Chapter one · Pre-war pioneers
Footballers of the Sepia Age
Before the newsreel and the floodlight, football was remembered the way village weddings are remembered: in photographs that fade and stories passed down a family. These are the players who flourished between the 1880s and 1939, and then slipped out of the conversation.
Most of the players in this chapter were celebrated in their own time. Several were famous enough to fill grounds and sell newspapers. Yet when television arrived, their names slipped quietly away, because there was nothing to replay. What follows is not a ranking. It is closer to a walk through an archive, stopping at the shelves where the dust lies thickest.
The sprinter who kept goal
Arthur Wharton was born in Jamestown, in what was then the Gold Coast and is now Ghana, in October 1865. He came to England in his teens to train as a Methodist missionary, but sport claimed him first. In 1886, at the Amateur Athletic Association championships at Stamford Bridge, he ran 100 yards in ten seconds, widely recorded as the first "even time" in a championship race. That alone would have earned him a footnote.
Wharton was also a goalkeeper of real daring, known for punching the ball clear and for an athleticism that crowds found startling. He kept goal for Darlington and for Preston North End during that club's rise in the late 1880s, then played professionally for Rotherham Town and, briefly, Sheffield United. That is why he is widely recognised as the world's first Black professional footballer.
His later years were hard. He worked as a colliery haulage hand in South Yorkshire and died in Edlington in 1930, buried in an unmarked grave. A campaign led by the anti-racism group Football Unites, Racism Divides placed a headstone there in 1997, and in 2014 a statue of Wharton was unveiled at St George's Park, the national football centre.
He was not forgotten because he failed. He was forgotten because nobody thought his story needed keeping.
From the editors' notebook
- 1865Born in Jamestown, Gold Coast (now Ghana).
- 1882Arrives in England; later studies at Shoal Hill College, Cannock.
- 1886Runs 100 yards in ten seconds at the AAA championships, Stamford Bridge.
- 1886–88Keeps goal for Preston North End, including the FA Cup run of 1886–87.
- 1889Joins Rotherham Town and plays as a professional.
- 1894Signs for Sheffield United.
- 1930Dies in Edlington and is buried in an unmarked grave.
- 1997A headstone is placed after a community campaign.
- 2014Statue unveiled at St George's Park.
The goalscorer the numbers cannot settle
Josef Bican's difficulty is the opposite of Wharton's. His record survives in great detail, and the detail itself has become the obstacle. Born in Vienna in 1913 to a family of Czech origin, he broke through at Rapid Wien, played for Austria at the 1934 World Cup, and moved to Slavia Prague in 1937. There he scored at a rate that still looks like a misprint, finishing as the league's top scorer season after season.
Statisticians generally credit him with more than 800 competitive goals, though totals vary depending on which wartime and regional matches are counted. After the communist takeover of 1948 he was treated with suspicion in Prague and moved between provincial clubs. He lived modestly and died in Prague in 2001. When people debate the greatest goalscorers today, his name usually arrives late, often with a question mark, which is a curious fate for a man who seemed to have none in front of goal.
Other lights of the sepia age
Walter Tull
Forward for Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town. Enlisted in the Footballers' Battalion in 1914, was commissioned as an officer, and was killed in France in March 1918. His body was never recovered.
José Leandro Andrade
Uruguay's elegant wing-half won Olympic gold in Paris in 1924 and Amsterdam in 1928, then the first World Cup in 1930. Europe was dazzled by him; he died in poverty in Montevideo.
Steve Bloomer
Derby County's great inside-forward scored 28 goals in 23 England matches. Coaching in Berlin when war broke out in 1914, he spent the conflict interned at Ruhleben camp.
Matthias Sindelar
The slight centre-forward of Austria's "Wunderteam", nicknamed Der Papierene, the paper man. He died in Vienna in January 1939 in circumstances that are still debated.
Reading the sepia record carefully
Writing about this era asks for patience. Match reports often named players only by surname or initial. Line-ups were printed before kick-off and sometimes changed. Goals were credited to whoever the reporter happened to see, and local papers occasionally disagreed with national ones about the same afternoon. A single club history can repeat an error for a century.
So we treat every figure as a claim rather than a fact until it has been checked against at least two independent sources. Where the numbers differ, as they do for Bican, we give a range and explain why. Where a story is lovely but unproven, we label it as tradition. This makes for slower writing, but it is the only honest way to restore a name: a legend rebuilt on a mistake is simply forgotten twice.
Sources and further reading
- Phil Vasili, The First Black Footballer: Arthur Wharton 1865–1930 (1998).
- Phil Vasili, Walter Tull, 1888–1918: Officer, Footballer (2010).
- RSSSF – Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation
- National Football Museum, Manchester