What is Arsenal? Why are teams United? Uh, Hotspur? Clubs' names explained (2024)

There are 13 clubs known as United in English football’s top four divisions. Aside from its array of Citys and Towns, ‘the 92’ also include three Wanderers, five Rovers, a couple of Athletics and a Rangers. There are a trio of Albions and just as many Countys. In contrast, as those from a corner of Devon will insist, there is only one Argyle.

On top of all those suffixes can be added, among other quirks, an Arsenal and a Vale. There are names to conjure images of elegant stately homes or gleaming palaces of glass, all memories from yesteryear… as well as a day of the week.

We take them all for granted these days. They are part of the lexicon of the game across England and the world, names that are accepted as dividing lines in cities, counties, even households. Rallying points for their partisans. Institutions whose origins are woven into a region’s history.

But occasionally, as the Saturday results roll in and we learn Stanley are still in the FA Cup, United are dysfunctional and Forest are on fire, we might still check ourselves and ponder what all these odd monikers actually mean.

Why, for heaven’s sake, is there an Orient currently loitering in League Two? And a Hotspur, hardly a commonly used English word, signing players left, right and centre as they aspire to enter the race to win the Premier League?

The Athletic attempts to provide some answers as to why clubs adopted their particular appendages, or even carry handles with no obvious links to their modern-day environment. Or, in some cases, to their roots.

It is far from an exhaustive list, for all that it might be exhausting to read in one sitting.

The compilation does illustrate that, while some clubs are clearly named after local landmarks – albeit some long since gone – the influence either of the church or the industrial revolution, with factory workers now granted the rare luxury of Saturday afternoons off, in their formation is clear.

Friends, schoolmates and work colleagues founded these teams. Some will have pinned names to their new creations that were fashionable at the time, reflecting established sides in the higher echelons. Others merely maintained the names of the clubs from which their football wing was an offshoot. The game in England owes much to the popularity of rugby, athletics and, in particular, cricket in Victorian society. So many of our current football clubs stem originally from the English summer sport of bat and ball.

The reasoning behind a club’s given name is not always detailed in the accounts of the late nineteenth century.

There are bound to be some omissions from what follows – clarifications and other theories, hand-me-down tales that have taken hold within fanbases that might even contradict the more conventional explanations put forward by historians over the years.

If there are, please share them in the comments section at the bottom. The narrative, however tenuous, does matter, because club folklore is passed down from generation to generation and cherished.

So what is an Arsenal?
arsenal | noun 1 a collection of weapons and military equipment: Britain’s nuclear arsenal. 2 aplace where weapons and military equipment are stored or made.

The Royal Arsenal was a vast site on the south bank of the River Thames in Woolwich, south east London. Originally known as the Woolwich Warren, the complex was used for the manufacture of armaments and ammunition, as well as organised proofing (tests to ensure the weapons worked as intended) and research into explosives for the British armed forces. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, it employed close to 80,000 people and covered an area of around 1,290 acres, although, by then, the local football club had actually moved out.

It was employees at the arsenal’s Dial Square workshop – a turning and engraving studio named after the sundial that hung over its main entrance – who first explored the possibility of setting up a football club. Local press reports noted “a small band of adventurers in No 2 gun shop at Woolwich Arsenal”, led by a Scotsman and former Kirkcaldy Wanderers player named David Danskin and several others who hailed from Nottingham, where football was flourishing, founded a club first known as Dial Square FC.

There are some suggestions this happened as early as 1884, though the more accepted date is December 1886. They beat Eastern Wanderers 6-0, some say just across the Thames on the Isle of Dogs and others “on open ground at Plumstead Common”, in their first game and, having met in the Royal Oak pub on Christmas Day a few weeks later to discuss the new venture, changed their name to Royal Arsenal – a grander title than Dial Square, combining the name of their employers with the pub in which they were sitting.

They would tweak the title again, to the rather wordy Woolwich Arsenal Football and Athletic Company Limited (Woolwich Arsenal for short), after turning professional and securing election to the Football League Division Two in 1893.

‘Woolwich’ was only dropped when the club moved from Plumstead to Highbury, in north London, in 1913, a switch made much to the annoyance of Tottenham Hotspur, Chelsea and Clapton Orient, although the Football League decided “that by rule and practice it had no power to interfere”, according to Charles E Sutcliffe’s 1938 account of the first 50 years of the governing body.

Regardless, around 136 years on from their foundation, Arsenal remain a throwback to the days when workers at the country’s principal armaments factory fancied a post-shift kick-about on wasteland south of the river.

Why Orient?
orient |noun | 1 (the Orient) literary the countries of the East, especially East Asia. 2 [mass noun] the special lustre of a pearl of the finest quality (with reference to fine pearls from the East).

The football club now known as Leyton Orient, with that exotic moniker, was born of cricket, like so many others formed in the late 19th century.

Glyn Cricket Club was the brainchild of 12 old boys of Homerton College, a theological teacher training school for Puritans and Non-Conformists in Hackney, north London, in 1881 and played their matches at Glyn Road. They had become Eagle Cricket Club by the time Jack Dearing, a committee member, team player and employee of the Orient Steamship Navigation Company, took to his feet at a meeting held around the corner at 86 Dunlace Road in Hackney and proposed the name be changed to Orient.

The assumption is that there were other members of the Orient company – whose roots went back to the late 18th century – within the membership because the name change was embraced with enthusiasm. In the same meeting, those present proposed the formation of a football section so players could maintain their fitness in the winter, cricket’s off-season.

They became Clapton Orient in 1898 and, after moving another short distance within the area to Leyton in 1937, Leyton Orient following the Second World War.

Peninsular & Oriental (the famous P&O) bought a majority stake in the Orient Steamship Navigation Company in 1919 and hoovered up all the remaining shares in 1966, but the shipping firm’s original name will live on as long as the football club endures.

What is a Crystal Palace?
The origins of Crystal Palace Football Club have actually become the subject of much controversy, after the modern-day club recently claimed their roots extend back to 1861, rather than the previously accepted foundation date of 1905. If correct, that earlier date would pip Notts County to make them the oldest professional football club in the world.

Regardless, the name clearly stems from the nickname which stuck for Sir Joseph Paxton’s vast glass and iron building first erected in central London’s Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition in 1851 and subsequently rebuilt south of the Thames on Sydenham Hill, which at 367ft (112m) above sea level, is among the capital’s highest vantage points.

The latter site was effectively the nation’s greatest pleasure park. Its landscaped gardens were decorated with water features and statues, including Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ celebrated representations of iguanodons, plesiosaurs, pterodactyls and various amphibians, which can still be seen today. The FA Cup final was played in its grounds each year from 1895 and 1914.

