1898 - Once upon a time football - I ^ parte

Foreword

Thus began the heading "It was the year .... Given the amount of topics we preferred to divide each event into two parts, therefore Below is the first part of 1898.

Born football in Italy

It was impossible not to start from what is the first official championship of football in Italy recorded in the annals of the history of this sport. The right-thinking people might think that it all began with great fanfare, but it would be a blunder. In fact no one from there before he had to believe that he was to mark an era, all on tiptoe. In the spring of 1898, it was May, then in Turin a bunch of kids with a football under his arm, so much enthusiasm and carefree they met on the outskirts, in a clay soil in exchange for "four kicks" between friends. None, as said earlier, could even remotely imagine that was about to begin the first football championship ever held in Italy. And how could it be otherwise? Besides the game in the "beautiful country" was completely unknown, had it not been for the English immigrants who worked in the industries of our country or just moored there, in the major ports, for purely commercial purposes. Indeed, the modern game was born in England, around the second half of the nineteenth century, although historians have detections from Sports News rudimentary, similar to football, from the earliest times.

Sport of the people

Football in Italy was a sport anonymously. Our country in those years devoted pages of the largest newspapers only to fencing and gymnastics regarded sport as noble tempers the body and mind. So it is the most noble and important associations of gymnastics to make room in the game "novice", integrating the company engaged in the practice within their records. Everything is therefore in the hands of the British, indeed the only two regions where there are football events are to Liguria and Piedmont, coincidentally the only two regions, in order '800, the British influence. It is precisely at the British base in an evening of a distant September 1892 (Thursday, 7 to be exact), the first club "Italian" in football where the story took note: the Genoa Cricket and Football Club, whose father was the founder Consul Charles Alfred Payton. Initially the main concern was to find a field where performing. He chose, not without difficulty, the plain of Ponte Carrega. We contracted with the major clubs in England, Germany and Switzerland in combining the practice of football to the more "noble" Cricket. Indeed, the latest finding it because the British position was seen as the sport of the people "in England and sports were virtually excluded from the noble class.

GF

In the second part: cronostoria, numbers and curiosity of the first Italian football league.