There are apocryphal tales of British sailors playing football on the wharves of Rio, and slaves and dockworkers attempting to mimic the magnetic ball game that had been played by the visitors, but the record points to the role of one man in starting a craze that is now over a century old: Brazilian football.
Charles Miller was born in São Paulo in 1874, son of a Scottish railway engineer and an Anglo-Brazilian mother, themselves part of a growing community of Britons in Brazil owning coffee plantations, running banks and utilities and building railways. Sent back to England for his education at Bannister Court near Hampshire, he got the sports bug delighting in cricket and playing football for his for school and county.
He returned to Santos in 1894 with two leather footballs and a copy of the rules of the game. Recalling the moment many years later, he knew that his father was expecting a degree certificate but instead he offered him the balls and said “My degree … Yes your son has graduated in football”.
Initial efforts to persuade the cricketers of the São Paulo Athletic Club to give the game a try were rebuffed. Undaunted Miller gathered a selection of British enthusiasts on a patch of scrubby grassland east of the city centre where the mules that pulled the city teams were left to graze. He organised them into a Gas Team and the São Paulo Railways team and they played the first recorded game of football in Brazil.
Within five years, with Miller as chief organiser and referee, São Paulo would have its own football league, with six clubs drawn from the among the sons of Brazilian plantation owners and the city’s elite American and German colleges.
But Miller had started something that could not be confined to the rich. In Brazil the ball was spreading rapidly to the feet of the poor. Reporting back to his old school magazine on the new football scene in São Paulo he wrote:
“You will be surprised to hear that football is the game here. We have no less than sixty or seventy clubs. A week ago I was asked to referee a match of small boys, twenty a side, I told them that it was absurd to lay twenty a side but they wanted it. I thought the whole thing would be a muddle but I found I was very much mistaken. They played two-and-half hours and I only had to give two hands [warning for foul play] … even for this match 1,500 people turned up. No less than 2,000 footballs have been sold here within the last month: nearly every village has a club now.”
Miller, settling in to his business life, played his last game a few years later and would then retire from football administration altogether. The age of gentlemanly football would soon go with him, but he had started something extraordinary: it would take Brazil’s urban poor, white, Mestizo and black, who were flocking to the game, to finish the job.
Other Britons who brought football to South America
Alexander Watson Hutton
Watson Hutton was a Scottish teacher and sporting fanatic who found the elite Buenos Aires English High School at a time when almost a quarter of the city’s population were Anglophone. He made football a central element of the curriculum and by 1891 there were enough active footballers for him to establish the Argentinean Association Football League still considered to be the first national competition by the Argentinean FA.
William Leslie Poole
Known as the “father of Uruguayan football”, Poole was another teacher from Scotland who graduated from Cambridge and took a job at the English High School in Montevideo. A huge enthusiast for school sports he and his students founded Albion Cricket Club in 1891 and added a football section in 1893, the country’s first. He would go on to play for Uruguay, referee internationals, found the national football league and serve as president of the Uruguayan Association Football League.
Sir Thomas Lipton
Sir Thomas Lipton, the global tea magnate and keen sportsman, was so delighted by the intensity of football on the Rio Plata that in 1905 he donated a cup to be awarded to the winner of an annual match between Uruguay and Argentina.
English Names in South American football
A glance at the league tables of South America show how deep the British influence went. Argentina’s top flight includes, Newell’s Old Boys, River Plate and Arsenal; Bolivia’s includes Always Ready and The Strongest. In Chile, Everton play in the city of Vina Del Mar, while in Uruguay, Liverpool play in Montevideo.
On Tour
Latin America saw some of the earliest foreign tours by British football clubs. In the years before the First World War visitors included Southampton (1904), Nottingham Forest (1905) Everton and Tottenham Hotspur (1909) Corinthians (1910 and 1913) Swindon Town (1912) and Exeter City (1914). Southampton were accorded the honour of playing before General Julio Roca, president of the Argentine Republic.
Moments in history: CONMEBOL and the Copa America
Nearly forty years before UEFA was founded, South America created its own football federation CONMEBOL. It was the brainchild of Hector Rivadavia Gomez, a Uruguayan parliamentarian and head of the Montevideo football league. It held its first championships – the Copa America – in 1916. Sadly the massive overcrowding that occurred at the first final in Buenos Aires saw the crowd protest and burn the stadium down.
Famous for a reason
Charlie Miller didn’t seek fame, it found him because of his passion for football. The Famous Grouse’s reputation is also built upon being Famous for a Reason. Created in 1896, the founder Matthew Gloag didn’t want to be famous, he simply wanted to create the best whisky he could possibly make so he created The Grouse Brand. It soon became so popular that it was re-named The Famous Grouse. Renowned for quality, craftsmanship and exceptional taste, The Famous Grouse is available in four expressions including the smooth The Famous Grouse Mellow Gold and the distinctive The Famous Grouse Smoky Black.
Please enjoy The Famous Grouse whisky responsibly.