The huge glass structure, flanked by imposing water towers, housed the spoils of the British Empire until it burned down in 1936. The glow from the fire that night could be seen in France, over 100 miles (around 175km) away.

The suggestion has been that employees, possibly groundkeepers, of the Crystal Palace first decided to form a football club. Another theory is local athletes, professionals and public schoolboys from the nearby, up-and-coming villages of Penge, Sydenham and Norwood moved to set up the club as the area boomed, having been transformed by the Palace’s presence into one of the trendiest quarters of London.

In reality, cricket had already been well established on the site since 1857 and probably played some part along the way, with those who joined the new football wing all being members of the existing cricketing club.

James Turner, a goalkeeper, and Francis Day, the secretary, from Crystal Palace attended the inaugural meeting of the Football Association at the Freeman’s Tavern in Great Queen Street, central London, on October 26, 1863.

Theirs was a working men’s team who competed in the first FA Cup, held in 1871-72, but appear to have disbanded thereafter with no Palace side affiliated with the Football Association between 1875 and 1905, when the current club – who were originally tenants on the Crystal Palace site – entered the Second Division of the Southern League.

Why would a club be called Wednesday?
The Wednesday Cricket Club had been founded in Sheffield in 1820 by six local tradesmen – William Stratford, John Southren, Tom Lindley, William Woolhouse, George Dawson and George Hardisty – who were linked by all having a half-day off work on Wednesdays. That practice was common in the Yorkshire city at the time. Indeed, as Jason Dickinson notes in his 2015 book The Origins of Sheffield Wednesday, in the early part of the 19th century there were also local Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday Cricket Clubs.

The population of Sheffield was rising rapidly by the 1860s, with association football gaining in popularity and the city at the heart of the sport’s national development. The Sheffield Football Association was formed in March 1867 and, at a meeting at the city’s Adelphi Hotel on September 4 (a Wednesday, of course), Wednesday CC chose to form a football wing as an acknowledgement of the rise of that sport, but also reflecting the desire to keep their members together during the winter months.

The cricket club were wound up in 1924 having been reduced to a solitary annual fixture as membership dwindled. Lance Morley, a member of 45 years, confirmed the club’s demise and asked that the Cromwell Cup, won by Wednesday Cricket and Football Club in 1867, be presented to the Wednesday Football Club Limited.

It was actually only in 1929 that ‘Sheffield’ was formally added to the football club’s name. That is also the year when they won the most recent of their four English titles.

What is a Hotspur?
hotspur | noun archaic a rash, fiery, impetuous person. Late Middle English: literally ‘a person whose spur is hot from rash or constant riding’. • the nickname of Sir Henry Percy.

At first glance, there appear to be very few obvious connections between a celebrated 14th-century fighter against the Scots, born into the illustrious House of Percy, Dukes of Northumberland – a figure cut down in his prime at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, but later immortalised by William Shakespeare in his historical plays Richard II and Henry IV Part One – and a modern-day football club based in north London, far from either Northumberland or Shrewsbury, which is in the English Midlands nine miles from the border with Wales.

And yet every time Tottenham Hotspur fans reference Spurs, they are retreating over 600 years and effectively basking in the exploits of Sir Henry, the scourge of the Scots.

Henry ‘Harry’ Percy was born on June 13, 1364, probably in the now-ruined Spofforth Castle between the Yorkshire towns of Wetherby and Harrogate. As a youngster, he was present as his father’s men retook the castle of Berwick-upon-Tweed from a band of Scottish raiders, who had managed to kill the local Constable, Sir Robert de Boynton, and were ransoming his family.

The suggestion that a 12-year-old Harry had leapt into the breach, sword in hand, is probably apocryphal. But, over the years that followed, the heir to the Duchy of Northumberland forged a reputation as an impulsive, bold knight.

He fought and was captured by the Scots at the Battle of Otterburn (despite it being a home fixture for him in Northumberland) – his ransom, set at 7,000 marks, was met by royal gift and parliamentary subscription, such was his popularity – led raids into Picardy against the French, and won the battle of Homildon Hill, also against the Scots.

With his band of trusted Percy retainers, he was feared north of the border. His nickname, Harry “Hotspur”, was coined not by his allies, but by his fiercest enemies.

The chronicler Thomas Walsingham, writing in the 1390s, stressed that, “Unlike his father, who was the guardian of the town of Berwick, Henry Percy was constantly active, more especially against the Scots, whom he subdued with tireless courage at every outbreak of disorder. On account of this, they called him ‘Hatspore’ [Haatspore].”

He died at Shrewsbury while leading an uprising against his half-cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, aka King Henry IV. When rumours circulated that Hotspur was actually still alive, the king had his corpse exhumed and displayed it, propped upright between two millstones, in the town’s marketplace.

Though Harry Hotspur’s life ended in open rebellion against the monarch, the Percy family had been well rewarded with land and titles over the years.

One gift had been an area then north of London known as Northumberland Park, a nod to the family’s status in their own far-off neck of the woods.

It was there that the locals set up a Hotspur Cricket Club — playing on land loaned to them by one player’s uncle, a Captain Delano — in the middle part of the 19th century, referencing the most celebrated of the Percy knights in the team’s name.

In August 1882, some young members of the club met under a street lamp on the Tottenham High Road and discussed the possibility of forming a football club to see them through the winter. The cricket club gave them some financial backing to help buy wood to build a goal, flag posts, tape, stationery, stamps and, not to be forgotten, a ball.

The team, marking out their own pitches, duly started playing friendlies on Tottenham marshes.

There were some initial issues – groups of older boys pushing them aside and taking over the pitches for themselves. As one correspondent, describing himself as “one of the few surviving founders”, told the Tottenham & Edmonton Herald in 1921, “For one or two years, a kind of guerrilla warfare had been waged amongst rival classes of lads.”

Harry Hotspur might have approved of such scraps but, for a while, these local squabbles threatened to prompt the disbanding of the fledgling club. Yet most of the youngsters involved were members of a Bible class run at All Hallows Church, Tottenham, by John Ripsher. He was a respected figure locally in the Tottenham Young Men’s Christian Association, and his presence gave the newly-formed club some clout and legitimacy.

Ripsher organised them properly, appointing a committee, drawing up a fixture list and, as discussed in a meeting almost a year to the day after the idea of a new club had first been mooted, formalising the team’s name. There were 21 people present, with Ripsher chairing proceedings.

“Several suggestions were put forward,” offered the correspondent to the Herald. “Northumberland Rovers was fancied at first and was on the point of being adopted when others present struck an idea.

