Ancestors is a pictorial journey of long-forgotten or little known football clubs in all their prime. Famous clubs pepper the blog, but it is those bygone teams that hold front and centre. Most photographs are obscure archival photos unseen for 125 years, many are older still. Those unknown teams are set in aspic, looking at us as we look at them. Some photos capture individual players, fresh as a daisy. We are so accustomed to sepia-tinted photographs of superannuated players that we forget they were once young and vibrant. I hope these posts go some way in redressing that.
The Sheffield representative football team was a city-wide team composed of players drawn from the dozens of Sheffield clubs of the time. This picture appeared in the Sheffield Portrait Gallery: A Journal of Literature, Criticism, and Satire in April…
Forest FC in October 1863. It is the earliest known image of a football club.
Fifteen players in all black kits pose against a backdrop of a United Tribes flag and the Union Jack. The ‘Maories’ were the New Zealand Native Football Team who toured Britain (including Ireland) in 1888-89.…
Fifteen players in full kit gather round an oval ball, posing in three tiers of standing, sitting, and lounging. While most players wear club caps, two dandies sport lounging caps. Yorkshire County Football Team were…
Union Star were formed in 1881, primarily by cotton mill workers. They reached their pinnacle in 1885, when they won the Burnley Hospital Cup at Turf Moor, beating Haggate 3-0 before an estimated 10,000 spectators.…