The Queen’s Park Football Club have been widely considered as pioneers in the history of football, largely related to their development of the passing game. Yet, the Glasgow club can also be considered the forbearers of inter-nation club football.

On the 4th of March, 1872, Queen’s Park of Scotland took on Wanderers of England at the Oval. Nine Scots had travelled to London by rail where they were joined by two more ex-pats in the English capital. Queen’s Park had entered the inaugural edition of the FA Cup as they were one of the few clubs in Scotland to play by the ‘association rules’ and had found little competition in their native land. Over 80 years later, clubs throughout Europe would also endure long journeys for the same purpose: to measure yourself against the best and see how good you really are.

On a sunny day in front of a large crowd, an even match ended in a 0-0 draw. Wanderers offered to play a 30-minute extra-time period but the Scots refused for reasons that remain unclear. Unable to afford another trip South at considerable expense (the rules stipulated that the semi-finals and final had to be played in London) for a replay or potential final, they withdrew. Wanderers went on to win the final 1-0 over the Royal Engineers.

It was the FA Cup that had lit the blue touch paper for the rapid spread of organised club football. A meeting had been held in October of 1863 at Freemasons Tavern in London in order to create ‘an Association with the object of establishing a definite code of rules for the regulation of the game.’

The meeting was the culmination of an ongoing debate that had reached the letters page of The Times started by ‘Etonensis’. His letter, published on October 6th, argued that by framing of a set of rules ‘football might then stand a chance of occupying, among other games, the rank which so healthy and manly a sport deserves to hold.’

‘Football’ had become a mainstay of the Elite Private Schools of England but how and what ‘football’ actually was varied from school to school. A code of rules was required to ensure the alumni and the developing football clubs could play each other without confusion or controversy.

Yet for its first nine years, the FA failed to deliver any sort of consensus or consistency on what football actually looked like. As Football Historian Tony Collins has written ‘few organisations have begun so unsuccessfully as the Football Association (FA). Its original goal of uniting all football clubs under one code of rules was a complete failure.’^ On more than one occasion, its members considered dissolving the organisation.

The establishment of the FA Cup, however, caught the imagination and raised Association football’s profile ahead of that of Rugby football. In order to compete, you had to play by the rules and the chance of glory was carrot enough to abide by the regulations set forth by the FA. Initially, the tournament was dominated by former pupils of the private schools, notably Wanderers (a mix but mainly Old Harroverians), Old Etonians and Old Carthusians (Charterhouse) with the military represented by The Royal Engineers. In 1882 a team from the North of England, Blackburn Rovers, reached the final for the first time and the following year, their neighbours, Blackburn Olympic, would lift the famous trophy. In 1876, the Welsh club Druids F.C. competed in the competition and in the 1884 and 1885 season Queen’s Park would reach the final but lose on both occasions to Blackburn Rovers.

The cause of the Northern clubs in the FA Cup had been aided by Scottish players, so-called ‘Shamatuers’ who, in most cases, were employed by club benefactors in their factories and mills. This created conflict within the Football Association as many saw football as a strictly amateur game, a recreation away from banking or landowning. The growing debate reached its breaking point in 1884 when London club Upton Park complained that Preston North End were fielding professionals. Preston did not deny the fact, but identified that this was common practice. The argument resulted in a threat from the Midland and Northern clubs to break from the FA and create the British Football Association which would legalise professionalism. The FA relented, professionalism became the norm, and football would never be the same.

With the increased wage bills, clubs had to develop consistent income. Several local and regional cup competitions had sprung up alongside the FA Cup, but the nature of knockout football provided no guarantees on fixtures (and revenue) from week to week. The solution lay in the dominant bat and ball games of England and the USA. Both cricket and baseball had established a consistently high-level competitive program via the unofficial County Championship and the National League, respectively.

William McGregor, a Scottish draper and director of Aston Villa, convened a meeting of twelve professional clubs from Lancashire and the Midlands in April 1888 to set up a Football League comprising home and away matches that would run from September to April. Preston North End’s ‘Invincibles’ would be the first League Champions, winning 18 of their 22 games, and drawing the other four. They would also win the FA Cup that season, completing ‘the Double’.

