Oldest Football Clubs In The World: The history of football is lengthy and extensive, making it one of the most popular sports in the world. The game first became a widespread organized sport in the middle of the 19th century, at which point it transitioned from being a pastime. The game has developed and matured since it first launched, notably in terms of how it makes use of technology. The sport’s fundamentals are still the same, though.
Several teams were formed at the time when football became more popular in England in the mid-1850s and 1860s. As they continued, they dominated the list of the oldest football teams in the world and engaged in professional competition. The earliest football clubs are examined in this article.
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Top 12 Oldest Club In The World Still In Existence
1. Sheffield Football Club: Since its founding in the autumn of1857, Sheffield Football Club has held the title of oldest football club in the world. The Football Association of England (FA) and FIFA both acknowledge the club as the oldest known football club.
The Sheffield Rules were the first formal set of regulations and rules used for football games, and they even had an impact on the FA’s rules. Early football teams employed their own rules before the FA was established. In 1863, Sheffield joined the FA, although it kept on using its own set of regulations. Finally, in 1878, the club embraced the FA’s regulations.
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2. Cambridge University Association Football Club: The oldest club currently playing association football, according to Cambridge University, is their own. Although it is sometimes debated, the club is said to have been founded in either 1856 or 1857. It is not usually acknowledged as the oldest football club because of the ambiguity surrounding the team’s establishment date.
There is evidence that football matches between clubs from various colleges and institutions were played at Cambridge in the 1840s, suggesting that the club may have existed before 1856.
The National Football Museum did present a special award to the Cambridge University Association Football Club in 2016 in recognition of the team’s status as the oldest in the world.
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3. Melbourne Football Club: The Melbourne Football Club, one of the founding clubs of the Australian Football League, is the oldest football club in Australia. The Victoria cricket team players who decided to play football together informally in 1858 gave the team its start. The cricket team’s captain, Tom Wills, proposed creating a “football club” with its own “code of rules” to keep players active over the winter.
Wills and a few other cricketers created “The Rules of the Melbourne Football Club” the following year, which served as the foundation for Australian rules football. In 2008, the football team commemorated its 150th birthday by releasing a list of “150 Heroes” and a unique birthday emblem that was used on the team’s uniforms.
4. Castlemaine Football Club: A few months after the formation of the Melbourne Football Club, the Castlemaine Football Club became the second-oldest football club in Australia. The club was established on June 15, 1859, but the team’s first game was not played until June 22 at the Cricket Ground Barkers Creek because the ball did not reach in time from Melbourne.
The founding date of Castlemaine was not known until 2007, making it older than the Geelong Football Club, which was thought to have been founded earlier. In 1925, the team became a member of the Bendigo Football League, and it still belongs to same league today.
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5. Melbourne University Football Club: It is debatable if Melbourne University Football Club is the second or third-oldest football club in Australia because there are no records of the club’s precise founding. Although the inaugural game of the Castlmaine Football Club and the club’s first match were both played in June 1859, it is unknown which team was founded earlier.
From 1885 to 1888, the university’s club participated in the Victorian Football Association, which at the time governed Australian football.
The Victorian Football League’s eight original teams (now the Australian Football League) voted in 1907 to include Melbourne University as the league’s ninth side.
6. Geelong Football Club: On July 18, 1859, during a meeting held in the Victoria Hotel, the Geelong Football Club was established. The club is the second-oldest in the Australian Football League and the fourth-oldest in all of Australia. The next year, the club played its inaugural game, and for the ensuing ten years, it kept playing senior football games.
From 1865 until his retirement from the game in 1874, Tom Wills, one of the pioneers of Australian rules football, played only for Geelong. The Australian Football League, which would eventually replace the Victorian Football League, had eight founder members, including Geelong.
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7. Ballarat Football Club: The Ballarat Football Club, which has a history stretching back to 1860, is another Australia’s first football clubs. Ballarat was formerly thought to be Australia’s third-oldest non-university football club, or fifth-oldest if you include Melbourne University’s club, before the formation of the Castlemaine Football Club was made known.
Ballarat engaged in casual competition throughout the following decade, but by 1874, it had begun to take part in more organized competition.
