Note: this series serves as an introduction to Arsenal’s great achievement of 100 consecutive years in the top division of the Football League. You can find an index to that series (which is now complete) on this website here. This series follows on from …
Why Arsenal joned the Football League rather than the Southern League
… and you can follow the series on from that article. We do occasionally slip in one or two other articles which are not part of the main series – but for the most part you will find the articles run one after the other.
So now back to our current sequence. We are looking at 1903/4 – the promotion season..
By Tony Attwood
And so, as we have seen, after 11 consecutive years in the Football League Division Two, Woolwich Arsenal had finally managed to gain promotion for the Football League Division One, by coming runners up in Division Two in 1903/4.
And what we can particularly note is that Arsenal’s emphasis on goal scoring paid off – they scored 29 more goals than Preston who won the league, but that goal scoring didn’t translate totally into more points. In short it appears that by Christmas other clubs in the league had started to adopt a tactic, that spread from club to club, of simply doing anything to stop Arsenal scoring. For from Boxing Day onward Arsenal played ten matches in which they failed to score – an extraordinary statistic for a club knocking in 91 goals in 34 games overall. The word had spread (aided of course by the newspapers): put all the effort into stopping them scoring. And that’s what clubs did.
Indeed in four of the last seven games in the League season Arsenal failed to score a single goal. The word had clearly spread, and Arsenal found themselves playing against teams that were simply defences.
And although that tactic had some impact on Arsenal’s progress, it wasn’t enough, and the club finished in the second of the two promotional places. For the first time ever, an Arsenal team would play in Football League Division One. All those years of being the only professional team in the south, and the only Football League team in the south, had finally paid off. London at last had a first division club.
Now although that might seem a bit of a fanciful way of reporting Arsenal’s success, it should be noted that the League clubs did not forget what Arsenal had done, resolutely refusing to join regional leagues as club like Tottenham Hotspur had done. Woolwich Arsenal had singlehandedly made the Football League a competition for the whole country, and that sacrifice was not going to be forgotten. They had opened the gateway to a professional football league which covered the entire country.
Here’s the final table for 1903/4 The top two clubs were promoted.
| Pos | P | W | D | L | F | A | Pts | |
| 1 | Preston North End | 34 | 20 | 10 | 4 | 62 | 24 | 50 |
| 2 | Woolwich Arsenal | 34 | 21 | 7 | 6 | 91 | 22 | 49 |
| 3 | Manchester United | 34 | 20 | 8 | 6 | 65 | 33 | 48 |
| 4 | Bristol City | 34 | 18 | 6 | 10 | 73 | 41 | 42 |
| 5 | Burnley | 34 | 15 | 9 | 10 | 50 | 55 | 39 |
| 6 | Grimsby Town | 34 | 14 | 8 | 12 | 50 | 49 | 36 |
| 7 | Bolton Wanderers | 34 | 12 | 10 | 12 | 59 | 41 | 34 |
| 8 | Barnsley | 34 | 11 | 10 | 13 | 38 | 57 | 32 |
| 9 | Gainsborough Trinity | 34 | 14 | 3 | 17 | 53 | 60 | 31 |
| 10 | Bradford City | 34 | 12 | 7 | 15 | 45 | 59 | 31 |
| 11 | Chesterfield Town | 34 | 11 | 8 | 15 | 37 | 45 | 30 |
| 12 | Lincoln City | 34 | 11 | 8 | 15 | 41 | 58 | 30 |
| 13 | Burslem Port Vale | 34 | 10 | 9 | 15 | 54 | 52 | 29 |
| 14 | Burton United | 34 | 11 | 7 | 16 | 45 | 61 | 29 |
| 15 | Blackpool | 34 | 11 | 5 | 18 | 40 | 67 | 27 |
| 16 | Stockport County | 34 | 8 | 11 | 15 | 40 | 72 | 27 |
| 17 | Glossop | 34 | 10 | 6 | 18 | 57 | 64 | 26 |
| 18 | Leicester Fosse | 34 | 6 | 10 | 18 | 42 | 82 | 22 |
So there we had the top scoring team in the league and the best defence in the league, combined in terms of one club. So it is not surprising that commentators noted that the rest of the league were playing tactically against them. Of course other second division teams didn’t particularly mind if Arsenal went up to the first division – what they were after was a point – and if that meant 11 behind the ball for 90 minutes, that is what they would deliver.
Perhaps this helped Arsenal a little, since the club did finish the league season with the best defence and the best attack in the league. Indeed, the season’s start of eight consecutive wins meant that the club stayed in the promotion places through every week of the season except one.
There was also one other, perhaps smaller but still noteworthy, change. Arsenal made it to the second round of the FA Cup. Which might not sound too amazing but it was the first time this had happened. The club then went out to Manchester City who in fact won the trophy.
And yet despite all of this – the goals, clearly outplaying other teams in the league, and so on, half way through the season the manager, Harry Bradshaw, who had been with the club from 1899, resigned. And this needs mentioning because in his era the club had finished 8th, 7th, 4th, 3rd and now in this season, second – thus getting promotion.
In fact he resigned at Christmas saying that he could no longer work with this board of directors. And allow me to repeat the obvious fact – this was the best Woolwich Arsenal team ever.
In the end the manager stayed on until Phil Kelso took over the role and thus had the honour of seeing the club through its final games to secure promotion. And I think it is also worth noting the crowd reaction when the promotion was achieved on 25 April 1904 – it was the last game of the season, and the crowd was 28,000. Which might not sound much today, but in terms of Woolwich Arsenal, it really was an all time record.
The directors gave gold medals to the regular team members, the manager, the previous manager and the trainer. Arsenal’s goal tally of 91 goals in 34 games was not a record, as a change in the off side law had made high scoring more commonplace – but still it was noted as exceptional.
Also emerging in this team was Percy Sands who had only just joined the club as an amatuer, becoming a professional in 1906. He was the longest serving captain of the club – until overtaken by Tony Adams. He was, sadly, the captain when Arsenal were relegated in 1913, but more happily he can be remembered as the first captain of Arsenal to walk onto the pitch at Highbury on 6 September 1913 in a game against Leicester Fosse. During the war he served his country with honour in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
And thus it was that Arsenal were promoted on 25 April 1904 after a goalless draw against Burton Port Vale in front of a crowd estimated at 20,00. Of course that promotion made no difference to their wholesale travelling for league games – League Division One, like the league Arsenal had just come from, had no other London clubs within it. But it became apparent to the 17 other clubs in League Division One that having Arsenal in their league did mean an annual trip to London. And that, as noted before (and I will touch on again later in this series) was something that players, and even directors, looked forward to with a certain amount of what we might call “interest”.
As for the finances, the home crowds which had varied between 10,000 to 20,000 (in contract to crowds which could be as low as 4,000 in some away games) now could regularly hit 25,000 for home matches. As for away games these were of course variable but 40,000 was reported as the crowd for the Aston Villa away game on Boxing Day 1904, and 25,000 plus was common through the season.
Arsenal now truly were in a different league and a lot of clubs were going to have to get the maps out to find out exactly where Woolwich Arsenal played. It was, after all, not Woolwich.