The structure of football had been set: League and Cup.

Scottish and English clubs competed in formal and semi-formal challenge events in the last quarter of the 19th century often between the respective cup winners and league champions. In various dispatches, these games were known as the World Football Championship, or derivatives. In 1902, a British League Cup was organised to raise money for victims of the Ibrox disaster which featured the top two teams in each respective league; Celtic, Rangers, Everton and Sunderland (Celtic beating Rangers in the final). However, this seems to have been the end of any meaningful competition within Britain, aside from one-off events to commemorate major national occasions, e.g. the Coronation Cup in 1953. Thus, the ‘Home Nations’ continued to maintain their separate football institutions. Delete

Spread to the Continent

Football’s spectacular growth in Britain was mirrored in continental Europe. Brought across the seas by a mix of expat aristocratic sons who had been sent home for schooling, a professional class of merchants, sailors, engineers and educators, and native sons who had encountered the game on visits to Britain or watched with interest English and Scots play the game in local parks.

The case of many of the European Cup’s early competitors illustrates the branches football developed across the continent. Athletic Bilbao (1898), participants in 1956/57 season resulted from a merger between the Athletic Club, formed by students who had attended school in Britain and Bilbao Football Club, which was the club of the British miners and shipyard workers employed in the city. FC Barcelona (1899), also based in a rapidly industrialising port, was formed by Swiss banker Hans Gamper, who placed an advert in the local paper and attracted a group of Spanish German and English players. Mining engineer Julián Palacios would, in 1902, organise the Madrid Football Club (Real Madrid). In 1899, Herbert Kilpin, a lace manufacturer from Nottingham, created the Milan Cricket and Football Club. They would later be renamed Associazione Calcio (AC) Milan. A dispute within the club over foreign players would lead to the formation of the breakaway club Internazionale (1908). In Turin, the young students at the elite Massimo d’Azeglio Lyceum in 1897 school created Juventus, Latin for Youth.

With the League and the Cup providing two regular income streams for the Scottish and English clubs, the overseas tour would provide a third opportunity to generate revenue and, for the hosts, a chance to learn from the visiting teams. In the early days, these tours resulted in many lopsided wins for the British club, but they also helped create a cottage industry for players and coaches joining teams throughout the continent, growing the game with a missionary zeal. Whilst many of the early founders of continental clubs had played in England, most had been recreational level players, the second wave were the products of professionalism. The Scotsman, Johnny Dick was a prime example. Dick started his career at Airdrieonians and then followed the well-trodden path across Hadrian’s Wall, to sign for Arsenal in 1898. He was part of the Gunners side, which toured Central Europe in 1907. He would return to Prague in 1912 to become manager at Deutscher FC. Following the First World War, he joined AC Sparta (Sparta Prague), managing in two spells until 1933. His rival coach across the city was another Scot, John Madden, a former Celtic player who coached from 1905 to 1930.

There were many more; Fred Pentland at Athletic Bilbao, Jack Greenwell (FC Barcelona), Jack Reynolds (Ajax) and William Garbutt (Genoa, Roma, Napoli) but the man widely considered to have made the biggest impact was Jimmy Hogan.

Hogan grew up in Burnley and played for his hometown club, Fulham and Bolton among others. In 1910, he took up an offer to coach Dutch side FC Dordrecht and during that time he coached the Netherlands to a 2-1 win victory over Germany. Following a return to England to finish his playing career, he was offered a job preparing the Austrian national team for the 1912 Olympics by the Austrian FA’s Hugo Meisl. This was extended to take in the 1916 Olympics, but after the declaration of war in 1914, Hogan found himself in Budapest. It was there that he took over at MTK Budapest.

Hogan returned to the UK at the end of the War but the style of play he implemented, known at the time as the Scottish passing game, left a legacy and was carried on by one of his players Dori Kürschner who would later take this to South America. Meisl became the Head Coach of Austria and it was Vienna that became the most important football city in continental Europe. Football became another important topic for the deep thinkers and intellectuals within the city’s numerous coffee houses to debate and develop new approaches. Collectively the nations of Central Europe came to be known as the ‘Danubian School’ and by the mid-1920s it was was one of the three centres of World Football alongside Britain (which had the advantage of early adoption) and the Rioplatenese powerhouses of Argentina and Uruguay.

