Malaga Football Club

David Redshaw

Description

For the first time ever the story of Malaga Football Club is told in English. With thousands of British ex-pats and holidaymakers on the Costa del Sol attending every home game, they can now find out the extraordinary story behind the club they have taken to their hearts. The book details the complex origins and history of the club and gives an insight into the many characters who have contributed to its extraordinary past. Starting with the inception of football in Spain, it charts the story of the club from its humble beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century right up to the present-day institution, with accounts of the role of the city's links with the shipping and railway industries, the club's former 'royal' patronage, several disappearances and subsequent re-foundings, match-fixing scandals, ground closures andrefusal to fulfil fixtures, and even the assassination of the club's president. A great addition to the library of any genuine football fan, this is a book packed with information about the partthat Mlaga Football Club has played in the history of the city, and in Spanish football.

Sujets

• Spain
• Spain (groupe)

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781848769434
• Langue: English

Extrait

MALAGA FOOTBALL CLUB
THE STORY
DAVID REDSHAW
Copyright 2010 David Redshaw
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Matador 5 Weir Road Kibworth Beauchamp Leicester LE8 0LQ, UK Tel: ( 44) 116 279 2299 Fax: ( 44) 116 279 2277 Email: [e-mail] Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
ISBN 978 1848763 982
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in 12pt Palatino by Troubador Publishing Ltd, Leicester, UK

