Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

Where football clubs come from: from Sheffield in 1857 to every corner of the world

Title card reading 'Where football clubs come from' in black, green and claret on cream, beside a world map with countries shaded by the year of their first football club and dots for clubs coloured from dark red (1857) to purple (2026). Text: 45,931 clubs in Wikidata, from Sheffield FC in 1857 to 222 countries and territories.

In 1857 two young cricketers in Sheffield founded a football club. I put every football club in Wikidata on one animated map, in the order they were founded, to watch the game spread from Yorkshire to 222 countries, and to see which clubs did not make it.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper

Every football club has a birthday. Sheffield FC’s is in 1857, Notts County’s in 1862, Peñarol’s in 1891, Genoa’s in 1893. Most clubs’ birthdays are known only to their members, but a surprising number have been typed into Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia. It holds 45,931 association football clubs once national teams, reserve sides and a few other things are taken out, and 27,079 of them have a founding year.

So I put them on a map in order. The interactive version has a time slider and a play button: press it and watch dots appear, one year at a time, from 1857 to today.

Six small world maps for 1870, 1890, 1910, 1930, 1960 and 2026. In 1870 dots cluster in England and Scotland; by 1890 they cover the British Isles with outposts in Peru, Argentina, India, South Africa and Australia; by 1930 Europe and South America are dense; by 2026 dots cover the Americas, Africa and Asia, with recent clubs in blue
Football clubs in Wikidata at six moments, coloured by year founded. Countries are shaded once they have a club.

Out of Sheffield

The early map is a British one. Of the 314 clubs Wikidata dates before 1880, 258 are in the United Kingdom. Sheffield FC comes first, then Hallam, Notts County, Stoke, Nottingham Forest and Sheffield Wednesday, and a string of London clubs from the early FA Cup that no longer exist. Wales gets its first club in the record with Wrexham (1864), Scotland with Queen’s Park (1867) and Northern Ireland with Cliftonville (1879).

Map of Great Britain and Ireland with dots for clubs founded by 1890, dense across Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands, London and central Scotland, with labels for Sheffield FC 1857, Wrexham 1864, Queen's Park 1867 and Cliftonville 1879
Clubs in the British Isles founded by 1890. Ringed dots are clubs that later folded.

The first club in every country

The most satisfying thing to pull out of the data is the oldest club Wikidata knows in each country. By 1900, 55 countries and territories had one; by 1914, 87; by 1950, 173. The last place to join the record is Gibraltar, in 2021.

World map colouring each country by the founding year of its oldest club in Wikidata: dark red for western Europe, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, the United States, India and Australia in the 1850s to 1880s, orange and gold across Russia, China and much of Africa in the early twentieth century, green across West Africa in the mid century, and blue for Mongolia and Laos in the 1990s
The year of the oldest dated club in Wikidata, country by country.

Football did not spread like a ripple on a pond. It jumped by sea. Countries whose first club came before 1900 are a median 1,966 km from Sheffield; those whose first club came after 1950, 6,894 km. But Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, India and Australia all have clubs in the record before Hungary, Poland or Russia. The first in South America is the Lima Cricket and Football Club, in 1859.

Scatter chart of each country's first club year against its distance from Sheffield. European countries cluster in the bottom left before 1900; Lima, Argentina, Brazil, India and Sydney sit high up as early outliers; African and Asian countries fill the middle from 1900 to 1960; Pacific islands sit high on the right
The diffusion front: each country’s first club, by year and distance from Sheffield, coloured by continent.

A word of caution about those first clubs: many began as something else. Lima’s was a cricket club, Lausanne’s a football and cricket club, Montevideo’s a rowing club, and Norway’s and Italy’s gymnastics societies. Wikidata records when the club was founded, not when it first kicked a ball. And it cannot tell us who founded them. The British engineers, sailors and students of football folklore may be behind many of these clubs, but nothing in the data says so, so I have not counted them.

Waves of new clubs

Before 1900, 93% of new clubs were European. The single busiest year is 1919, with 475 new clubs, as the First World War ended, and Europe’s busiest decade is the 1920s. Every other continent peaks in the 2000s; since 2000, Europe’s share of new clubs is down to 38% and Asia’s is 26%.

Stacked bar chart of clubs founded per decade from the 1850s to the 2020s, by continent. Claret European bars dominate until the 1940s, peaking in the 1920s; from the 1950s orange Asian, blue North American and green African bars grow, and the tallest bar is the 2000s
Clubs founded per decade, by continent.

The busiest year for new clubs was 1919. The busiest year for dead ones was 1945.

The clubs that died

Wikidata records a dissolution date for 4,091 clubs. The worst single year is 1945: 174 clubs ended, 143 of them German, as the Allies dissolved German sports clubs after the war and clubs in the lost eastern territories ceased to exist. The oldest club that died is the Wanderers (1859 to 1887), five times FA Cup winners. More than half of all recorded deaths are since 2000, which is partly bankruptcies and mergers and partly just easier record keeping.

Bar chart of clubs dissolved per decade: small numbers until the 1930s, a red spike in the 1940s with 174 in 1945 alone, low again until the 1980s, then rising steeply to over a thousand in the 2010s
Clubs dissolved per decade in Wikidata.

A map of who keeps records

None of this is a census of football. The Netherlands has 2,857 clubs in Wikidata, more than Germany, and 165 per million people; Nigeria has 0.6 per million and India 151 clubs in all. That reflects Dutch, Swedish, Belgian, Baltic and Cypriot editors who have catalogued their village clubs, not where football is loved. A country’s first club is more trustworthy than its number of clubs, but even that is only as early as the oldest club someone thought to enter.

Horizontal bar chart on a log scale of football clubs in Wikidata per million people: Cyprus, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Estonia top with over 150, and India, China and Pakistan at the bottom with well under one
Clubs in Wikidata per million people: the most and least catalogued countries.

How I did this

One query to Wikidata, through QLever, returned every item that is an association football club or a subclass of one, with its founding and dissolution dates, coordinates, home ground and country. I kept one record per club and took out national teams, beach soccer and futsal sides, reserve and youth teams, and Australian clubs whose names mark them as Australian rules football clubs, which Wikidata often files as football clubs. Founding dates stored as 1 January are treated as a bare year. Each club sits at its own coordinates, else its ground’s, else the town in its name, and is counted in the present-day country its point falls in (the UK split into its four nations). The paper sets out every step and caveat.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper
Data and code

Notes and sources

  • Wikidata, via QLever. CC0.
  • Natural Earth countries, states and provinces, and populated places (public domain).
  • engsoccerdata (James Curley, GPL-3), used only to check the locations of English clubs.
  • I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results.

Tristan Hotham

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