The Sociedad de Foot-Ball de Barcelona () was a football scratch team that existed between 1892 and 1896, mainly consisting of players from the British community within Barcelona, but also included Catalans and Frenchmen. This entity was initially known as the Barcelona Football Club (1892–94), before being renamed as Sociedad de Foot-Ball de Barcelona following a restructuring in 1894. It was one of the first Catalan football clubs and is considered a predecessor of FC Barcelona founded in 1899. Some historians ascribe this entity as "a group of thirty friends, English workers, who played alternately and without a regular squad".
This entity is best remembered for its pioneering role in the amateur beginnings of football in Catalonia, organizing the first known football match in Catalonia in 1892 and being the catalyst for many other historic landmarks such as the oldest photograph of a football team in Spain and the first proper chronicle of a football match in Spain, both regarding a game between the club's members held on 12 March 1893. Moreover, they were part of the first known rivalry in Spanish football, when they faced the Scottish colony of Sant Martí a few times during the winter of 1893–94. Their game against a team from Torelló in 1895 marked the first time that teams from two different cities played against each other in Catalonia.
In 1895, the presidency of this club was given to the British consul William Wyndham. Apart from Wyndham as president, little is known about its board of directors, only that James Reeves, English, and George Cochran, Scottish, were its captain and vice-captain respectively between 1892 and 1894, always acting as captains on the two sides into which the members of the club were divided every Sunday. Reeves was the undisputed leader and fundamental head behind the club's foundation and management, and likewise, upon his departure in the autumn of 1895, this society, which was never officially established, soon declined and seems to disappear around 1896.
Between 1892 and 1895, this group of football pioneers would meet up in a field near the Hippodrome of Can Tunis in the municipality of Sants, and from 1895 onwards, the club's meetings were held at the Velódromo de la Bonanova in Barcelona, because it was closer to the city center, thus practicing the sport before the attentive and curious gaze of the local population.
History Origins At the end of the 19th century, Catalonia enjoyed the most developed industry in Spain, especially thanks to its cotton industry, and for this reason, Barcelona became the home to a vast British colony. Football first entered Catalonia thanks to the British colony that worked and lived there (and later through the Catalans returning from studying abroad), among whom the figures of Samuel James Morris and James Reeves stand out. The former was an English businessman and engineer who moved to Barcelona in 1889–90 to run two tram companies. He brought a football ball from London with him, and on Sunday mornings, he would teach his three sons, Samuel, Enrique (Henry) and Miguel (Júnior), the practice of football, a sport practically unknown in the city at the time, thus taking them to the outskirts of the city, preferably in Can Tunis (Casa Antúnez), in some fields adjacent to the Hippodrome of Can Tunis (then known as the hippodrome of Marina de Sants), due to being a lonely place free of onlookers and rowdies.
Known in Catalonia as Jaime Morris, he and his oldest son Samuel were members of the British Club de Barcelona, located on La Rambla dels Capuchins, no. 26, and in 1891, the Morris, together with Henry Wood and William MacAndrews, among other Britons, founded the Barcelona Cricket Club, domiciled at Ronda de Sant Pere, which was the first club to play football in Catalonia, as they played cricket in the spring-summer and then football in the autumn-winter (which was common at the time). Under the umbrella of the British Club of La Rambla, the cricketers began meeting in Can Tunis in a field located between the hippodrome and the Civil Arsenal, not too far from where the Morris brothers had learned to play the game with their father.
Reeves, on the other hand, arrived in Barcelona at some point in early 1892 due to work reasons. He was an enthusiastic and passionate lover of the game, but instead of joining the cricket team of the British Club of La Rambla, which was a strictly British entity, Reeves decided to create an organization exclusively dedicated to the practice of football and that would include British and Catalans alike. Reeves was a member of Club Regatas de Barcelona (a club of rowing and sailing established in 1881), and the spokesman for the club's British members (or British Club Regatas), so he used this position to meet and convince some of them to play football, but also some French members and most notably, three Catalans, Figueras, Tuñí, and Alberto Serra, who thus became the first documented Catalans to practice football in Catalonia. They began to play football around the autumn of 1892, the natural beginning of the football season, in the same ground that the Cricket Club was using to play football, and thus, they began facing each other, preferably on holidays, since Sundays were not a non-working day until 1905. Their first match thus probably took place on All Saints' Day on 1 November. The players, no matter the number (they rarely managed to be 22), were divided into two teams, one dressed in Blue (Azul) and their opponents in Red (Encarnado).