The Mitropa Cup

Football’s growth beyond the shores of Britain led to the formal development in 1904 of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). French journalist Robert Guérin of Le Matin newspaper brought together eight European associations (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland). The British associations would join in 1905 but flit in and out of membership based on a series of disputes until the late 1940s. The primary result of FIFA’s creation was to give them sanctioning power over International matches. Football became an Olympic sport in 1908 and by 1928 in Amsterdam, it was one of the most popular events in the entire program. Again, however, the issue of professionalism came to the fore. With the Olympics being founded on strictly amateur principles, there were questions about who could be selected. In Britain, the divide between a professional and an amateur was fairly well established, but the same was not the case in other nations which did not have a professional league. Arguments raged, resulting in the British bloc resigning en masse. The fallout would prompt FIFA to develop their own World Championship. In 1930, the World Cup was born.

Formal leagues had been formed throughout Europe at the turn of the century. Like the Football League, many of these competitions began with a small number of teams and often in a hybrid league and cup format. The first football league in continental Europe came from the Belgians who launched the Belgian First Division in 1895. This was followed by the Swiss (1898), the Hungarians (1901) and Austria in 1911. Several other nations formed regional leagues, which worked up to a national championship, for example, Italy in 1898.

Inter-continental Cup competitions also began springing up in the early part of the 20th century. In 1908, the Torneo Internazionale Stampa Sportiva sponsored by La Stampa newspaper was a four-team knockout tournament. Hosted in Turin, it featured a team from Italy, Switzerland, Germany and France with Servette of Switzerland beating Torino in the final. The tournament was a success, but without an English team it lacked the prestige to be seen as a fully international tournament. The following year, Scottish tea magnate Sir Thomas Lipton agreed to a request from Italian King Victor Emmanuel III to put on a tournament. Lipton had previous success in South America donating a trophy for an annual match between Argentina and Uruguay, the Copa Lipton, which began in 1905. Lipton pledged to invite an English team over for the event, but in an unsurprising development, the insular Football Association chose not to send one. Determined to secure an English presence, West Auckland Town, of the Northern League, a team made up of miners, were invited. The reasons for their selection remain a mystery but they took up the offer and wouldn’t regret it. The County Durham men defeated Stuttgarter Sportfreunde in the semi-finals, then Swiss Champions FC Winterthur in the final. Future FC Barcelona player and manager, Jack Greenwell, was in the West Auckland line-up. In 1911, they returned to Turin and kept the trophy for good, beating Juventus 6-1 in the final. Unfortunately, the trophy was stolen from the club in 1994 and never recovered but a statue was built to commemorate the triumph in 2013.

In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Challenge Cup was created in 1897, the brainchild of John Gramlick, an Englishman and Electrical merchant and one of the founders of the Vienna Cricket and Football Club. Teams from Vienna, Budapest and Prague took part in the event which was dominated by the Viennese teams. The tournament ran until 1911 with Wiener Sport Club defeating Ferencváros in the last final.

The horror of the First World War, which left a continent maimed and mutated, saw the political map of Europe redrawn. None more so was that felt in the Austro-Hungarian empire, where Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Poland emerged as Independent states. Yet post-war, the passion for football remained unabated. Attendances boomed, FIFA’s membership steadily grew, and, in a template for years to come, football often became an early opportunity for diplomatic tensions to be thawed.

In Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia professional leagues were established in the mid-1920s and it was decided in 1927 to create an Inter-Club competition. Players were now more freely available to travel, but they also needed to be paid and developing additional revenue streams was essential for the clubs, just like in England, forty years prior. The tournament, officially titled the Central European Cup would become known as the Mitropa Cup, after the nations of Mitteleuropa (Middle Europe) a term often attributed to the former Austro-Hungarian states. The Mitropa Cup was the brainchild of Meisl, the previously mentioned Austrian football player, coach, referee, and administrator.