“According to one present at this momentous gathering, several lads had been reading the history of England of 1401-03 and were full of admiration for Henry Percy, nicknamed Hotspur, son of the Earl of Northumberland, who performed ‘prodigies of valour’ on the field of battle. Were not these youths, also, the sons of Northumberland Park? And was not the Institute near to Percy House, named after the redoubtable Percies? (Percy House, which still stands yards from Spurs’ stadium today, was built in the 1740s by Sir Hugh Smithson, who had inherited the fortune and lands of the Percy family.)

“Besides, the lads belonging to the original club would have no other name than ‘Hotspur’.”

Of course, that account does not acknowledge the pre-existence of the Hotspur Cricket Club, who had presumably indulged in similar deliberations when setting themselves up a few years previously and had played such a part in bringing together Spurs’ first group of footballers. This, in many ways, was merely a nod to continuity.

Yet the appeal of an association with Hotspur was still clear. The Percy family’s influence in that corner of London lives on in a name.

Why Forest?
forest | noun a large area covered chiefly with trees and undergrowth: a pine forest.
• historical an area, typically owned by the sovereign and partly wooded, kept for hunting and having its own laws.
• [in place names] denoting an area that was formerly a royal forest: Waltham Forest.

It might be easy to assume that Nottingham Forest references all things Robin Hood, the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sherwood Forest. Except that the name actually seems to stem from the team’s first ground, the Forest – an open space north of the city centre cleared from the aforementioned forest and which, in the 19th century, was home to Nottingham racecourse.

The grandstand at the Forest was built by John Carr of York in 1777 with horse-racing meetings held on the site until 1890, when the sport transferred to Colwick. The stand was pulled down in 1909 and, since 1928, the area has hosted the annual Goose Fair, said to be the second largest travelling fair in the country.

Legend has it that, during a game of shinney (a sport similar to hockey), one player broke with convention and threw a football to the players, who duly dropped their sticks and started a kickabout, whetting their appetites for a change of sports proper in the process.

That may be apocryphal but, regardless, the formation of Nottingham Forest FC was proposed by JS Scrimshaw to a group of 15 of his fellow shinney players at a meeting at the Clinton Arms hotel, on what is now the corner of Shakespeare Street and Sherwood Street, in 1865 with their chosen name synonymous with the location of their home ground only half a mile away.

All those present would become football players for the newly formed club. They would leave the Forest Recreation Ground in 1879 for the Castle Ground and the Meadows Cricket Ground, recently vacated by their local rivals, Notts County.

Why are clubs United?
united | adjective joined together politically, for a common purpose, or by common feelings: women acting together in a united way. • British use in names of soccer and other sports teams formed by amalgamation: Oxford United.

The adoption of ‘United’ has tended to stem from the merging of two or more clubs, with the new and larger membership duly uniting under a common banner and committing to the same cause.

In the Victorian era, extinctions and mergers of clubs were very common, for all that plenty of the associated marriages and divorces were complicated. Clubs might be reborn overnight to escape outstanding debts, allowing them effectively to start with a clean slate. Similarly, with the rise of professionalism, difficult decisions were forced through with one eye on self-sustainability.

So, for example, when there was deemed insufficient support to maintain two major football teams in Rotherham, Rotherham Town (formed originally as simply Rotherham FC in 1870) and Rotherham County (previously Thornhill United, founded in 1877) amalgamated in 1925 to form Rotherham United.

Forty miles down the road in Sc*nthorpe, Brumby Hall FC merged with several other local clubs to become Sc*nthorpe United at the end of the 19th century. They, in turn, linked up with North Lindsey United in 1910 and, for 48 years, the club was actually known as Sc*nthorpe And Lindsey United.

Newcastle United are the result of a somewhat controversial merger between Newcastle West End and Newcastle East End, a club formed in South Byker in 1881 and originally called Stanley.

West End, who played at St James’ Park, were struggling financially by the end of the 1891-92 season. Attendances had nosedived and the club teetered on the brink of insolvency, so two of their committee men, John Black and Dr William Neasham, tentatively approached their counterparts from the other side of town and offered, according to East End’s minutes taken from the meeting, “the West End ground for the rest of the lease and would give us (East End) £100”.

A deal had been agreed within the week, with East End taking up the remaining 12-year lease on the stadium and agreeing, as had been stipulated, to use Black’s pub as dressing rooms. They dismantled the timber stand at their Chillingham Road home, which was to be used by the East End Wednesday club thereafter, and took it with them to St James’ Park – albeit the Town Corporation later ordered its removal as proper planning permissions had not been granted. West End, meanwhile, were to cease operations as a club, with their players and staff offered the opportunity to transfer to East End.

The Newcastle Daily Journal carried a short story, headlined “Goodbye to West End”.

Yet the reinvigorated East End club were frustrated in their attempts to gain entry into the Football League in the summer of 1892 and declined an invitation to join the newly-formed Second Division, put off by a fixture list that would have necessitated financially draining journeys south to play games against similarly sized (and far from exciting) teams. Instead, they prepared for another crack at the Northern League by welcoming Glasgow’s Celtic down to St James’ Park for a friendly — a fixture which attracted an encouraging attendance of over 6,000 and receipts of £147.

However, the run-of-the-mill league fixtures which followed failed to generate similar gates. East End’s support, traditionally around 3,000 strong and from the Heaton and Byker areas, were increasingly apathetic given they now faced an hour’s walk to home fixtures at St James’. The remnants of West End’s fanbase, meanwhile, were still struggling to adjust to seeing their local rivals occupying their former home.

The East End club’s board realised something radical was required to inject some much-needed enthusiasm – and, with it, a rise in attendances – and, at a meeting on December 9, 1892 in the Bath Lane Hall, the chairman Alex Turnbull and an audience of around 300 discussed what could be done.

A correspondent in The Journal noted that “there was a certain amount of jealousy existing among some people regarding the present title of the club, and it was considered that a more general and representative name should be chosen”.

Several options were proposed, including Newcastle Rangers, Newcastle FC, Newcastle City and City of Newcastle, but “a large majority” opted for Newcastle United, acknowledging the meeting of East and West. The Football Association agreed to the change later in the month, albeit the Newcastle East End Football Company Limited only switched to Newcastle United Football Club Ltd in the autumn of 1895. The name change, perhaps a superficial gesture, had the desired effect.

The oldest United among the 92 league clubs are Sheffield United, who were formed to occupy a sporting venue already in existence, Bramall Lane, rather than following the more conventional chronology of the day.

Sheffield United Cricket Club, formed after several local clubs merged, had been playing at the Lane since 1854. Sheffield FC and Hallam had competed in the first football match there in December 1862 – the game lasted three hours and finished goalless – and, for a period, the footballing arm of the Wednesday Cricket Club used the venue until a dispute over rent prompted them to purchase land and build their own place.

