After starting his term, its honorary president, Alfonso Macaya, began to develop the idea of a football championship between different clubs, and thus the
Copa Macaya was born, the first regulated football competition played on the
Iberian Peninsula. The Hispania team that lined up that day was:
S. Morris; Soler, Gold;
Sanmartín,
Soley, Ortiz;
Lomba, Black, Green,
Leigh, and
E. Morris. This victory proved to be decisive in the outcome of the tournament since the rest of the participating teams basically played a "formality role", as Barcelona and Hispania beat them all with thrashings, with Hispania's biggest ones coming against
Franco-Española with resoundings 0–10 and 14–0 wins, in the latter, Hamilton netted 6 goals, while
Green and Black clutched a
hat-trick. Naturally, the title was only decided when they met again, now at Hispania's home ground, on the last matchday on 14 April, with Hispania having 14 points against Barcelona's 12, thus if the latter achieved victory, the title would have to be decided with a tiebreaker, a play-off. In the first half, Hispania went ahead thanks to an
own goal from an undetermined Barcelona player, and then managed to resist Barça's siege largely thanks to their
goalkeeper,
Samuel Morris, who conceded a goal from
Joan Gamper in the second half, which was not enough to prevent Hispania from holding to the draw and hence become the first Catalan champion in history. However, this historic meeting was not without controversy, since the referee annulled a second goal from Barcelona for offside, a decision that was heavily contested, with Barça claiming bias in the refereeing in favor of the organizers of the tournament. The tournament itself had been wrapped in further controversy when on 10 March 1901, Hispania faced Club Español (now known as
RCD Espanyol) in a match that turned out to be a real disaster: Hispania's changed home grounds in the middle of the tournament, going from Frare Blanch to the
Camp del Carrer Muntaner, thus the ground was making its official debut, which went terribly wrong as the ground had a slight incline at various points; the goal frames fell twice, two Espanyol players had to leave the field of play due to injuries, and in the face of such an accumulation of nonsense, Espanyol chose to leave the field before the end of the match, thinking of raising a protest against the competition committee, but they gave up from the idea knowing that the committee would always rule in favor of Hispania, so they withdrew from the tournament after the fourth match, claiming that the refereeing was in Hispania's aid. ==1901–02 Copa Macaya==