First official football match in Spain

Modern football was introduced to Spain in the late 19th century by a combination of mostly British immigrant workers and visiting sailors. In 1873, a large group of British workers arrived in both Huelva and Vigo, two cities opened to the world through the sea and who had kept a close industrial relationship with Britain, which means that the first kick to a football ball on Spanish soil occurred in one of those cities. According to Spanish historian José Ramón Cabanelas, "the first football matches [in Spain] began to be played in Vigo as soon as the Cable Inglés arrived in May 1873", and indeed, this British colony was the first one to establish a football team in 1876, which played matches against the crews of the English ships that docked in the port of Vigo, which were held at El Relleno. In Huelva, on the other hand, a certain William Bice was the one who began organizing the first "kick-abouts" between the club's members, and this colony eventually founded the Rio Tinto English Club in 1878 (known in Huelva as Club Inglés Bella Vista), which had a football team known as Rio Tinto FC. Furthermore, soldiers from the British colony of Gibraltar held football matches and training sessions in the neighbouring La Línea and San Roque in Cádiz, and there was even a team called "Benalife" made up of llanitos, which lost a match to a "British Navy XI" in January 1884; The earliest known example of this is March 1888, when the club played football and cricket matches against the sailors of a merchant ship called Jane Cory who had just arrived in port; Mackay even invited a Spaniard Ildefonso Martínez to play. Eventually, in the late 1880s, football started to gain some followers among the local youth, and as they became familiar with its rules, some of them asked Mackay to participate, which he happily accepted, as he did not conceive of his recreational club as something exclusive to the British colony. Ildefonso Martínez, José García Almansa, Alfonso Le Bourg, and some others, thus became the first Spaniards to play football. ==Background==

The Sociedad de Juego de Pelota developed into the oldest official football club in Spain, Recreativo de Huelva, founded by William Alexander Mackay, the doctor of the Rio Tinto Company, Charles Wilson Adam, the owner of the land where the games were played. Just a month later, on 25 January 1890, Sevilla FC was founded by a group of young British residents in Seville, including Isaias White and Edward Farquharson Johnston. Sevilla FC organized several "kick-abouts" between the club's members, usually a Sunday 70-minute five-a-side match, but as soon as they learned of the existence of a Recreation Club 80 miles away in Huelva, they decided to invite them for a football match. To that end, on 25 February 1890, Isaias White, the then secretary of Sevilla FC, wrote a letter to the president of the Huelva club, which was published three days later in the La Provincia, a now-extinct Huelva newspaper. A few days later, on 3 March, some members of the Recreation Club, which had never played a football match of any kind, gathered at the Hotel Colón, and ultimately decided to accept Sevilla's invitation. ==Squad==

On the morning of 8 March 1890, 22 members of the Recreation Club took the mail train on a four-hour journey to Seville, arriving there in torrential rain. On the other hand, Sevilla FC fielded a mixed team of workers from the Seville Water Works Company and Johnston's shipping company, including Rickson, W. Logan, White, Enrique Welton, and captain Hugh MacColl, a native from Glasgow who had come to Seville's Water Works as a marine engineer. The newspapers of the time do not reveal the identity of Yugles, but it mentions that he is from "our left-wing", and according with Sevilla's future line-ups against Huelva in the next two years, Isaias White and Welton are the only players who both played on 8 March and featured as left-wingers around that time (at the time, there was no such thing as wing-backs), and in fact, White is the son of the co-owner of the Portilla, White & Co., one of Spain's largest foundries at the time, and a rich man has a higher chance of being the one who usually sleeps with a fancy pyjama than not. ==Overview==

The match took place at 16:45 on Saturday 8 March 1890 in a steady downpour, at the Tablada Hippodrome (horse racing track), also known as Hipódromo de la Sociedad de Carreras de Caballos, next to the Guadalquivir. The grass, now wet, had been marked with lines and at both ends of the meadow, the Seville players had placed three sticks to form the goals. Admission was free and there were around 120 spectators, mostly curious residents, and friends of the town's football players, most of whom arrived in horse-drawn carriages. The game was refereed by Sevilla's president Edward Johnston, who was also the British vice-council in Seville, who walked onto the pitch "while holding a piece of tanned calfskin, spherical in shape, sewn together with rough cords". He was assisted by a member of both clubs, who served as linesmen to help Johnston safeguard the rules of the English FA, and based in their future meetings in 1892, the Huelva linesman was most likely William Bice, an RTCL employee around the same age as Johnston. The match lasted two halves of thirty-five minutes. Rickson and Yugles scored the only goals of the match as Sevilla claimed a historic 2–0 victory, thus winning the very first official match in the history of Spanish football. Recreativo's defeat was attributed to the fact that the Huelva team had never played together before, and had just returned from a four-hour train journey in that same morning, plus the match was refereed by the president of Sevilla. ==Final details==

After the match, Sevilla FC, in what the Brits dubbed as the third half, marked this historic occasion by holding a large banquet in the saloon of a Suizo restaurant called Café Seville, hence honoring their opponents and guests with dinner. Sevilla FC opened the scoring after 25 minutes thanks to a goal from Gilbert Pollock, thus becoming the first-ever player to score an away goal on Spanish soil, but this time, however, Sevilla went on to lose as Huelva's side, fortified by "some athletes from the British colony of Rio-Tinto", fought back to win 2–1. In December 2014, the American sports media ESPN stated that "The game they played was not the first but it might be the first full lineup we have, the first record of a big away day [for Huelva]". ==Disputes==

On 3 May 1890, the Scottish newspaper Glasgow Evening Post stated: "It was the Astillero team that actually played the first game in Spain (about six months ago), and not the Seville team". This statement directly contradicts the report made by The Dundee Courier, which described the Seville match as "the first football match in Spain". Glasgow's remarks, however, turned out to be incorrect and it was most likely a result of a healthy rivalry between the Scottish communities in Spain regarding which one of them was the first to play football. In November 2001, there was news about a spectacular discovery of football in Vilagarcía de Arousa in 1873, but the alleged discovery was later disproven; in fact, the "discovered" news supposedly appeared in a newspaper (El Eco Republicano de Santiago de Compostela) that never existed; this is a clear example of the interest of certain amateur historians in granting their clubs or towns the "deanery" of Spanish football. ==See also==