The pioneer of soccer in America turns 155

In a bar in Buenos Aires, Santiago Hogg, a customer who does not attract the attention of the rest of the diners, shows a photo of his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Hogg, an Englishman born in England in 1843 and living in Argentina in 1860. In the image Engraved on paper that has already yellowed, you can see a

of the time dressed in a dark beret, a shirt with a collar and matching bow tie, long pants and light shoes that cover all of his skin except for his face and hands.

A 47-year-old publicist and real estate

, Santiago professes so much disinterest in current soccer that he stumbles when he tries to mention two players from the national team that will participate in the World Cup in Qatar.

“Messi and Agüero”, he says, without noticing that the

He left the activity due to a heart problem last December.

Although he is anonymous for the crowds and for the sports industry, the fans of the Argentine teams and the rest of the continent should still give him a pat of thanks or directly treat him for what he is: the great-great-grandson of the man who this Monday, 155 years ago years, he founded the first soccer club in Latin America.

The germ of River, Boca, Flamengo, Colo Colo, Universidad de Chile, Peñarol, the Nacional of Montevideo and Medellín and the América of Mexico or Cali, among thousands of institutions that mark the emotional pulse of tens of millions of people from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande, began with the grandfather of Santiago's grandfather.

The first step that the most popular sport took to become what it has been for decades in America was taken on May 9, 1867 in a pension in the Argentine capital where young people born in the north of England lived.

On a street whose name would change over time, then called Temple and today Viamonte, Thomas Hogg and four other Britons between the ages of 21 and 29 founded the Buenos Ayres Football Club.

The meeting had been anticipated three days ago, on May 6, in

, the journalistic reference of the English community in Argentina, under the title “Foot Ball”.

“A preliminary meeting will be held next Thursday night, at No. 46, Temple Street, for the purpose of drawing up rules and regulations for football matches to be played on the cricket ground during the winter.

The assistance of all interested persons is requested,” the text said.

Thomas Hogg, the creator of the first soccer club in America in 1867 COURTESY

Although they were always linked to the railways, the Argentine historian Víctor Raffo confirmed in his book

that the pioneers who arrived from the United Kingdom worked in banks and shops.

One of Thomas's brothers, James, and three other Britons living in Buenos Aires also participated in the birth of the first club: Walter Heald, Thomas Jackson and Thomas Barlow Smith.

But Thomas Hogg (who would also participate in the first soccer game in America, the following month) would remain the maximum reference of the precursors.

Actually, the great passion of Hogg and the rest of the football pioneers was cricket, to the point that they were part of a club that was the predecessor of the Buenos Ayres Football Club, called -without much imagination- Buenos Ayres Cricket Club and founded three years ago , in 1864. The first Hogg to arrive in Argentina, in fact, had been the father of Thomas and James, also called Thomas.

According to the sociologist Pablo Alabarces in the book

, “Thomas Hogg arrived with General William Carr Beresford in the first English invasion of Buenos Aires, in 1806, and settled in the Argentine capital.

Mr. Hogg founded, over the years, a British trade association, a library, a college and a cricket club in 1819, as well as a family.

His children were born in Leeds, but later, like their father, they settled in Argentina.

“Thomas worked at the Bank of London and Río de la Plata and was a great fan of sports: sailing, athletics, swimming and especially cricket;

but at one point he also bet on soccer, ”says Santiago Hogg, the great-great-grandson of who could be called the founder of soccer in America.

And he adds, in days when Argentine football enters the final phases of the 2022 League Cup: "My grandfather's grandfather belonged to a wealthy class and studied at a London university, but he believed that football could have great value to the people.

An “easy and cheap” hobby

Seven months after the birth of the Buenos Ayres Football Club, in December 1867, Thomas Hogg would write a letter to

newspaper .

“In my opinion, this game will take a long time to spread even among British residents, but I intend to insist, because I consider it the best, easiest and cheapest pastime for the youth of the middle class, as well as for the people.

My great love is cricket, but I am neglecting it for the sake of soccer," Hogg wrote in a text revealed by journalist Oscar Barnade for the Mexican weekly

, in 2014.

The brothers Hogg, Heald, Jackson and Barlow Smith decided that the members of the Buenos Aires Football Club should pay 30 pesos to join the institution and that, to play the new sport, they would adopt the rules of the brand new English Association with "some slight modifications”, although which ones were not documented.

Soccer was a diffuse game that was confused with rugby: just four years ago, in 1863, in a Masonic tavern in London the first rules of the new sport had been drawn up.

What rival does a team play against when it is the only one in the country and the continent?

"They played a game with each other," answers Santiago Hogg, while he extracts more photos and documents of his ancestors from a bag cared for like a family treasure.

In one of these images, Thomas Hogg appears accompanied by other

, although Santiago cannot specify whether it is the first soccer team in the country -and the continent- or a cricket formation.

"The red beret is because the teams were differentiated by the color of their hats, not their jerseys," he explains.

Santiago Casaval, great-great-grandson of Thomas Hogg, in an interview with EL PAÍS.Guadalupe Aizaga

The Standard

announced the first football match in its edition of June 20, 1867 and many onlookers approached the sports arena, although due to the sense of ridicule implied by such unusual clothing for the time, only two teams of eight could be formed. players per side.

Barely 42 days had passed since the founding of the club, on May 9.