The financial implications of their departure sparked fears of financial ruin within the cricket ground’s committee, so there was much delight when Bramall Lane took £574 in gate receipts from an FA Cup semi-final between Preston North End and West Bromwich Albion in 1889, with a crowd of 22,688 in attendance. That opened the committee men’s eyes to the financial possibilities of Association football and the decision was made to create a football club to use the site in the cricket off-season.

Charles Stokes, a member of the Bramall Lane Ground Committee (which, at the time, was apparently frequently referred to as the Sheffield United Committee, with the ‘United’ a reference back to Sheffield United Cricket Club), discussed the formation of a football club with JC Clegg, president of the Sheffield Football Association.

From the ensuing committee meeting at 10 Norfolk Row — now home to the Top Nails salon — on March 22, 1889 sprung Sheffield United Football Club, who are the oldest ‘United’ playing at professional level in the game today.

From Newton Heath to Manchester United
The most celebrated United, on a global stage, is the Manchester version.

The modern-day Manchester United began life as Newton Heath, a club set up in 1878 by workers at the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company (LYR), whose carriage and wagon depot was situated in the suburb of that name three miles to the north east of Manchester city centre.

The club were initially called Newton Heath LYR but, while the majority of their players still worked on the railways, they dropped the LYR in 1890 and were no longer supported by the social committee of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway.

Life was far from straightforward for the fledgling club. They were the first team ever to be relegated from the First Division, losing a Test match (play-off) 2-0 to Liverpool in 1894, and missed out on promotion in the years that followed. Attendances duly dropped off, exacerbating their financial situation.

Harry Renshaw, the first Newton Heath correspondent for the Manchester Evening News, wrote that the rent of the club’s headquarters in 33 Oldham Road “was just six shillings a week, and to increase the social side, the club rented a schoolroom in Miles Platting as a place where supporters and players might meet. It was a place where they might spend time together in a common cause, and to add to the facilities, a billiards table was purchased. But, sad to relate, the venture was not a success. Indeed, at one meeting of directors, the only light available was from three candles fixed in ginger-beer bottles. The reason? The Corporation had cut off the gas supply and served a summons on the club”.

Even as professionals, Newton Heath’s players were never quite sure how much would be in their wage packets. The directors would count out the gate money after each home match, take out running costs, and pay the players whatever was left – if that amounted to anything at all.

The club instigated a wild array of fund-raising ventures to stave off financial ruin, from advertising a performance by ‘The Bank Lane Canary’ at home games – the bird was actually a goose, but it still put an extra 100 on the gate – to asking one of the players to bring in a goat he owned to accompany supporters to a nearby pub post-match.

The poor animal would then be given beer, with bets placed on how many pints it would drink before toppling over.

Regardless, by 1902, the club had debts of £2,670 and were on the verge of bankruptcy.

William Healey, a building contractor and a Newton Heath director, had sued the club for £240, money he was owed in loans and unpaid bills, and was granted a winding up order. That prompted a public meeting at New Islington Hall in Ancoats, on April 24, 1902, to discuss the crisis. Much to the audience’s surprise and relief, the club’s right-back and captain, Harry Stafford, rose to his feet and said he knew of some local businessmen prepared to invest the required money in return for getting to run the club.

The group introduced by Stafford were willing to buy Newton Heath out of trouble but, in order to widen the club’s appeal, a new name was discussed.

Neighbouring Ardwick FC had recently changed their name to Manchester City and the Heathens’ new owners felt that their team, too, should give the impression of a big-city club.

Manchester Central, which sounded too much like a railway station, and Manchester Celtic were rejected. The secretary, Jim West, favoured Manchester Newton Heath. Louis Rocca, who would play a leading role on the club’s staff over the next 48 years and was their chief scout under Matt Busby, always claimed he was the one who proposed ‘Manchester United’, though the Gorton Report of April 26, 1902, suggests the chair of the meeting, James Brown, actually made the suggestion.

Regardless, ‘United’ gave the reborn club a renewed sense of vim and vigour after years of financial toil. It proved a popular choice within the room.

United in defiance?
A renewed sense of purpose in the face of radical change may have prompted supporters of Leeds City, wound up brutally following allegations of illegal payments to players during the First World War, to adopt ‘United’ for their newly-formed phoenix club.

It was Charlie Copeland, a full-back embroiled in a bitter pay dispute with Leeds City, who made the Football Association aware of breaches of rules whereby all players were supposed to have been paid as amateurs during the four-year conflict. On October 13, 1919, an FA commission expelled Leeds City from the Football League.

Their players were duly auctioned to the highest bidders at an event staged at the city’s Metropole hotel four days later.Around 30 rival clubs turned up, with the team sold off for £10,150.

For City’s fans, the whole scenario was humiliating. Over 1,000 crammed into Salem Hall just hours after the auction to discuss how to salvage something from the wreckage, with Alf Masser, a local solicitor and former vice-chairman of Leeds City, the driving force behind the formation of a new club.

A seven-man committee formalised the creation of Leeds United following a meeting at Masser’s house in the Roundhay district the following day, with advertisem*nts placed in local newspapers asking for players to join up. ‘United’ rather summed up the mood of the fanbase in the face of their team’s extinction.

The onset of professionalism in the game had a similar effect on Thames Ironworks Football Club, and provoked their rebirth as West Ham United.

The original club had been formed for employees of the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company Limited, one of the biggest and most important shipbuilders in Britain, who boasted eight slipways grouped in two east London locations, at Bow Creek in Canning Town and a little further upstream.

On June 29, 1895, the Thames Ironworks Gazette, the company newspaper and mouthpiece for the owner Arnold Hills, wrote: “Mr Taylor, who is working in the Shipbuilding Department, has undertaken to get up a Football Club for next winter.” Dave Taylor was a foreman in the shipbuilding yard, and a local referee. The club membership fee was half a crown — 30 per cent of a riveter’s weekly pay — and they played their first game at their Hermit Road ground, known as the Cinder Heap, in Canning Town on September 7, 1895, drawing 1-1 with Woolwich Arsenal.

Thames Ironworks FC were quickly successful, winning the London League title in 1898, but there were differences of opinion with Hills – an advocate of ‘sport for sport’s sake’ – over the lurch towards professionalism in the years that followed.

Hills found himself effectively bankrolling a side he had originally envisaged as a community club providing recreation for his employees at the ironworks. He was dismayed when players were brought in from outside to help the team compete in the Second Division of the Southern League, and increasingly felt the club no longer contributed to company morale; in short, he had created a monster.

