Any Wintry Afternoon in England

C. R. W. Nevinson was an English artist who was an associate of the Italian Futurists and an official War Artist in the 1914-18 conflict.
Any Wintry Afternoon in England was painted in 1930, and can be seen at the Manchester Art Gallery.

Ángel Zárraga

Another beautiful painting by Ángel Zárraga.

Ángel Zárraga

During the 1920's the Mexican artist Ángel Zárraga produced a series of vibrant paintings of footballers.
More to follow...

Jean Jacoby

Jean Jacoby (Luxembourg) was the Olympic gold medal winning artist in both 1924 and 1928. 

This painting , Corner,  was one of his pieces from 1924. 

De Voetballer

There was a time when the Olympic Games extended to non- athletic disciplines such as art, architecture and music.
In 1920 when his countrymen were victorious in the controversial Association football final, the Belgian artist Alfred Ost won the bronze medal at the 1920 Antwerp Games for his painting De Voetballer / Joueur De Football.

Artistic License

This large ceramic tile was produced by the Spode company in the 1870s. There is some lovely detail in evidence, such as the construction of the ball and the costumes of the players. However, a closer look at the jerseys reveals some artistic license. Is it fair to assume that the rose and the thistle motifs are meant to suggest that what we are seeing here is an England v Scotland clash, played out against a backdrop of rolling hills?
England, of course, have never sported the rose as a national football emblem (it has always been the crest of the Rugby Union team). The thistle is usually Scotland's Rugby emblem, but the Association team adopted it in the 1890s before a return to the lion rampant that had featured from the first ever international. The combination of hooped jerseys (navy and white) and the thistle emblem might have appeared in 1881, but those jerseys were collared.
See also: http://gottfriedfuchs.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/egg-chasers.html

Wisła Kraków

1907

Wisła Kraków was founded in May 1906 by students of the Second Practical School in Kraków, 
In 1925 they made the first appearance in the Polish championship, which that season was formed of 3 leagues of 3 teams followed by a round-robin final. Wisła  reached the final stage but finished bottom of the table. 
In 1927 the Championship took on a more familiar form. 14 teams took part and Wisła emerged as champions (scoring an average of 3.6 goals per game in the process). They repeated the feat the following season. 

Polish artist Wlastimil Hofman painted the 1927 team:

Football: The Association Game (1906)

The following plates are taken from the 1906 edition of Football: The Association Game by C.W Alcock.
It's hard not to smile at the indifferent expression on the face of the goalkeeper - he doesn't exactly look ready to spring into action...

Again, the goalkeeper looks ill prepared considering he's about to face a shot from 4 yards out!

I love this staged photograph. The team in stripes are defending quite deep. The goalkeeper seems to be actually behind the goal line.  Look at the stooping aspect of both attackers and defenders. The goal frame looks exceedingly flimsy...

The book is available to read online here.

Standing Room Only

Kampfbahn Glückauf 

Fußballclub Gelsenkirchen-Schalke 04 e. V-  they romanticised themselves as a band of self governing outsiders, at odds with the exclusive bourgeois nature of many German sports clubs.  They were undeniably a working class club, the players and supporters sharing a background in heavy industry. 
German football was puritannical in its anti-professionalism, and in 1931 Schalke fell foul of the authorities over payments to players.
They were suspended for 6 months. 
Any doubts about the importance of the club to the people of Gelsenkirchen were answered when the  ban was lifted.
Since 1928 the club had played at Kampfbahn Glückauf , a stadium designed to hold 34,000.
When Schalke played their comeback match, a friendly against Fortuna Dusseldorf, an estimated 70,000 crowded into the ground. 

Glück auf Kampfbahn, FC Schalke 04- by Friedrich G. Einhoff

Good vantage point for any goalmouth incident

Lads enjoying a birds eye view of the goal

The Sportswoman

The Sportswoman, painted by the Soviet artist Ivan Semyonovich Kulikov (1928) presents a  positive image of the game for women. This is in contrast to the attitude which is related in Yuri F Korshak's book Старый, старый футбол (Old , Old Football) which contains the following reference to women's football in pre revolutionary Russia: 
In the spring of 1911 in Moscow there appeared a number of...women's football teams!  The enthusiasts were senior schoolgirls. According to  newspaper reports the 'ladies' of the team trained hard in preparation for matches. The press reported that a match did take place, but this was the end of women's  football in Russia. Probably the players themselves realized football was not a game for women, and calmed down again. 

