Blackburn Olympic F.C.

The Olympic players of 1882 display the two trophies the club won in the first four years of its existence.

Association football was first codified in the 1860s in the south of England and played by teams of upper-class former public school pupils and Oxbridge graduates. However, the game spread to the industrial towns of the north by the following decade.[1] The town of Blackburn in Lancashire had more than a dozen active football clubs by 1877, with Blackburn Rovers, founded in 1875, generally viewed as the leading team.[2] Blackburn Olympic F.C. was founded in February 1878 when two of these clubs, Black Star and James Street, opted to merge.[3] The name was chosen by James Edmondson, the club's first treasurer, and is believed to have been inspired by the recent excavation of Olympia, site of the ancient Olympic Games. The new club's first match was a friendly played on 9 February 1878 which resulted in a 2–0 win over local team St. John's.[2]

In April 1878, the club entered its first competition, the Livesey United Cup. Olympic beat St. Mark's in the final to win the tournament, and, as the competition was not held again, the club retained the trophy in perpetuity.[4] Over the next two seasons the club continued to play friendly matches and also entered the Blackburn Association Challenge Cup, a knock-out tournament open to all local clubs set up by the organisation which governed football within the town. Olympic won the cup in both 1879 and 1880, after which the competition was discontinued when the Blackburn Association was absorbed into the larger Lancashire County Football Association. As with the Livesey United Cup, the trophy remained in Olympic's possession for the remainder of the club's existence.[5]

In 1880 the club's committee decided that Olympic should compete for greater prizes, and opted to enter two further competitions, the Lancashire Senior Cup and the Football Association Challenge Cup (FA Cup), the country's premier football competition.[6] In the club's first FA Cup match, the "Light Blues" were defeated 5–4 by Sheffield,[7] and the following season the team again lost in the first round, away to Darwen.[8] The club's reputation within its home area was growing, however, and matches were now being arranged with teams from further afield, such as Sheffield Wednesday, Nottingham Forest, and even Scottish clubs such as Cowlairs and Hibernian.[9] The club's increasing expenses were met with the help of Sydney Yates, a local iron foundry owner, who invested a large amount of money and continued to bankroll the club for most of its existence.[10] At the end of the 1881–82 season, Olympic defeated Blackburn Rovers to win the East Lancashire Charity Cup.[11]

The second FA Cup trophy, pictured here, is identical in design to that won by Olympic in 1883. The original trophy was stolen in 1895 and never recovered

In the 1882–83 FA Cup, Olympic defeated four other Lancashire clubs, Accrington, Lower Darwen, Darwen Ramblers, and Church, to reach the fifth round. At this stage the "Light Blues" were drawn to play Welsh team Druids.[12] Olympic defeated the Ruabon-based team 4–1 to progress to the semi-final stage, where for the first time they faced opponents from the south of England — Old Carthusians.[12] The Carthusians, the team for former pupils of Charterhouse School, had won the cup two years earlier and even the local newspapers in Blackburn considered them strong favourites to reach the final again.[13][14] Olympic, however, won 4–0 in a match played at a neutral venue in Whalley Range, Manchester, to set up a match with another of the great amateur teams, Old Etonians, in the final at Kennington Oval.[12] The Etonians had defeated Olympic's close rivals Blackburn Rovers in the final a year earlier, the first time a northern team had reached the final.[15]

Before the final, former England player Jack Hunter, who had joined the club in 1882 in the twin roles of player and coach, arranged to take the team to Blackpool for several days' special training. Such an undertaking had never before been made by a club, and it was considered an extremely novel idea.[16][17]

Illustration of the 1883 FA Cup final depicting teams' captains and venue (above), the match and the prize giving ceremony (below)