Yet, while Hills was uncomfortable with where the club were headed, neither did he want his factory to be tainted by a sense of failure should Thames Ironworks FC fold. As a result, he severed the club’s formal connections with the ironworks and proposed a limited company, in which he became a major shareholder.

At the end of June 1900, the Thames Ironworks Football Club resigned from the Southern League and were wound up. Within days, the club reformed under the name of West Ham United and was elected to take the place of the Ironworks in the Southern League.

The Ironworks, in decline as northern and Scottish shipyards undercut their rates, closed two years before the outbreak of the First World War.

Accrington Stanley? Who are they?
Accrington FC, aka Th’ Owd Reds, formed in Lancashire in 1876 and were founder members of the Football League in 1888, and yet the local public apparently turned increasingly lukewarm to the idea of matches against teams from outside the county. It seems games against Woolwich Arsenal and Newcastle United held less appeal than ones against local amateur rivals. So, in the early 1890s, several smaller clubs sprung up in the shadow of the town’s league team.

They were joined, in around 1892, by Stanley Villa. According to Mike Jackman and Garth Dykes in their history of Accrington Stanley, this new club gained their name because the team was comprised of local lads from the Stanley Street area of Accrington. In 1964, the Accrington Observer interviewed 92-year-old Fred Carr, who “was one of the gang of young boys from the Peel Park district who became the original Stanley”.

According to Carr, two men associated with the Stanley Arms pub in Stanley Street came along and proposed the formation of a football team to play other local teams.

In 1893, as Th’ Owd Reds were blacklisted and fined by the Football League after resigning their position to join the Lancashire League, Stanley Villa underwent a metamorphosis and emerged as Accrington Stanley. They joined the Accrington & District League for the 1894-95 season and, a year later, the North East Lancashire Combination, embarking on a journey that would eventually see them replace Accrington FC as the town’s Football League club.

What is a Villa?
villa | noun
1 (especially in continental Europe) a large and luxurious country house in its own grounds.
• British a detached or semi-detached house in a residential district, typically one that is Victorian or Edwardian in style. • British a rented holiday home abroad.
2 a large country house of Roman times, having an estate and consisting of farm and residential buildings arranged around a courtyard.

Aston Villa, trendsetters up and down the country given their status as the most successful club of the Victorian era, have their roots in the Aston Villa Wesleyan Chapel in Lozells Road, in Aston. That area, now swallowed up by the city of Birmingham, is referenced in the Doomesday Book as ‘Estone’, meaning East Hill. The Methodist chapel had been established in around 1850 and took its name from a house, called Aston Villa, built nearby during the previous century.

Members of one of the Sunday School classes, the Young Men’s Bible Class, decided to form a cricket team in 1872 and played under the name of the Aston Villa (Wesleyan) Cricket Club.

One Saturday in February 1874, with the popularity of football still in its infancy in Birmingham and rugby the preferred winter sport there, four of the cricketers – Jack Hughes, Walter Price, William Scattergood and Frederick Matthews – watched a football match being played on wasteland near the chapel and were rather taken by the energy of it all.

Even so, the purpose of the Aston Villa (Wesleyan) Football Club they set up was primarily to keep their members active over the winter, so they would be fit and ready for the start of the new cricket season in the spring. Such a move had been encouraged by their Bible class teacher, Henry Hartshorne, who the group duly invited to become the club’s president.

Price became the team’s first captain with the club’s subsequent success inspiring other teams either to adopt the Villa suffix or mimic their claret and blue kit in the years that followed.

Why North End?
The stretch of common land on Preston Moor, between Garstang Road and Deepdale Road on the north east fringes of the town, from which Preston North End derives its name has had a colourful history.

Originally a part of the Forest of Fulwood, it had been gifted to the Lancashire town through the Royal Charter of King John. During the Banastre rebellion of 1315, a bloody battle had been fought at Deepdale with one of the rebel leaders, Sir Ralph de Bickerstaff, being killed during the hour-long rout of his army.

When the Lancashire Cotton Famine took hold in the early 1860s, Preston’s mill owners and legislators devised a system of public works aimed at ensuring locals without jobs would not succumb to idleness.

Funds were secured for the Moor Park project under the Public Works (Manufacturing Districts) Act and, by June 1865, around 100 acres of parkland on the Preston Moor site was being developed. There were to be eight acres of pleasure grounds and gardens, with a municipal cricket pitch as its centrepiece.

The Duke of Cambridge was in attendance in October 1867 when Moor Park was opened, albeit he left halfway through the celebratory banquet. The mayor summed up the mood of optimism by declaring that “the game of cricket strengthens the body and tends to elevate the mind”.

The site was particularly appealing to some of the players from the local Bow Lane and Preston Nelson cricket, athletics and rugby clubs, who had been playing on an irregular strip of land, known as the Marsh, since around 1863. That area on the Ribble estuary at Ashton had been earmarked for development, with a criss-cross of streets planned, as well as a dock for boats.

Some club stalwarts refused to up sticks and steadfastly continued to play on the Marsh. For plenty of others, Moor Park, with its pristine cricket ground, represented an upgrade.

A North End club, indicating the team’s new base in that part of town, was set up in 1867 and attracted the best players from many of Preston’s various teams. It was ambitious. Its facilities were impressive. As David Hunt suggests in his History Of Preston North End Football Club: The Power, The Politics And The People, it was respectable but not socially exclusive, and boasted relatively low entry fees to ensure as wide a membership as possible.

Admittedly, there were some financial difficulties to endure at the outset but, once they had emerged from that awkward start, they were also ideally placed to exploit the sudden popularity of Association football in East Lancashire when it kicked in during the late 1870s.

They played their first game in 1878. Within three years, the other sports had been dropped and Preston North End – who would go on to become English football’s original Invincibles of 1888-89 – adopted the association code and concentrated fully on football.

What brings Argyle south?
Argyll | archaic Argyle, modern Gaelic Earra-Ghaidheal. An historic county and registration county of western Scotland, sometimes called Argyllshire. The name derives from Old Gaelic airer Goidel (border region or coast of the Gaels)

Francis Howard Grose and William Hampton Pethybridge, both former pupils of Dunheved College in Launceston, Cornwall, were keen footballers whose studies in architecture and law respectively had taken them the 25 miles south to Plymouth in Devon.

They were keen to join a local club to continue playing association football.

Plymouth FC, made up of members of old boys from the town’s middle-class schools, might have been suitable but the Cornishmen were not invited to join. So the pair decided to set up their own team.

They held several meetings with like-minded colleagues, often at the homes of prospective members, and drummed up enough local enthusiasm to formalise the arrangement at a rendezvous held at the Borough Arms Coffee Tavern on Bedford Street in early September 1886.

And so to the inevitable debate over the new football club’s name.