Jedermann sein eigner Fussball. John Heartfield (1919)

Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (Everyman His Own Football) was an illustrated magazine published by members of the Dada Movement in 1919, . It specialized in absurd satire and was invariably seized by the police as soon as it was off the presses. 
The German championships of 1918-19 were of course affected by the war. There were no National Championship playoffs, and only 3 regional championships were completed:
Brandenburg: Viktoria 1889 Berlin
Mittel-Deutschland: Hallescher FC
Nord-Deutschland: Victoria Hamburg

Dinamismo di un Foot-baller. Umberto Boccioni (1913)

Umberto Boccioni was a leading figure in the Futurist Movement.

The precise identity of the soccer player (or players) who inspired him is unknown, but it may be significant that 1913, the date of the picture, was also the year when the Italian football federation staged the first national soccer tournament, culminating in a final contested by Lazio of Rome and the Piedmontese team of Pro-Vercelli (who won 6-0). The game had never been more popular.

 Andrew Graham-Dixon (2002)

Mr Graham-Dixon isn't quite on the mark there with his football history.

Soccer—The Game of the Working Class (3)

Football by Yuri Pimenov (1926)

A further extract from Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR by Robert Edelman (1993)- reproduced without permission.

The Conduct of Players and Fans

In the early years of Soviet soccer, matches were taken very seriously, and gentlemanly play was far from the norm. Player conduct on the field was often extremely rough and undisciplined, and the situation was made all the worse by the fact that skilled and experienced referees were few. As a result, fights and other forms of "hooliganism" were common. Perhaps the most famous incident of this sort took place in November 1926. The Moscow selects were invited for two games in Odessa against that city's first and second teams. In the first few minutes, it was clear that the Muscovites were far stronger than the second Odessa team, and, to compensate for their lack of talent, the Odessa players began to foul regularly. Soon one of the Moscow stars was seriously injured, leading to the disqualification of the guilty Odessa defender. In the second half, the Muscovites lost their patience and began to retaliate. Several Odessa attackers
were brought down in their tracks by Moscow defenders, and eventually one member of the Moscow team began to kick an Odessa player who was lying on the ground. This action provoked a riot, and the crowd invaded the field—from which they were cleared only with great difficulty, by mounted policemen. An investigation ultimately found the causes of the incident to be weak refereeing and (what would become a constant theme), "insufficient educational work" among the players.
Fights, dirty play, and other transgressions were not just products of the supposedly lower moral standards of the NEP period. Unnecessary roughness was still common in the 'thirties. In one game during the 1935 Moscow city championship, a player was disqualified for kicking an opponent in the head.
A year before, a game in Leningrad dissolved into a mass brawl and had to be abandoned. At a game in Simferopol, two "notorious hooligans," the Bolsenov brothers, began to beat up their opponents' goalie. When the referee intervened, the brothers punched the referee in the mouth. At other games in
Simferopol, players showed up drunk and kicked opponents in the face.
 In what would become a familiar theme, Krasnyi sport attributed these incidents to. . . the low cultural level of the players. During the game and after it they are to be found in the closed atmosphere of the sporting crowd. . . . No one is surprised by the corrupt, hooligan jargon of these players. It is considered a normal part of our sport. . . . Sport is not only a pleasant way to pass time. It is a weapon of culture, a means of education, and a way to organize the cultured leisure time of the masses.
Soccer, in particular, was not a sport of the intelligentsia. Those who played it were largely a rough-and-ready crowd who had not accepted the values of orderliness and discipline that the authorities sought to inculcate through sports. "Cultured" (kul'turnyi) sportsmen did not kick prostrate and injured opponents, nor did they punch referees in the mouth. Educational (vospitatel' nyi) work was required of team captains and leaders, but their efforts were miminal and ineffective.
The citizens who came to see these games also did not watch them with any special regard for official values. Very early, the public, especially the working class, adopted favorite teams and players, whom they rooted for with a passion and intensity not unlike that of their counterparts in capitalist countries. The vicarious and not always healthy pleasures of fanship were much the same as they were elsewhere in the world. For some workers, their identity as followers of a team became more important than their identity as proletarians, as the diseases of diversion and apoliticism emerged even within postrevolutionary society. Passive watching, as opposed to active participation, was, in official eyes, something to be feared. In 1927, Krasnyi sport described a hypothetical worker they called "Ivan Spiridonovich":
What could be Ivan Spiridonovich's relationship to sport?. . . Does he run the hundred meters or pole vault? No, he is a soccer player. And not the kind of player who runs on the field in shorts. Quite the opposite, he is part of the public.... By his profession, Ivan Spiridonovich is a metal worker but in his true essence he is a food worker [pishchevik]. "The food workers, there's a soccer team," he says. And sure enough the food workers [Pishchevik] do have a team.
Given its importance to workers, sport was supposed to play a role in raising the cultural level of the proletariat, and soccer's popularity among the working class made it especially important but potentially problematical.
Krasnyi sport noted this fact in 1927: 
"Let's take a big factory center like Orekho-Zuevo or the workers' suburbs in Leningrad. We will see that sport, and football in particular plays a role of the first importance in the leisure time of the worker. At the last trade union congress it was noted that big games draw so many spectators that the mines in the Donbass are completely empty on the days of important matches."
For this reason, it was especially unfortunate that the experience of watching a game was difficult and testing for the spectator. Not only were most stadiums less than comfortable, they were poorly run. Only one or two ticket windows might be open, and the same held true for entrances. On big game days, the box offices and entryways were the scenes of what Krasnyi sport called "real battles." In this crowded and disorderly atmosphere, any confrontation on the field or act of bad refereeing could have serious consequences for public order. Riots were by no means uncommon, and drunkenness and hooliganism were very much part of the sports scene throughout the 1930s.
By the end of 1935, it was clear that Soviet soccer had its share of problems on and off the field. It had become, by far, the Soviet Union's most popular sport, but clearly it could not continue along the semi-professional lines of the past.
 A change in course was required. The leaders of the game finally took action early in 1936.