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
Contents
FOREWORD
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CLUBHONOURS
FOREWORD
After deciding to settle on the Costa del Sol in the mid-eighties, I suppose I wasn t unlike most other ex-pats to have come to Spain over the years in that I missed several things about home, most notably family and friends. As somebody used to watching Manchester City on a regular basis it wasn t long before I was getting severe withdrawal symptoms concerning football, especially when it came to watching a live game. At that time there was no satellite television and the UK newspapers didn t arrive until two days after they were printed, so Saturday afternoons were usually spent glued to a shortwave transistor radio frantically trying to get the final scores, despite a constant barrage of static in the left ear.
I knew that Malaga had a football team and a top stadium, as I remembered Scotland playing there in the 1982 World Cup, but to be honest I had absolutely no idea which division they were in or even where they played; I didn t know anybody who had even the remotest interest in the club. Consequently it wasn t until March 5 th 1989, around three years after my arrival, that I attended my first game, being invited along by an acquaintance I had made who went by the dubious nickname of One Armed John . It was a first division fixture against local rivals Sevilla, which Malaga won 1-0 thanks to a penalty by Juanito (the only player on the pitch I recognised), but football-wise the occasion was completely alien to me. The game itself was played almost in slow motion after the blood and thunder contests I was used to watching in the England of the seventies and eighties; even the noise of the crowd seemed totally at odds with what was happening on the pitch. Nonetheless, from that moment onwards I was completely hooked. And so began a love affair with the club which is still going strong 20 years later.
Since my introduction to football in M laga I have watched the team in the top three divisions of Spanish football, and can t remember the last time I missed a home game whilst in the country. A season-ticket holder since 1997, I have been involved in organising buses to all home fixtures (and many away) for a number of years, and although I obviously knew the players representing M laga at any one time, I was aware that I didn t know the first thing about the club or its history. Despite my efforts to find out, I was reliably informed that there were no books on the subject, in either English or Spanish - which made me even more curious.
The upsurge of interest from the number of foreigners who have made their home on the coast, particularly in the last decade, has meant that around 3,000 now attend every home match. This was what first gave me the idea of researching and writing about the history of the club in English, but it took constant badgering from my partner, Val Wilson, to actually get me to sit down and seriously consider doing it. What I didn t expect when I began the research was that it would be so difficult, particularly since I could find no records kept of any league games in the first half of the twentieth century.
With so many clubs under different guises in the history of football in M laga, and the frequent name changes and amalgamations, it became more like a whodunnit in trying to unravel the many teams and characters which eventually resulted in the formation of M laga Club de F tbol . I hope I got there in the end, but what I did find along the way was that some of the events which have taken place over the years have been truly astonishing - an assassination and a match-fixing scandal to name but two. Life was certainly never boring if you were a M laga fan.
It wasn t easy putting over 100 years of football into such a concise record, but I have tried to keep things simple, especially with the translation of words and club names, and as no football story can be told without the mention of money I have worked on the basis that 1,000 pesetas was worth around 4 pounds sterling. The spelling of certain names and the titles of cups and divisions etc. has changed with the passage of time, but whenever possible I have kept to the modern usage. I am indebted to many people for providing me with facts and statistics, but would particularly like to thank the following:-
Arnaud from www.footballdatabase.eu. for a comprehensive list of all M laga results since the early thirties.
Curro Navarro L pez, whose compilation of facts and statistics can be found at http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Lab/1009/index.html?200916
Antonio F. Urdiales for his excellent website on the history of football in M laga at http://urdi.dyndns.org/home.htm
Bany from Sevilla for the use of his information on M laga s great rivals.
CHAPTER ONE
To find the origins of football in M laga we must go back to the latter part of the nineteenth century and examine the context in which the game became popular throughout the whole of Spain. The idea of modern football was initially pioneered by a mixture of British immigrant workers and sailors, who had responded to the new-found interest in the sport back home by organising games between themselves and locals whenever they could. The first actual matches were known to have taken place in the 1870 s between English and Scottish employees at the mineral-rich Rio Tinto mines in Huelva, Andaluc a. According to records the first account of football in Spain was thought to have been written into the guestbook of a local hostelry in Gaucin, a small village to the south-west of Ronda, dated September 1874, when Captain W F Adams wrote: Marched out from Huelva on Wednesday. Played football with some railmen about an hour out. The only diversion we truly had .
Despite the fact that the Rio Tinto Football club was believed to be the earliest team to come into existence around this time there was no record of it having been registered as a company, whilst in the north of Spain Gimn stic de Tarragona had been founded as a sports club in 1886, yet did not form an actual football team until much later in 1914. Thus the first Spanish football club came into being on December 23 rd 1889, when Dr. Alexander Mackay and a group of workers from the mines formed, and officially registered, the Huelva Recreation Club, with Charles Adams as its honorary president. This momentous event took place at the Hotel Col n in Huelva, and just a few days later a ship arrived from London laden with a cargo of kit and equipment intended for use in both football and cricket.
Initially the objective of these pioneers was to encourage other enthusiasts in Andaluc a to take up the game, with the first official match taking place just six weeks later on March 8 th 1890 in Sevilla. The first historical document relating to the game was a letter that had been published in El Diario - a newspaper printed in the Huelva province - on February 25 th 1890, which was sent by Isaias White, the secretary of newly-created Sevilla FC, inviting Huelva Recreation Club to come to Sevilla for the game.
The result was a 2-0 victory for the local club in a match played at the Hip dromo de Tablada ground, situated on the outskirts of the city, with the opposition being made up of workers from the Sevilla Water Works. The players taking part in the match were all British with the exception of just two players on the Huelva side, and the lasting legacy of this game is still to be found today in the name of Sevilla FC, the initials after its name denoting the British Football Club rather than the Spanish Club de F tbol .
Since Britain dominated the global industries of shipbuilding and mining it was inevitable that other countries would look to use the expertise it could provide, and Spain was no exception as it welcomed tradesmen that could enhance its own standing in the overseas markets. The spin-off from this was that the game began to become even more popular in the whole of the peninsula, an example of this being the British steel and shipyard workers in the Basque country, who formed the Bilbao Football Club in the early 1890 s. With the sons of the Spanish ruling classes going in the opposite direction to be educated in Britain, it wasn t long before they returned to their native country having developed a keen interest in the game, and consequently they themselves began to organise matches against the British workers back home. The returning students would eventually found clubs across the whole of Spain, one of the most popular