Grose, in a letter sent to John James Pascho – a former colleague at the Devonport Dockyard and a long-time official at the Devon FA – dated March 25, 1934 and subsequently published in the Western Morning News, recalled the discussion which had ensued. “The question of what name the club should be known by then arose and that of ‘Pickwick’ was mentioned and found favour with several present,” he wrote. “Others however objected, as the name did not adapt itself to local application.”

Charles Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers, had been published over 50 years previously, so seemed an odd choice for a forward-thinking football club. Instead, the throng opted for ‘Argyle’ which, despite the Scottish reference, managed to satisfy the local application criteria.

Quite how remains open to conjecture.

Grose, in his letter, went on to specify that his admiration for “the style of play adopted by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, who I believe in the previous year won the Army Cup” had been decisive in convincing those present.

Yet Grose was writing to Pascho nearly 50 years after the event and extensive research by Argyle historians, most notably Roger Walters – whose excellent and extensive account of the club’s early years can be found here – have picked holes in the founder member’s recollections.

Principal among the issues is the reality that the Second Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, admittedly wearing tartan that resembled the green and black colours chosen for the Argyle Football Club, won the Army Cup in 1889, not 1885. They defeated the Second Battalion, South Staffordshire Regiment, who were actually garrisoned in Plymouth and had been adopted as favourites by many of the locals, in the final at the Kennington Oval in south London.

Grose’s chronology appears to have been muddled.

Rather, the “local application” may possibly have been satisfied by the proximity of nearby Argyle Terrace – a recently built row of new houses that were considered suitably upmarket for the club members’ middle-class social standing. None of those in the room at the Borough Arms in September 1886 are thought to have lived on Argyle Terrace themselves, but some were from the surrounding streets.

One correspondent to the Western Morning News in 1937 claimed a J. Reed, who was in attendance at that meeting, had actually come up with the name. A builder called John Reed lived close by in the late 1880s, prompting Walters to wonder whether he might even have constructed Argyle Terrace earlier in that decade.

Moreover, the trend of naming teams after nearby streets was well established in and around Plymouth at the time – Walters cites numerous examples of small local clubs, from Brunswick Rovers to Melville, named after roads – and ‘Argyle’ was popular, born of Queen Victoria’s fascination with all things Scotland.

It was probably a fashion. A fad. And, 136 years on, it remains synonymous with the Devonian club.

What in the world is a Port Vale?
There is intrigue associated with some club names.

It remains unclear why Port Vale are so called, with documentary evidence from late-19th century Staffordshire so scarce.

What we do know is there is no actual place bearing that name these days.

Some claim the club were founded at a meeting in a building called Port Vale House in 1876.

There are theories, not always backed up by concrete evidence, of a merger between three local sides, or that the club originated as a brickworks team. But the respected club historian Jeff Kent has suggested they were probably an offshoot of Porthill Victoria FC and named, closer to 1879, after the valley of canal wharves called Port Vale, a stopping point on the Trent and Mersey canal, close to where the team played. There is a Port Vale Street close to the former docks.

Port Vale, newly restored to League One for the season that begins at home to Fleetwood Town today (Saturday), are one of just a handful of clubs in the EFL with no geographical reference in their name.

Why Alexandra, of all people?
Just as unclear is why Crewe adopted ‘Alexandra’.

As with others already mentioned, the suffix predates the football club, set up in 1877 as an adjunct to Crewe Alexandra Cricket Club – which was founded 11 years earlier for employees of the town’s locomotive works. It may be that it was a reference to a hotel, the Alexandra, patronised by those connected with the railway industry in the town and where the club’s committee held its early meetings.

Alternatively, it might be a reference to Princess Alexandra of Denmark, who married Queen Victoria’s eldest son, later King Edward VII, in 1863.

That is the version of events pushed by the club, and is far from outlandish. Northwich, 12 miles up the road, had been home to Northwich Victoria, named in honour of the reigning monarch, since 1874.

Expressing admiration for a member of the royal family was clearly the done thing.

What is an Albion?
Albion | noun a literary term for Britain or England, often used when referring to ancient or historical times: the ancient religious sites of Albion.

Albion conjures up patriotic images of England, with its derivation from the Latin ‘albus’ (‘white’) presumably alluding to the white cliffs of Dover. In the 19th century, with the British Empire at its height and the popularity of the monarchy soaring, the use of the word to decorate a sporting club name would have sounded suitably stirring.

Those sentiments might have appealed to the founders of West Bromwich Albion, who are the original Albion among English footballing teams, and there was a theory that one of the club’s early directors had stressed that, because of the name, the team were not only representing West Bromwich but also England. And that his players should bear that in mind when running out onto the pitch on matchday.

However, in truth, it seems likelier that the founders were thinking more locally than nationally when opting to adopt the name.

The club’s roots lie in friendships forged at work, and on the cricket pitch.

In 1879, a group of employees from the George Salter Spring Works met at the end of the cricket season and made plans to play football over the winter months, but they had a problem — there was nowhere in town to buy a ball. So, according to Peter Morris in his book Soccer In The Black Country, the group strolled to nearby Wednesbury to buy their key piece of equipment. Their number “included John Bisseker and Joseph Hughes, who were to become respectively the first secretary and treasurer of West Bromwich Albion Football Club”.

Possibly as a result of that three-mile meander along country lanes, the club initially called themselves “Strollers”. But, soon after their formation and before the start of the following winter, the Strollers became the Albion.

According to Morris, some of the players lived in a district of West Bromwich known as Albion – an area to the west of town, just south of Greets Green near Union Park – and that they “decided they fancied that name, and so the momentous change was made”.

All these years on and only two other clubs have incorporated Albion into their official title.

As enthusiasts in the twin south-coast towns of Brighton and Hove proposed the formation of the area’s first semi-professional club, Brighton & Hove United, in 1901, the suffix was put forward as a compromise to appease concerned members of amateur club Hove FC.

They had described the use of ‘United’ as “obnoxious” as it implied an amalgamation between themselves and the professionals which, they thought, would severely affect attendances. Albion, in their eyes, would be far more acceptable and was waved through.

There were plenty of Albion references around Brighton and Hove.

The Royal Albion hotel had been open since 1826.

The Albion brewery, and associated inn, had taken root in Brighton’s Albion Street until, as Tim Carder and Roger Harris point out in their book Seagulls! The Story Of Brighton & Hove Albion, they were bought by Tamplin’s Brewery, who would buy 200 shares in the new club, in 1892.

There was a cricket and football club called Hove Albion in existence before the turn of the century, for all that the football wing had dissolved before the end of the 1896-97 season.

Two brothers who were involved in the early days of the new club, Tom and Harry Gadd, had bought the Albion Coffee House in Queen’s Road in 1890, turning it into the Albion Hotel.