Ballarat South, Ballarat Imperial, and the club all became members of the Victorian Football Association in 1886. When the Ballarat Football Association (now League) was founded in 1893, the club was among its initial members.
8. Cray Wanderers Football Club: The London, Chatham and Dover Railway line’s construction, which took place between 1858 and 1860, is when the Cray Wanderers Football Club first emerged. During their breaks, the railway construction workers would bounce a ball about, and in the community of St. Mary Cray, they finally organized a club.
The club performed well compared to other amateur football clubs in the late 1800s, and in 1893–1894 it made its first FA Amateur Cup entry. The team joined the Kent League in 1894–1895 as one of its original members, and again in 1901–2002. The Isthmian League South Division currently includes the Cray Wanderers.
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9. Hallam Football Club: This list refutes Hallam Football Club’s assertion that it is, behind Sheffield Football Club, the second-oldest football club in the world. The club was founded in late 1860, making it one of the oldest association football clubs in the world.
The grounds on Sandygate Road, which according to Guinness World Records is the oldest football facility, are where Hallam has traditionally held its home games.
The Youdan Cup, said to be the world’s first football competition, was won by Hallam in 1867. Despite being missing for a while, the team still owns the cup, which it purchased from a Scottish antiquarian in 1997.
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10. Queens Park (Scotland): The oldest club in Scottish football history is Queens Park, a Glasgow-based football team. They are also the oldest team in the globe, having been established outside of England and Wales in July 1867. For the first 152 years of its existence, the club fielded an amateur team. That is, up until its status was altered in November 2019 as a result of a membership vote.
Although Queens Park are an amateur team, they have a long history. They have taken home the Scottish Cup three times, which is the third-most (10). They are also the only team from the nation to have participated in an FA Cup final. They have also twice won Scotland’s second-tier football division championship.
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11. Aston Villa (1874): Aston Villa was established in Birmingham in 1874 and was a founding member of the English Football League (EFL) in 1888 as well as the Premier League in 1992. The club has only ever had three home stadiums in its history: Aston Park from 1874 to 1876, Wellington Road from 1876 to 1897, and Villa Park from 1897 until the present (123 years), which is the eighth-largest stadium in England and the largest in the Midlands, which corresponds to the early medieval kingdom of Mercia in the center of England.
Aston Villa played in the Football League First Division, the highest division in the English football league system before the Premier League, from 1888 to 1992.They took home five championships in the aforementioned league tier. They have also won the FA Cup seven times and the League Cup five times.
Additionally, they once won the UEFA Super Cup in terms of intracontinental honors. The Second City Derby, often known as the Birmingham Derby, has been a local rivalry between Villa and Birmingham City since 1879.
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12. Rangers (1872): Rangers, a football team from Scotland, was established in Glasgow in 1872, making it one of the oldest clubs in the sport worldwide. Along with Celtic, a team they have long-standing rivalry with, they are regarded as one of the Scottish Premiership’s titans.
Along with being one of the oldest football teams in the world, Rangers also has a sizable fan following. There are more than 600 Rangers fans’ groups spread over 35 different nations. The team also holds the record for most fans that travel to support their team; for example, in the 2008 UEFA Cup final between Rangers and Zenit Saint Petersburg, about 200,000 Rangers supporters traveled to Manchester.
Rangers was in the fourth tier of the Scottish football league system in the 2011–12 season due to a financial crisis. However, the club worked their way back up to the Scottish Premiership in just four years by winning all the domestic trophies in each league they played in. They were the only Scottish club to have done so, and they were actually back there in the 2016–17 season.
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Conclusion
It can be challenging to date the first football clubs, as several teams that date to the late 1850s and early 1860s assert that they are the oldest. Numerous early rugby clubs also called their teams football clubs, and they still do today, which makes it more challenging to date football clubs. The 10 oldest association football (soccer) clubs in the world are included on this list, nevertheless. They were all founded around the same period, and many don’t have accurate records of when they were founded.
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Scotch College Football Club (Melbourne) and Church of England Grammar School FC (Melbourne) are two football clubs which have existed from 1858 to the present day (they play in the APS Schools Competition). While they have been secondary school clubs their entire existence, they competed against senior men’s clubs. There are records that they were incorporated on or perhaps even before August 1858 and as such they should be listed at 4th and 5th on your list.