At the 1926 FIFA Congress Meisl submitted competition proposals for International and Inter-Clubs. The matters were not fully addressed until the 1927 congress, but FIFA made no decision. Meisl thus leaned on his network and the nations of Central Europe gathered in Venice in the summer of ‘27 and sketched out the plans for the Central European International Cup and the Mitropa Cup.

It is impossible to consider a history of the European Cup, without acknowledging the importance of the Mitropa Cup. In his sprawling history of the game, The Ball is Round, David Goldblatt wrote that the Mitropa Cup ‘occupies a special, even pivotal place in the history of football. In the twelve years that it was contested before the Second World War it created the defining template for international club football competitions.’

The tournament established the home and away aggregate format and the ominous coin toss tiebreaker. Of course, money was always an important consideration, and a division of gate receipts were also allocated to each team. After operational costs were paid, the home team received 70% and the away 30% (with a guarantee of at least $1600). For the inaugural season two teams from each of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia competed. In 1929 the Italians replaced the Yugoslavian teams, adding more prestige and quality to the event. In most cases, the Italians and Czechs nominated their national champions and either the league runners up or cup winners. This was not always true of the Hungarian and Austria representatives. As an example, Hogan’s MTK Budapest were invited to participate in the inaugural tournament instead of Champions Ferencváros. Also of note for establishing norms related to competitions, the knockout ties were played alongside the existing league season from August to November. The maiden final in 1927 saw John Dick’s Sparta Prague defeat Rapid Vienna 7-4 on aggregate across the two legs. Crowds flocked to the games with 40,000 in attendance at the second leg of the final in Vienna. For those who could not attend, the first radio broadcasts of matches on the continent would keep fans informed. German, French and Belgian newspapers also covered the tournament.

The Mitropa Cup grew throughout the 1930s, reaching a peak of 20 teams in 1939, with Swiss and Romanian clubs added to the party. It featured some of the iconic players such as Mathias Sindelar, Giuseppe Meazza, Raimundo Orsi and György Sárosi. Future FA and FIFA President Sir Stanley Rous would referee the 1930 final. The 1934 (Italy v Czechoslovakia) and 1938 (Italy v Hungary) World Cup finals would see teams from the competing Mitropa nations play in each final. England would lose to Hungary, Austria and the Czechs in the 1930s and the Austrian Wunderteam, coached by Meisl would batter Scotland 5-0 in 1931. The Mitropa Cup can be considered the highest consistent level of club competition in Europe of its time.

The tournament was not without its controversies and, in the Europe of the late 20s and 30s, diplomatic incidents were commonplace. MTK Budapest players were denied visas to travel to a match in Subotica (formerly of the Austro-Hungarian empire but at the time part of Yugoslavia). Inaugural winners Sparta Prague refused to travel to games in Vienna the year after their victory after being on the end of anti-Czech insults in their match against Rapid. Crowd trouble in their semi-final saw Slavia and Juventus thrown out of the tournament, leaving Bologna as champions and most notably, in 1937, Mussolini refused to allow the second-leg of the quarter-final between Genoa and Admira Wien to take place after a mass brawl in the first-leg had seen a Genoa player suffer a broken jaw.

Still the tournament remained hugely popular and clubs benefited from their participation but it was those political tensions that had cast a shadow over proceedings that would conclude the Mitropa’s golden age. The annexation of Austria into the Third Reich in 1938 ended their participation in the event and, with war raging across Europe, the tournament was suspended after 1939. It was revived in 1955, but by then Mitteleuropa was a very different place and the footballing landscape had evolved. Still, it was played until 1992, when in its 50th edition, Borac Banja Luka (Yugoslavia) defeated BVSC Budapest in front of 1000 fans in Foggia.

Central Europe was the most prominent example of a collective football network that did not ascribe to specific geographic and political boundaries. We can only speculate what might have happened had the Second World War not occurred. What we now consider UEFA territory may have been sub-divided into smaller confederations. The Mitropa Cup may have continued expanding across Europe, or rival competitions in other regions may have developed. Competitions in International football were established in the Balkans, Baltic and Scandinavia during this time, and of course, the Daddy of them all was the British Home Championship.