Another of the members, Albert Grinyer, was the licensee of the Albion Inn at 110 Church Road in Hove.

Whether any of those figures was able to influence the membership to adopt Albion in preference to United, however, is unknown.

The other Albion, Burton, owe their name to a vote held at the local town hall on July 6, 1950.

Burton Town had followed Wanderers, Swifts and United by disbanding, and it had been a decade since the town — in Staffordshire, between Birmingham and Derby — boasted its own team. Yet, with football booming after the Second World War, local enthusiasm had been rekindled. The meeting was attended by 700 people and a caretaker committee, led by the mayor, was formed to oversee the formation of a new club.

Four names were proposed to the audience: Burton Borough received 150 votes, Burton County 52 and Burton Association only seven. The overwhelming majority went with Albion.

Why the Wanderers?
wanderer | noun a person who travels aimlessly: he is a longtime seaman, a rootless wanderer.

The suffix Wanderers, like that of Rovers, has been taken to mean a club who have rather ambled from one home ground to another, living a rather nomadic existence. Yet the moniker may also have been made popular by one of the most successful clubs of football’s formative days.

Wanderers were originally formed as Forest FC by John and Charles Alco*ck in 1859, playing their games around Epping Forest and Leytonstone, now both part of north east London.

Initially, matches were played just among club members, but they won their first contest against external opposition, beating the original Crystal Palace 1-0 in a 15-a-side fixture in 1862, and all nine of their games the following year. They took on the name Wanderers after leaving Leytonstone in 1864 and the new name was retained even when they settled in new surroundings at the Kennington Oval, south of the river.

They won the inaugural FA Cup final in 1872, beating Royal Engineers, and went on to receive the trophy five times in the competition’s first seven years. Their name conveyed that romantic sense of a group of travelling gentlemen playing for pleasure rather than reward, which will have appealed in a period when there was a rush of clubs being formed.

There is a suggestion that Wycombe Wanderers, founded in 1887 by a group of workers from the local furniture-manufacturing industry who had convened at a pub called the Steam Engine, may have adopted Wanderers after a visit from Wanderers FC some years previously.

Wolverhampton Wanderers were born in 1877 from a merger of St Luke’s and a local cricket and football club called The Blakenhall Wanderers.

The team did, indeed, move from field to field over the next few years, as well as a location just off Dudley Road opposite the Fighting co*cks Inn, where the only shelter for spectators was initially a shed, in the summer of 1881. They would not switch to Molineux for another eight years, but their status as Wanderers had been established upon their merger with the cricket club.

One club who could point to the name being appropriate through their early days are Bolton Wanderers, albeit not in relation to their home ground(s).

The club was born of a friendship between the Reverend Joseph Farrall Wright and Thomas Ogden. The latter had been appointed headmaster of Christ Church Boys’ School in January 1869, a week before his 23rd birthday, where he taught 140 pupils single-handedly and simultaneously. Somehow, despite rampant truancy and dreadful early reports from Her Majesty’s Inspectors, Ogden’s dedication to his work started to turn the school’s fortunes round.

The young headmaster was an enthusiastic footballer and impressed when he watched nearby Turton play ‘Harrow football’, introduced to the village by a former pupil of that London public school.

At 44, Wright was too old to play but, as Peter Lupson details in his fine book Thank God For Football!, he was influenced “by the ‘muscular Christian’ belief, popular in many churches at the time, that team sports such as cricket and football were wholesome pastimes that developed qualities of character such as courage, self-control, fair play and unselfishness”.

The pair put their heads together and formed Christ Church FC in the hope it might benefit the pupils, with Wright as president, Ogden as captain and the Christ Church Boys’ School, where the Sunday School met, serving as their headquarters.

At first, things flourished. But Wright took his role as president particularly seriously, attending all committee meetings and preventing them taking place in his absence. He railed at players swearing on the pitch, or failing to warn the club if they could not feature in a game in good time.

His presence rapidly became a source of tension. The committee “considered him to be intrusive and his attitude authoritarian”, writes Lupson. In 1877, with the relationship fractured, Christ Church FC parted company with their president and his church. The Sunday School would no longer be available as their base.

It was the fact they had to ‘wander’ in search of a new HQ, eventually found at the Gladstone Hotel, that prompted the committee to propose the new name, Bolton Wanderers, which was adopted on August 28, 1877.

The new club would compete for ascendancy in the town with Bolton Hornets, All Saints, St James’, Eagley, Farnworth, Bolton Association, Halliwell, Gilnow Rangers, Bolton Olympic, Emmanuel, Astley Bridge, Great Lever and Turton – illustrating the rapid rise in popularity of the game in that corner of England’s north west.

And, while we are at it, what is it with Rovers?
rover | noun a person who roves, spends their time wandering.• noun archaic a pirate.

As with Wanderers and Rangers, ‘Rovers’ has connotations of restlessness and constant travelling, though the archaic use in the context of piracy does at least inject a sense of excitement and daring into the name.

Bristol Rovers, formed in 1883 by five young teachers originally as the Black Arabs (named after their black shirts and the fact a local rugby club, known as the Arabs, played on an adjacent pitch), morphed into Eastville Rovers in 1884 as they attempted to encourage players from a wider area to join the club. In turn, they became Bristol Eastville Rovers in 1897 and Bristol Rovers the following year, though their modern-day nickname, the Pirates, does at least refer back to the old meaning of ‘Rovers’.

Blackburn Rovers, the most decorated of their kind as three-time league champions and FA Cup winners three years in succession in the mid-1880s and five times in eight years, may well have been referencing their status as a travelling team, given they initially had no home ground when set up in November 1875.

The side was formed following a meeting organised by John Lewis and Arthur Constantine, former pupils at Shrewsbury public school, at the St Leger Hotel on King William Street. Some 17 “educated men” attended the meeting, the majority were Blackburn Grammar School old boys.

Many of the members were well connected – there were cotton-mill owners and businessmen in their number – which helped the club establish themselves amid plenty of local competition (Blackburn Olympic would win the FA Cup before Rovers did, in 1883) and in the absence of gate receipts, given the lack of a home ground. They relied solely on subscriptions over that first year, amounting to two pounds and eight shillings, of which a large proportion was spent on a set of goalposts and a football.

They drew their first game at Church, a village just outside Accrington, a month after formation.

During the 1876-77 season, they did successfully rent a pitch, of sorts, on farmland at Oozehead, on the west side of the town, which the locals called the ‘Cow Pit’. There was a large watering hole in the centre of the playing area which had to be covered with boards – the timber was supplied by the father of one of the players – and then turfed over on matchdays. Regardless, gate receipts of six shillings and sixpence for the season bolstered the coffers.