The Etonians took the lead in the final when Harry Goodhart scored during the first half, however Arthur Matthews equalised for Olympic in the second half.[18] Soon afterwards, Arthur Dunn was injured and forced to leave the field, reducing the Etonians to ten men for the rest of the match. The scores remained level at the end of the regulation ninety minutes. Under the regulations of the FA Cup, thirty minutes of extra time could be played in the event of a draw, at the referee's discretion, and in response to the fervent mood of the crowd the captains asked to play on to try to secure a result. During the extra period, Olympic's superior stamina began to show. Around twenty minutes into extra time, Jimmy Costley received a pass from John Yates and kicked the ball past Etonian goalkeeper John Rawlinson to score the winning goal.[19] Upon the team's return to Blackburn, the players took part in a celebratory parade and received a civic reception at which team captain Albert Warburton reportedly proclaimed "The Cup is very welcome to Lancashire. It'll have a good home and it'll never go back to London."[20] Olympic were the first team from a working-class background to win the FA Cup.[21][22]

In the south, however, Olympic's victory over one of the great amateur teams provoked consternation. At the time, The Football Association (the FA), the sport's governing body, prohibited clubs from paying their players. Despite this, working-class clubs, especially those based in Lancashire, had been widely suspected of making illicit payments to players since at least 1876.[23] In the wake of Olympic's high-profile victory, journalists and officials affiliated with southern amateur clubs intensified their calls for the FA to investigate the finances of northern clubs. They focussed in particular on Olympic's training excursion to Blackpool, suggesting that the players would not have been able to take so much time off work unless the club was paying them some form of wage. Questions were also asked about players who had relocated from one town to another seemingly for the sole purpose of playing for a new football team. In Olympic's case Jack Hunter had moved from Sheffield to join the club.[24] Ultimately no action was taken against Olympic, although punishments were imposed on other clubs, including Preston North End, who were expelled from the FA Cup. This in turn prompted the northern clubs to make plans to break away from the FA and form a rival governing body which would not impose the so-called "amateur ideal" on clubs.[25][26]

Olympic's local rivals Blackburn Rovers won the FA Cup for the first time in 1884 and quickly became the town's leading club.

The following season, Olympic again reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup, as did Blackburn Rovers. When the draw for the semi-finals was made, Olympic were paired with Queen's Park in one match and Rovers with Notts County in the other, setting up the possibility of the two teams meeting in the final. The Olympic team, however, were outclassed and defeated 4–0 by their Scottish opponents. The club lodged an appeal with the FA based on the encroachment onto the pitch of some of the 16,000 spectators, but to no avail.[27] Rovers went on to defeat Queen's Park in the final.[28]

The club was never again able to achieve this level of success. In the 1884–85 season, Olympic lost in the second round of the FA Cup to rivals Rovers, who went on to cement their position as the town's leading team by winning the competition for the second consecutive season.[29] The threat of a schism within the sport was averted in 1885 when the FA agreed to legalise professionalism.[30] In a town the size of Blackburn, however, Olympic found it hard to compete for spectators and sponsors with the longer-established and more successful Rovers, and as a result could not pay wages on a par with those offered by that club or by other professional clubs in Lancashire. In 1886 the club's committee was forced to reduce the players' wages to a quarter of what was being offered by Preston North End. Many of the team's key players walked out in response and were quickly signed by wealthier clubs.[31]

The Football League, the world's first association football league, was formed in 1888 by the leading clubs of the Midlands and North. Aston Villa chairman William McGregor, the driving force behind the new competition, put in place a rule stating that only one club from each town or city could join, and chose Rovers, rather than Olympic, to be Blackburn's entrant.[32][33] Some of the clubs not invited to join the League, including Olympic, formed The Combination, but this was a poorly organised competition which attracted only small crowds and collapsed before the end of the 1888–89 season.[34] Beset by heavy debts, the club's committee announced in early 1889 that all professional players were being released from their contracts with immediate effect and that henceforth the club would employ only amateur players.[35] This desperate measure came too late to save the club, which closed down in September 1889. Blackburn Olympic's last match was a defeat away to Everton.[36]