The roots of European competition were being established. There was also a significant amount of pan-European football taking place that was not formalised into any competition, nor even, most times, covered by the press. The case of the British clubs in the inter-war years and their relationship with Europe is worth further consideration. Research by has shone a light on the continued tours that British clubs took take of Europe. Everton for example, toured every season except one from 1932 to 1939 and received over ten offers a season to arrange touring fixtures. The Easter break became a popular period for travel with 197 matches being authorised by the FA between English clubs and foreign opponents. This does not line up with the accepted notion of British isolationism. Herbert Chapman, Britain’s greatest ever pre-war manager, was a dedicated Europhile and even tried to sign Austrian goalkeeper Rudi Hiden in 1930 but was prevented by the Players Union and the Football League. As with the Mitropa Cup, these growing links were to come to a standstill during the Second World War. Delete

The Copa Latina

Like its predecessor, the Second World War changed the map of Europe and the course of football. In its simplest form, players had significant chunks of their careers taken away from them. Though they were less likely to see front-line action than in the First World War, there were still many who lost their lives. The impact was felt most devastatingly within the Jewish community, who had made such significant contributions to the development and subsequent ascent of Central European football. After spending six years in civil war, reconciliation, even in sport, would take time.

The most significant competition that grew up in the post-war, pre-European Cup period was the Copa Latina (Latin Cup), another regional affair. A request was made by the football associations of France, Italy, Portugal and Spain to FIFA to create a tournament for clubs within these nations. There is little evidence of FIFA playing an active role in its functions, but it indicates the status FIFA had in overseeing European football.

The presence of the Italians was an indicator of their growing shift westwards post-war. After having been a major player in the Mitropa Cup golden-era of the 30s (and indeed that of Italy), Italian clubs were now contributing to another emerging football culture.

The Copa Latina was held during the summer, and was a simple four team knock-out affair, with a blind draw to decide the fixtures. In addition to the annual event, there was a wider convoluted points system kept over the course of the four years, to determine the winning federation. The first season saw tragedy strike, as the favourites, Il Grande Torino, perished in the Superga air crash on their way back from a friendly in Lisbon, before the competition could begin. The team were still invited to take their place as the Champions of Italy, but the squad was clearly nowhere near the strength of Valentino Mazzola et al. Though the format differed, the tournament was a much closer relation to the subsequent European Cup, based not only on time but on the roll call of winners. Barcelona (1949 & 1952), Benfica (1950), Milan (1951 & 1956), Reims (1953), and last, but not least, Real Madrid (1955 & 1957) notably beating Reims in Paris in the ‘55 final. All five teams would compete in the European Cup Final by 1961. Benfica’s triumph in 1950 is worthy of further mention as it featured, a 146th minute winning goal. Benfica and Bordeaux had played out a 3-3 draw after extra-time. In the replay, Benfica scored a late equaliser in the 90th minute to force more extra time. 30 minutes came and went and the game carried on until in the 146th minute, Julinho, scored the winner for the Portuguese, coached by Englishman Ted Smith.

Despite the high-level of football that was on show, the competition faced criticism from an early stage, largely based on its timing, held as it was at the end of the season, in the hottest months of the year. Players, tired after a long season, struggled to bring the desired intensity in sweaty humid arenas. French newspaper Miroir Sport claimed in 1952, that ‘the real winner of the Latin Cup was fatigue’. There were also conflicts with the World Cup, this saw Italy send Lazio (4th place in Serie A) to the 1950 edition because of the number of Milan, Inter and Juventus players who had been called up to the Italian National Team. In 1954, such conflicts were avoided by cancelling the tournament altogether.

Ultimately, it would be the onset of the European Cup that would lead to its demise, although sadly the proposal for a true Latin Cup featuring the European countries plus Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, never came to pass.

However, despite the Latin zone being the growing future force in European football, it would be one game, in one of the original heartlands of the sport, that would light the blue touch paper for the creation of football’s greatest club competition. It was a match between the two teams that served as standard bearers of their respective schools: Wolverhampton Wanderers of England and Great Britain versus Honved of Hungary and Central Europe.