During their matches in the Spanish public holidays of 6 and 8 December, Reeves proposed to the cricketers the idea of creating a well-organized football club, and having impressed some of his countrymen with his passionate and entrepreneurial spirit, he convinced some of the Cricket Club members to join him, including some of its founders, such as Wood, MacAndrews, and the Morris, thus achieving a respectable number of partners in a short period of time, and together, along with the others he recruited, they founded a new club unaffiliated from the British Club of La Rambla. Apparently, this group of football pioneers led by Reeves was constituted as Barcelona Football Club, thus following the same structure of English club names, where the name of the town where it belongs, "Barcelona", precedes the purpose of the association, "Football Club", contrary to the associations made up by Catalans, Spanish or imitators of these where the purpose always precedes the town, as in the association set up in 1899 by the Swiss Joan Gamper together with a few Catalans: Futbol Club Barcelona.
Barcelona Football Club (1892–94)
Although the British colony of Barcelona had a large presence in the city, finding 22 individuals (plus the referee) was not an easy task, given that the expatriates came to work and many of them had positions of responsibility. It was not until the end of 1892 (the winter), after months of hard work, that Reeves managed to gather enough individuals to assemble two teams, although in the vast majority of matches, they did not complete the 11 per side. This group of football pioneers was made up of the British cricket players of the Barcelona Cricket Club, such as the Morris, Wood, Dumsday, Richardson, Beaty-Pownall and MacAndrews; the British, Catalan and French members of the Club Regatas de Barcelona, such as Ubaldo Noble and Lockie; Figueras, Tuñi and Serra; Chofre, Daunt and Georges Dagnière; and some other figures from unknown whereabouts such as Jorge Barrié, Henry W. Brown, Park, and George Cochran. Finally, on 25 December 1892, they were able to play the first known football match in the city (actually in the neighboring municipality of Sants, in the old La Marina de Sants), which was held in some field between the hippodrome and the civil arsenal. This was their first meeting documented in the press as the local newspaper La Dinastía reported on the Christmas Eve that "the partners from the Real Club de Regatas have organized a game of foot-ball, which they will play at eight in the morning on Sunday(25)". Josep Elías i Juncosa, who played for FC Barcelona between 1900 and 1903, recalled having witnessed matches at the Can Tunis Hippodrome between the English and the members of the Club de Regatas for three months.
Reeves kept organizing football matches and training sessions between the members of his club, with the last game of the season, which took place at the end of the winter on 12 March 1893, being a historic match in many ways. In addition to being the last game of the season, this match was the subject of the first proper chronicle of the dispute of a football match, which appeared in La Dinastía on 16 March, written by Enrique Font Valencia, who detailed the aspects of the game, including lineups, the color of the clothes, the name of the referee, the result and the goalscorers. According to the chronicle, the match took place at four in the afternoon, on the field near the hippodrome, and it was refereed by Alfredo Collett, the manager of the British water company. The blue team won 2–1 with goals from the locals, Figueras and Barrié, while the Red's one was netted by Mr. Reeves himself. Jaime Morris (senior), who played for the Reds as a goalkeeper, was 51 years old at the time, but despite his advanced age, he managed to keep his oldest son at bay, who played for the Blues as a midfielder, while his youngest son, Miguel, aged just 13, watched from the stands. Years later, in 1906, Joaquim Escardó of Los Deportes published a photogravure of the 22 footballers that played that match, plus the referee and Miguel Morris. The photograph is thus widely believed to be the oldest documented image of a football team in Spain. The 1906 article also stated that "The individual from the English colony Reewes was the soul of that Club".
At the beginning of 1893, the frequency of matches increased notably, with confrontations between red and blue teams becoming common, and they began to take football much more seriously. As a result of this, they decided to formally start a football club in Barcelona in the autumn of the following year.
After the summer of 1893, football returned to the Catalan capital, and the Barcelona club played its first games against neighboring towns as the news in the Barcelona press related several matches between the English Colony from Barcelona and the Scottish colony from Sant Martí (an independent municipality until 1897), with the press reporting at least three matches between them, played on 8 December 1893, 11 March, and 15 April 1894. Local historians claim that this was the first ever 'unofficial' rivalry in Spanish football. The Scottish colony's history began in 1893, when John Shields and Edward B. Steegmann rented the central warehouses of a factory in Sant Martí, to create a branch of Johnston, Shields & Co in Catalonia, which became known as . These Scottish workers would later create Escocès FC, and likewise, the English Colony went on to create Team Anglès, two teams who were pivotal in the history of Catalan football.
Sociedad de Foot-Ball de Barcelona (1894–96)