Charging the goalkeeper

An Attacking Player Gives the Keeper a Firm Shoulder Barge Sending Him into His Own Net by

S.T. Dadd

In the early days of Association football a 'fair catch/ free kick from mark' rule had existed. This was abolished in 1869, and the discrete position of goalkeeper established.

Early football was more of a contact sport, and a goalkeeper was considered just as fair game as his outfield comrades. Scrimmages and rushes were important features of the game, and the 'charge' (knocking the player off the ball) seems to have been favoured over a purely ball winning tackle.  Wrexham's 1878 Welsh Cup win serves as an example of these tactics in action. -the Wrexham forwards charged the Druids' defenders to take the ball over the line to win the game in the final minute.
Most goalkeepers relied on punching the ball away rather than clean catches, unless they were particularly robust or were able to dodge the oncoming forwards like a Rugby outside- half.
Rule changes  in 1894 were supposed to offer the goalkeeper more protection- indeed a contemporary international * stated:
 The last part of Rule 10 says, 'The goalkeeper shall not be charged except when he is holding the ball, or obstructing an opponent'; and it is seldom, and not for long, that the custodian is in contact with the ball. It is safe to say that the goalkeeper is the best protected man on the field.
To understand the significance of this you have to appreciate that at this time it was legitimate to shoulder charge any opponent, regardless of whether he had the ball or not, so goalies could be taken out in order to clear the path to goal. It was still considered fair to charge the goalie with the ball! 
There is an example recorded in the South Essex Gazette (1898) of West Ham scoring against Brentford when two forwards bundled the goalkeeper into the net whilst he had the ball in his hands !

Thomas M.M. Hemy shows similar tactics deployed, to the delight of the Harrovian schoolboys behind the goal

* Ernest Needam,Sheffield United and England.

Sunderland v Aston Villa, 1895

Sunderland 4 Aston Villa 4, January 2nd 1895, Newcastle Rd, Sunderland.

Painted by Thomas M.M. Hemy (1852-1931)

Rafael Moreno - Pichichi

Pichichi

Moreno and his wife painted by Aurelio Arteta.

Spain at the 1920 Olympics

He was just 1.54m and wore a white cap on the pitch. He died aged 29 and his name lives on...

Pichichi- The Little Duck- not the most imposing nickname, but Rafael Moreno's record was more than impressive. 

In ten seasons for Athletic Bilbao between 1911 and 1921 Pichichi scored 200 goals in 170 appearances. Spain only entered onto the international stage in 1920, so he was restricted to 5 appearances before his death, from typhus, in 1922.

When La Liga was contested for the first time in 1929 the newspaper Marca instituted a trophy for the season's leading goalscorer, which they named Pichichi in Moreno's memory. The first recipient of the trophy was 'Paco' Bienzobas of Real Sociedad.

FA Cup Final 1933

This is a charming London Underground poster by the French artist Andre Edouard Marty (1882- 1974). 

The Cup Final in question was the 1933 FA Cup final, in which a crowd of 92950 saw Everton beat Manchester City 3-0. Everton legend Dixie Dean captained the team that he had a major part in selecting. He also scored Everton's second goal. 
 The competition rules required both teams to change strip in the case of a colour clash, so Everton wore white and City deep red. Shirts were numbered for the first time in an FA Cup final, but not in the way that became familiar- in this case Everton wore 1-11 and City 12-22. Matt Busby played right half for City.