- Why Arsenal joined the Football League rather than the Southern League
- Just what have been Arsenal’s greatest achievements?
- What have been Arsenal’s greatest achievements? (Part 2)
Arsenal in the 1896/7 season
Arsenal entered the Football League in the 1893/4 season, going into Division 2, as the only London team there. As we have noted in earlier articles, the club came 9th, 8th and 7th in their first three seasons in the league – while also going out of the FA Cup in the First Round proper each time.
But the First Round, in which Arsenal had entered the Cup, was not the start of the Cup by any means, as the FA Cup allowed every team which had a ground of the agreed dimensions, and an ability to charge each spectator a minimum fee, to enter. As a result additional rouds of matches were played before the league club entered en masse, in what became known as the “first round proper”.
In 1892 there were ten teams battling things out in the very first round (known in this season as the Preliminary Round), with five going through to the “first qualifying round”, where they joined no less than 155 others who had been given a bye in that preliminary round.
Quite which teams were given byes until later rounds was often something of a mystery, but in theory it was based on the level that the club was playing at, and which round the club had reached in previous years before being knocked out.
The teams then played in a knock-out competition (this year involving four preliminary rounds, where, there then being 20 clubs left for that fourth round, they then played a final preliminary knock-out found on 10 December 1892.
Thus this is how things were played out during the early years of Arsenal’s entry into league football and the FA Cup, but in 1896/7 rules were obviously changed as Arsenal were forced to enter not straight into the competition proper but into the qualifying rounds – starting in the third qualifying round.
This presumably was at least in part a recognition of the fact that in every season until this point Arsenal had got just one game in the FA Cup and been knocked out in that. Thus although this looks like a demotion for Arsenal, it did give them a couple of extra games, and thus some extra money – particularly since FA Cup games tended to get higher attendances than league games.
So on 12 December 1896 Arsenal beat Leyton 5-0 at home in the third qualifying round of the FA Cup – Arsenal’s first ever victory of any description in the FA Cup. Then on 2 January 1897 Arsenal beat Chatham 4-0 again at home in the fourth qualifying round – which took them into the fifth qualifying round on 16 January 1897 against near neighbours Millwall Athletic. And sadly Arsenal lost 2-4 away. So Arsenal had still not made it into the competition proper (ie beyond the qualifying rounds) but had at least won a couple of games, and of course helpful additional income.
But looking back at the results for 1896/7 they show that this was the season when Arsenal’s defence fell apart. Although the club still managed a reasonable 10th position in the league (having come 9th, 8th and 7th in the previous three league seasons) 1896/7 was different. For the number of goals against rose from 42 the previous season to 70.
Only Lincoln City had a worse defence than Arsenal this season, coming bottom of the league and conceding 15 more goals than Arsenal.
And yet Arsenal still had the third best attack in the league! As a result Woolwich Arsenal came 10th out of 16 clubs and safely avoided having to apply for re-election. As it was, Burton Swifts and Lincoln City were ejected from the league, while Burton Wanderers, who got four fewer points than the Swifts, actually stayed in the division.
I have no knowledge as to how and why the voting went that way, but I suspect a certain acrimony surfaced in the town of Burton (population 48,000).
So Arsenal’s sequence of finishing positions in the league since joining in 1893/4 was 9th, 8th, 7th and 10th.
But there was one other point to note from this year, and that was Arsenal’s return to the United League. The league was formed in 1896 to provide clubs in southern and central England with additional midweek matches. Over the years, clubs frequently joined and left the league from time to time, for reasons that are sometimes hard to fathom since information on this league is hard to come by. But the entry in Wiki does also note that clubs had a habit of coming and going. The league was dissolved in 1902, revived in 1905 but ceased for the final time in 1909.
Arsenal did of course, enter into the FA Cup in 1896/7 but were forced to start in the third qualifying round, presumably because of their failures prior to this season in this competition. (Woolwich Arsenal finished 10th, six points clear of the relegated Burton Swifts).
Indeed the foot of the league shows an example of the oddities of league football at the time. The bottom three clubs placed 14th, 15th and 16th in the league were each obliged to apply for re-election while being challenged by clubs that wanted to join the league. 14th placed Burton Swifts, who got 24 points in the season, were re-elected. 15th placed Burton Wanderers with 20 points failed to be re-elected, and 16th placed Lincoln City with just 12 points were re-elected. Indeed, it must have been noted that Lincoln had conceded 85 goals in that season compared with 67 for Burton Wanderers (who also got eight more points than re-elected Lincoln.)
There must have been some reasoning somewhere, possibly concerning issues such as crowd size, proximity to other grounds, state of the pitch etc, but sadly, I don’t have access to it.
This series will continue shortly.
