In some ways, football has become similar to religion.

Every weekend for nine months, large groups of people make pilgrimages to stadiums across the country to support their team. They often wear replica jerseys or their team colors to identify themselves.

However, like religion, rivalries have caused conflict, often resulting in violence between the two parties. Of course, hooligans don’t really think about religion when they’re beating up rival fans, but they still go around thinking they’re following. true faith.

With the amount of money now in the game, it is often forgotten that several of Britain’s top clubs were formed by religious groups. And, ironically, eradicating violence was one of their goals when installing them.

Even today, there are many schemes to get young people off the streets and into sports, but religion does not play as big a role in society as it used to.

In the 19th century, the church was more influential, and in several cases, clubs created by parishes have become multi-million dollar businesses.

Brother Walfrid’s Boys

North of the border, there is one such club that still has ties to religion: Celtic.
Irish Catholic communities formed several clubs, the first of which was the Hibernian of Edinburgh.
(its name is Latin for Ireland).

However, unlike the others, the connections between the Bhoys and their roots remain strong to this day.

They were first thought of on 6 November 1887 by Marist Brother Walfrid (also known as Andrew Kearns) in the hall of St Mary’s Church in Calton, Glasgow.

The club was created with the intention of alleviating poverty in the East End of the city. The name, Celtic, was immediately adopted and reflected the club’s Scottish and Irish roots. Surprisingly, the club’s first official game was played against Rangers on 6 November 1888 in what was probably the only “friendly meeting” between the two teams.

The Bhoys became the first to claim bragging rights as they won 5-2, with several of the starting XI players on loan from Hibernian.

Brother Walfrid himself wanted to keep the fan club going and had only charitable intentions for the club. However, he was unable to fulfill his wish, as local builder John Glass would sign eight Hibs players without the committee’s knowledge in August 1888, while he offered them huge financial incentives.

Now that the club is a professional team, they soon established themselves as one of the best teams in Scotland, winning their first trophy (the Scottish Cup) in 1892, and their first league title the following year. Since then, together with Rangers (who were made up of rowers) they have dominated Scottish football for over a century.

The other team that has played at Anfield

Today, Everton play their home games at Goodison Park.

But it is often forgotten that they used to play on the other side of Stanley Park, where their deadly rivals Liverpool now live.

In fact, the Toffees can claim to be indirectly responsible for the formation of their neighbor.
Everton became the first of Liverpool’s major clubs to be formed in 1878.

The minister of the Santo Domingo Methodist Church, the Rev. BS Chambers, created a football club so that members of the church’s cricket team would have something to do during the winter.
The club was originally called St Domingo FC, but changed to Everton in November the following year after men from outside the parish wanted to come and join.

Everton became one of the 12 founding members of the Football League in 1888 and by this time the club was renting Anfield, owned by John Orrell with his friend John Houlding as tenant.
Houlding eventually bought the land from Orrell and promptly raised the rent, something Everton refused to do.

So they left Anfield in 1892 and moved across to Stanley Park and their present home, Goodison Park, resulting in Houlding forming Liverpool.

But this is not where the religious links with Everton end, as Goodison Park is the only Premier League stadium with a church on its grounds – St Luke the Evangelist.

The church is located between the three-tiered main stand and the end of Gwladys Street and the walls are just a few meters from these two stands.

It even has a role to play on match days, selling refreshments.

blue faith

While its more illustrious neighbors were made up of employees of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company, Manchester’s blue half team was thought up by a rector’s daughter.

Two years after the creation of what became Manchester United, Anna Connell, whose
Father Arthur, rector of St. Mark’s Church in Gorton, in the city’s northwest, sought to provide activities for men who had nothing to do in the winter.

Like Everton, a cricket club already existed and more activities were needed to curb the levels of violence and alcoholism in the local area.

Ironic, considering these are the kinds of things now associated with the football fanatic.

Alcoholic fights often broke out between different religious and racial groups and the problems were made worse by the high levels of unemployment in the area.

With the help of two church guardians, William Beastow and Thomas Goodbehere, Connell created West Gorton (St Mark’s) FC, the club that eventually became Manchester City.

