickly to the game. There was an English Football Club in Copenhagen in 1879 and the Danish FA was founded in 1889. In Italy resident Englishmen founded the Genoa Football and Cricket Club, and Genoa (1892) is Italy’s oldest league club; the Italian FA was created in 1898. The game started in Hungary in the 1890s (the FA was formed in 1901) and two Englishmen were in the first Hungarian team. In Germany and the Netherlands the game was well established by 1900 (when the German FA was founded). By 1908 there were 96 Dutch clubs. The Dutch FA was formed in 1889. Football was introduced to Russia in 1887 by two English mill owners, the Charnock brothers, near Moscow. By the late 1890s the Moscow League was in operation.

By early in the 20th century the game was in full swing in Europe and most countries had formed their football association: Belgium (1895), Czechoslovakia (1901), Finland (1907), Luxembourg (1908), Norway (1902), Portugal (1914), Romania (1909), Spain (1913), Sweden (1904), and Switzerland (1895).

In South America British sailors had played football in Brazil in the 1870s, but the main moving spirit who established it was Charles Miller, the son of English immigrants. He encouraged British resident workers to form clubs (some already existed for cricket). The first mainly Brazilian club was the Associaciao Athletica Mackenzie College in São Paulo. In Argentina the game was introduced by British residents in Buenos Aires and the FA was founded in 1893. However, it caught on quite slowly and in the end it was Italian immigrants who made the game popular. Chile formed its FA in 1895, Uruguay in 1900, and Paraguay in 1906. British influence in South America is evident in the names of some club sides: Corinthians in Brazil, Everton and Rangers in Chile, Liverpool and Wanderers in Uruguay, and Newell’s Old Boys in Argentina.

Until recently and the staging of the 1994 World Cup, the United States had not often been associated with football, but it was played there from an early stage. The Oneida Club of Boston was founded in 1862 and the national side reached the semi-finals of the 1930 World Cup. In Africa the British colonial movement played a large part in introducing association football but it developed more slowly on that continent, while in Canada and Australia it is only lately that it has become popular.

In 1904, the world governing body, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), was formed in Paris. Between the World Wars many other countries took up football and after World War II many developing and newly emergent countries did likewise. By 2008 FIFA had 208 members.