“My great-great-grandfather was the captain of the team that wore a red beret and that won the first game, 4-0,” says Santiago Hogg.

In the absence of a name in the teams, but with different colors -red berets on one side and white on the other-, one was captained by Hogg and the other by Walter Heald, another of the founders of the Buenos Aires Football Club.

Of those 16 players -among which 15 British surnames appear and William Boschetti, a mestizo born in the Caribbean, in Saint Lucia-, the current generation of the Hoggs maintains a relationship with the descendants of another of the pioneers, Willliam Forrester.

“It is a pride of our family: my great-great-grandfather came from England in 1863 and scored the first goal in that match, the first in Argentina.

It was not easy to play football at that time.

There were no changing rooms and the players would change secretly.

Sometimes the police persecuted them or they ended up in jail.

Later our family would have more ties to rugby but not to football”, points out Roberto Forrester, doctor and great-great-grandson of other footballers in the first game.

TheStandard

He would also publish the comment of that pioneering match (it is possible that some years before there had been some rallies in the port of Buenos Aires between crew members of English ships, but they are not documented nor were they part of Buenos Aires residents): “The club opened its season with a spirited fight between armed teams on the field.

It was very difficult to find a suitable venue for the match and a request had to be made to the cricket club for their committee to authorize play on their ground in Palermo, which the football club thanked.

There were not as many players as had been expected, because many of those who had promised to join the match preferred to see how this first match unfolded.

The game started at 12:30 and fortune declared itself in favor of Mr. Hogg's team 4-0″.

With the feet and with the hands

With the separation of the regulation still diffuse between football and rugby, what is not clear is what was played in that founding match: the ball only with the feet or also with the hands?

The current football, as it is known, would definitively begin to be practiced in England five years later, in 1872, so it is likely that that original experiment of those intrepid boys - "the rules of the English Association with slight modifications" - has been a mixture of both games.

The Buenos Ayres Football Club would have an ephemeral life, in keeping with the volatility of football: in the rest of 1867 only a couple more games would be played and there is no record of much activity in the following years.

But it was still enough to set up the first soccer rivalry in America.

Thus, at least, it follows from the book

, by Ernesto Escobar Bavio: "One of the causes that undoubtedly influenced the most in the establishment of this sport was the rivalry created between the side of Thomas Hogg and that of Walter Heald , whose captains had partisan numbers”.

In other words, in the absence of more than one team, the fans took part for the best players, both founders of the Buenos Ayres Football Club.

But the yellow plague that would devastate the Argentine capital in 1871 - between February and June of that year, the epidemic killed thousands and altered many social habits, such as the recent coronavirus - would be another barrier to the development of soccer.

In between, between 1870 and April 25, 1873, the club interrupted its activity until it was re-founded with the same name and chaired by the ineffable Thomas Hogg.

According to Raffo's research, the Buenos Ayres Football Club would play a few more games until 1881, when it disappeared for good.

A note on the first soccer club in America in 1867. Guadalupe Aizaga

In another book,

, the Uruguayan-English journalist Andreas Campomar reconstructs that football also fought against the disqualification of the press after some violent matches.

“

took a stand against it and its rival,

, came to its defense: 'Football is a fundamental sport, as all Britons know, and our friends at

attack it and think it's impossible play without getting hit in the shin or in the eye'”, published Campomar.

“My great-great-grandfather would never stop being a

and he innovated with other activities unknown in Argentina, such as horse riding.

In the bank where he worked, he became deputy manager, but his performance at the beginning of football would mark him forever, ”says Santiago Hogg.

Before or after that 1867, his great-great-grandparents Thomas and James would also be pioneers of the first athletics, squash, golf, rugby and tennis activities in the country.

Alumni, the first champion

Football in Argentina would have a second and now definitive beginning in the following decade, with the arrival in 1882 of another Briton, the Scotsman Alexander Watson Hutton, founder of the Alumni club first -the first great national champion- and of the AFA later, in 1893, and as such considered the father of football in Argentina, perhaps an unfair neglect for Hogg.

After the formation of new clubs and the first official championship played in 1891, River, Boca and the vast majority of the 3,500 teams that today make up Argentine football were founded at the turn of the century.

In

, Campomar states that the first soccer game in Brazil was played in 1872 and that in Chile it was in 1880, while the first club in Uruguay, the Foot Ball Asoscoiaton, was founded in 1891. In turn, in

, Alabarces collects that in 1892 it was played for the first time in Peru and that the same year the first regulation was transcribed in Colombia.

In addition, in Bolivia there is evidence of the Oruro Royal Football Club since 1896 and in Ecuador, the Sport Club de Guayaquil since 1899, while the first tournament in Mexico was played in 1902 with the presence of five teams.

"We don't know what happened in the United States or Canada, but it is valid to say that the Buenos Ayres Football Club was the first football club in Latin America," says Barnade, a member of the Center for Research in the History of Football (CIHF).

On the cover of

, a book published in 1953, two men with beards and suits appear in two black and white photos.

One is Watson Hutton, the father of the AFA, and the other is Hogg, called "the pioneer of the game" in Argentina and America.

His great-great-grandson, Santiago, collects Thomas's photos and puts them back in the family envelope he brought them to the bar in.

"It's our pride," says this man so far away from football and yet with his origins in his blood.

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