Recent articles….
- 1898/9: Home form is great but why is away form so dodgy?
- Arsenal’s early seasons: 1897/8
- Arsenal’s greatest achievements: the strugle to break even and rise up the league
- How Arsenal Matchday Culture Changed Over Time
By Tony Attwood
The title of the last episode says it all
And the answer, in case you have not had time to read the article, was that it was most likely the travel. Arsenal were on their own in the south – every away trip was an expedition that would take hours and hours to complete, and I suspect the club was neither spending money on first class travel nor on putting the players up in a hotel for the night.
Yet despite the profound disadvantage of being the only southern club in the League they kept up decent mid-table positions based on winning most of their home games:
- 1894: 9th
- 1895: 8th
- 1896: 7th
- 1897: 10th
- 1898: 5tht
- 1889: 7th
But there were of course activities elsewhere and although it is true that professional sports developed much more slowly in the south of the country than the north, the Football League was in theory open to clubs from anywhere in the country.
But the Football League was founded in 1888 and was open to clubs across the country – although the county associations in the south refused to have anything to do with it. My conclusion is that Woolwich Arsenal’s local county associations refused to accept Arsenal into their leagues and so Arsenal joined the Football League in the hope that other clubs in the south would join with them.
But football developed more slowly in the south than in the north. However Arsenal had affiliated themselves to the Football League, and they stuck with that decision, not least because the London Football Association said they would have nothing to do with Arsenal because of its desire to be a professional club.
Arsenal did have some encouragement however in that a rival southern league (The Southern Alliance) which was set up in 1892 for amateur teams, quickly failed and although eventually the .Southern League was successfully set up the Football League remained the dominant league for the professional teams.
But lest I get too carried away in praising Arsenal we must also note that Arsenal never once in this period got past the first round of the FA Cup. They were in essence a decent second division team, hampered by their geographic position, but no more than that. They were in the Football League because they were a working men’s club that supported paying people for their work – and that is what the Football League believed in.
Our most recent report tracing this history cover 1888/9 and can be found here. And sad to say even the turn of the century didn’t bring relief from this run of mid-table results for in 1889/1900 Arsenal finished 8th.
Now by this time (in the previous season in fact) the league had taken the adventurous step of allowing two more clubs into their ranks. and the final table for the 1889/1900 showed Arsenal 18 points behind the Champions (The Wednesday) and 16 behind the second promoted club, Bolton Wanderers. So clearly they were nowhere near contention for promotion, but they continued to hold their own in the League. Arsenal came 8th with 16 wins and 14 defeats – a solid mid-table performance but with a goal average way below that achieved by the promoted clubs.
One new club had joined the league this year, Chesterfield Town, a club which maintained the northern bias of the league and supported the merit of their election by coming seventh at the end of the season..
At the bottom of the league by this stage three clubs had to go through the re-election process. Luton Town resigned from the league and and Loughborough probably knew their fate long before the voting at the AGM of the League since they only won one match and conceded 100 goals in their 34 league games. They were ejected from the league.
Yet had Arsenal managed promotion at this time even that would not have brought them any London derbies – they were still very much the only London team in the football league, but it would have brought them a few games against teams from the Midlands. But of course it was not to be.
Yet by the start of the new century the League had started to take on a look that most football fans would recognise. Yes it was still northern dominated, but as well as that it was quite common for clubs ending up near the foot of the second division table simply to go out of business. This happened to Loughborough in 1900, and I mention that club because this season Arsenal got themselves into the record books for a reason other than being London’s only professional club, and London’s only league club. For Woolwich Arsenal knocked up the biggest win of the season on 12 March 1900, with the score Woolwich Arsenal 12 Loughborough 0.
At the end of the season Woolwich Arsenal finished a reasonable 8th in the second division, but still12 points and an awful lot of goals off promotion. They were once more a solid mid-table second division team, but aside from their record breaking 12-0 win, their claim to fame was that they did also have a couple of games where they scored five.
However more than anything else the fact was noted that despite all the problems that it brought in terms of travel to away games, Woolwich Arsenal had valiantly stayed in the Football League and London’s only League club, and that was clearly recognised and welcomed by the League.
The Football League was founded in 1888 with all the clubs based in the north and the Midlands, since the clubs in the south were opposed to professional football – except of course for Woolwich Arsenal who became a professional side in 1891.
Thus with the London Football Association opposing professionalism, Woolwich Arsenal had joined the Football League – which meant that every away game meant a trip to Wolverhampton and cities beyond.
Attempts at founding amateur leagues in the south, to see off Arsenal’s professional approach foundered, and Arsenal continued to battle on as the only professional team in the south of the country.
It would appear from incidental comments that the Football League appreciated Arsenal’s valiance, and although Woolwich Arsenal was not based in central London, the players and directors of northern clubs appreciated their once a year trip to London to play Arsenal, and (in some cases according to incidental commentaries) partake of a post-match early evening in the West End, which was somewhat more well-known for the notorious licentiousness of those who habituated the area than anything else.
Thus rather than northern clubs resenting the long trip to London for the Arsenal away game, they found their players actually welcomed the event because of the after-match “activities”. As a result Arsenal battled on as the Football League’s only professional club in the south. Woolwich Arsenal undoubtedly would have welcome one or two other London clubs in the second division, for the sake of few local derbies, but they had made their decision to go with the Football League rather than a regional league, and they knew that was appreciated.