The club played its first game against Macclesfield Baptist Church on November 13, 1880.
The initiative was so successful that it led the Archdeacon of Manchester to comment on Connell: “No man could have done it, it took a woman’s tact and skill to make it so successful.”
Eventually the club would drift away from its roots.

He dropped St Mark’s from his name to become Gorton AFC in 1884 and three years later moved across town to Ardwick and turned professional.

It adopted the name of its new home before finally becoming Manchester City in 1894.

well of uncertainty

It’s not just the most famous clubs that owe the Church a debt of gratitude, and in this case, the cloth man even got in on the action.

For a long time there was some debate as to when Swindon Town was formed with the club changing between the founding dates of 1879 and 1881.

For a long time the later date was considered official as on 12 November that year Swindon, under its previous Spartan Club guise, merged with St Mark’s Young Men’s after a match between the two teams.

But last year, substantial evidence led the Robins to recognize 1879 as the correct date.
It is now accepted that the Reverend William Pitt, curate of Christ Church in the city centre, formed the club in an attempt to bring together the communities of the Great Western Railway workers and those that were there before the GWR arrived.

There are two main pieces of evidence that suggest this was the case.

One of these is a local report, discovered by former club statistician Paul Plowman, of a match between Swindon AFC and Rovers FC on 29 November 1879.

The report included a photo of the team that included Pitt himself.

Pitt severed ties with the club in 1881, when he was appointed rector of Liddington church.
However, he provided the other proof during a speech in 1911, during which
he said that the name was changed to Spartan Club as members found the original name too complicated.

He also mentioned that his removal from Swindon led to his departure.

Two years after his departure Spartan Club became Swindon Town.

the clue is in the name

When Southampton moved from The Dell to St Mary’s Stadium in 2001, it represented a bit of a homecoming.

Because the club moved back to the part of town where it was originally formed in 1885.
The stadium’s name was a welcome change from the current trend of selling naming rights, as it referred to the nearby church.

The club was set up by members of the Young Men’s Association of St Mary’s Church of England, meaning their first name was quite wordy, leading to the local press referring to them as St. Mary’s YMA.

St. Mary’s played a variety of venues around Southampton, one of the first being Southampton Common.

Or at least they tried to play there – the Saints often had their games interrupted by pedestrians wandering onto the field!

The club had changed its name to Southampton St Mary’s when it became a limited company in 1897 and ended its association with the church.

In 1898 the Saints, now simply called Southampton FC, moved across town to The Dell before making the return trip 103 years later.

More cloth sticks

There are many other soccer clubs that have their roots in the church, some more successful than others.

This season’s FA Cup semi-finalists, Barnsley, were originally a club trying to give football a foothold in an area dominated by rugby.

The Tykes were formed in 1887 by the wonderfully named Reverend Tiverton Preedy of St Peters’, whose church lent its name to the club as Barnsley St Peters’.

He wanted to create ‘a football club that rugby players don’t crush’.

The club moved to Oakwell soon after, but by 1897 Preedy had left the area and its fan base now included those outside the local parish, leading to a name change to Barnsley FC.
Aston Villa also had to deal with other sports when they were created.

They were formed by members of the Villa Wesleyana Chapel of the Cross in 1874 who, like several
of the other clubs mentioned were cricketers looking for something else to do during the winter.

It took them a year to find opponents in an area where rugby was more popular and they were in fact a rugby team.

In March 1875 they faced Aston Brooks St Mary’s in which the first half would be played under rugby rules and the second football.

Villa won this encounter, keeping the first half scoreless and scoring a solitary goal after halftime.
Tottenham Hotspur’s Jewish connections are well known, but they were in fact founded by a Bible class.

‘The Hotspur Football Club’ was born in 1882 by a group of primary school children at All Hallow Church.

These boys then made their teacher, John Ripsher, the club’s first president, a position he held until 1894.

Ripsher died in poverty in 1907 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Dover, until Tottenham presented him with a suitable headstone a century later.

The Church of England Church in Star Road, West Kensington can be credited with the formation of Fulham in 1879.

The Cottagers were originally a Sunday School team and began their existence, as Southampton, with a wordy name: Fulham St Andrews Church Sunday School.

The church still stands and a plaque outside acknowledges its place in the club’s history.