Over the next few years, the team played home games at Pleasington Cricket Club, Alexandra Meadows – home of the East Lancashire Cricket Club – and, in 1881, the Leamington Ground before a hike in rent saw Rovers choose Ewood Park as the site for a more permanent home.

It should be noted, though, that a Blackburn Rovers team had apparently existed around a decade before the modern-day club formed in 1875.

Albert Hornby, a future England cricket and rugby player who was working at his father’s mill at the time, had apparently encouraged his workers to organise a team. The teenager, who would go on to captain Lancashire County Cricket Club for 20 years and play for them for 33, supplied an opposition from his family and friends… and called them the Rovers.

What is a Ranger?
ranger | noun 1 a keeper of a park, forest, or area of countryside: park rangers. 2 a member of a body of armed men. 3 a person or thing that wanders over a particular area: rangers of the mountains.

Again, the sense associated with Rangers centres on wandering – in search of plunder, which at least provides a purpose – with a military twist implying order and precision.

There is only one Rangers among English football’s current 92 and, at first glance, west London’s Queens Park Rangers would satisfy that nomadic implication. Loftus Road is the 16th stadium QPR have called home, a tally that takes in stints at, among other places, Kensal Rise Athletic Ground, Barn Elms, Welford’s Field, Latimer Road (where the players changed in the neighbouring Latimer Arms pub), White City and Wormwood Scrubs Gun Club.

Yet they were Rangers well before seemingly exploring every feasible venue in that part of the capital.

The club began as an amalgamation of two boys-club teams. St Jude’s Institute FC, consisting of the pupils of Droop Street Board School, had started playing fixtures in 1885. The following spring, they came up against Christ Church Rangers, a team formed in 1882 from a boys’ club started by the Christ Church Mission on the nearby College Park estate.

Many of the players that afternoon knew each other, as they all lived on the Queen’s Park estate, an 80-acre community development, complete with shops, a dairy farm and a coal depot, that was built to house 16,000 people and expected high standards of behaviour from its residents.

On the way back from the game, George Wodehouse, a founder member of Christ Church Rangers, was persuaded by a friend to suggest a merger between the two clubs, thereby creating a stronger side.

The idea seemed sound in principle but, when it transpired the new club was to be called St Jude’s Institute and use the institute’s mission hall as its headquarters, many of the Christ Church players were outraged and claimed they had been hoodwinked into sanctioning a takeover. Some walked out and formed another team, calling themselves Paddington FC.

In a bid to appease those who remained, and ensure they felt properly included, a name change was proposed with suitable options explored.

The fact almost all those involved lived on the Queen’s Park estate made that an obvious choice, with ‘Rangers’ incorporated to show continuity with the former Christ Church Rangers team.

County lines…
county | noun a territorial division of some countries, forming the chief unit of local administration.
• British a sporting team playing for a county: it is the county’s third final in four years.

For county cricket, read County Football Clubs.

Derby County, preceded by Derby Midland and Derby Junction, were formed in 1884 as an adjunct to a flagging Derbyshire County Cricket Club in the hope the extra income might boost the established setup’s finances. The football club remained directly associated with their cricketing counterparts and played at the local racecourse.

There had also been cricketers involved at the meeting which formalised the creation of Notts County — not currently an EFL club after suffering relegation to the National League in 2019 but still one of the most revered names in the sport — on December 7, 1864.

Among their number was Richard Daft, the star batsman of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club, who some claimed to also be the best centre-forward in the region.

Daft later wrote in his book, Kings Of Cricket, “When a young man, I played regularly with the Notts County Football Club when it was first formed. I believe I played centre-forward but am not quite sure about this as we were never very particular in those days about keeping in place. Charging and dribbling were the chief features of the game about that time and often very rough play was indulged in.”

According to Keith Warsop in his history, The Magpies: The Story Of Notts County Football Club, the club were usually known as “Notts.”, with the full stop, or “the Notts. Club” in the early days. Sometimes they were referred to as Nottingham or Nottinghamshire, Notts (without the full stop) or Nottm., but, when the Nottinghamshire FA was formed on November 16, 1882, there was a recognition that the club side needed to be separated from the county representative team.

Eight years later, on the formation of the limited company, they applied to the FA for a change of name from “Notts FC” to “Notts Incorporated FC”, the registered company name, though thankfully that never caught on.

In contrast, Stockport County were founded as Heaton Norris Rovers in 1883 but, via a stint as Heaton Norrish FC, changed their name during the 1890-91 season in honour of Stockport having become a County Borough.

What now for the Athletic?
athletic | adjective 1 physically strong, fit, and active: I have never considered myself athletic. 2 relating to athletes or athletics: she gained fame in Greece for her athletic ability | an athletic club.

The adoption of Athletic, conveying a sense of fitness and strength, is probably self-explanatory. There were football clubs that sprang from the membership of athletics (track-and-field) clubs, too, as the association game took off. That might explain why Charlton Athletic assumed that title when a group of friends decided to set up a football club in the summer of 1905.

One slight quirk, though, surrounds Oldham Athletic. They were originally a pub side (steady!) put together by John Garland, the landlord of the Featherstall and Junction Inn, and his son, Fred, along with a group of their friends.

They named their club Pine Villa after the Pine Cotton Mill on Sherwood Street, built five years earlier, and in whose shadow they would play at a ground called Hudson Fold. The ‘Villa’ element is thought to have reflected Aston Villa’s success and popularity at the time.

Pine Villa had initially been joint tenants at the ground with Oldham County, the town’s first professional club, before the more established side set up a reserve team.

Indeed, while Villa made steady progress up the Oldham Junior Association, County’s ambitions saw them competing in the Lancashire Alliance and, eventually, even opening their own stadium off Sheepfoot Lane, a development they called The Oldham Athletic Grounds, in 1896.

Yet they over-stretched themselves in the process.

Midway through the 1897-98 season, that club went into voluntary liquidation, and their new home would lie unoccupied until the summer of 1899.

Pine Villa had enjoyed eye-catching success through their first few years in competitive football and, during a meeting at their headquarters, were deliberating which league the club should join to maintain their progress. Among those present was George Elliot, one of the liquidators of Oldham County, who suggested Villa make use of the vacant Athletic Ground. Terms were quickly agreed, with Elliot actually leaving the meeting as club president, and it was decided the team would make the jump from the Oldham Junior Association to the Manchester Alliance League.

A motion had also been passed that saw Pine Villa become Oldham Athletic, a move designed to reflect their newly adopted and more grandiose surroundings, but also to represent better the town.

(Main graphic designed for The Athletic by Sam Richardson)