Football on Christmas Day in England disappeared from the sporting calendar in 1959, when Blackburn beat Blackpool 1-0 at home in the old first division and Coventry beat Wrexham 5-3 in the third. But the tradition did well to survive that long given the events at one of the earliest matches played on Christmas Day.
Let the Knowledge take you back to the Christmas of 1890. All the horrors and wonders of the 20th century were a distant dot in the future, Vicent van Gogh was not six months gone and Blackburn Rovers, in their first season at Ewood Park, were preparing for the Christmas Day visit of their most local of rivals, the once mighty Darwen.
The problem, though, was that Rovers had an even bigger game against Wolverhampton Wanderers on Boxing Day. The late great Frank Keating takes up the tale:
As they then had to travel first thing on Boxing Day to Wolverhampton to play the more dangerous Wanderers, Rovers picked only three first-teamers for Christmas morning against their now lowly neighbours. It was Rovers’ first proud season at custom-built Ewood Park - and as soon as the eight reserves ran out the crowd, doubtless fired by some festive brew, took umbrage at being short changed. The more so when Darwen, slighted, said they’d field their 2nd Xl too - at which some 3,000, ‘combining from each allegiance’, stormed the pitch, dismantled both goalposts and tore up the brand new carpeting in the VIP seats. ‘The hat of a Rovers’ official was knocked off and a dressing-room window also broken,’ reported the outraged Manchester Guardian.
The police managed to calm the situation but not enough to get the match on.
WHEN SECRET SANTA GOES WRONG
What do footballers get each other at Christmas?” wonders Kris K.
New socks, smellies, book tokens, the usual stuff we reckon, Chris. In 1998, though, Newcastle United’s players took Christmas as an opportunity to tell the other members of the squad what they really thought of them. The Italian full-back Alessandro Pistone was given a sheep’s heart, as a sign of his perceived lack of commitment.
“I’m sure it was a joke,” he told the Sunday Times in 1999. “The others had some really funny presents too: Temuri Ketsbaia [who is bald] got a hairbrush and Duncan Ferguson a prison shirt [Ferguson had served a three-month jail sentence in 1995 after his headbutt on Raith Rovers’ Jock McStay].”
“Alessandro took his gift surprisingly well,” said Rob Lee at the time. Quite what Dietmar Hamann made of his present remains unknown. The German - brace yourselves folks - unwrapped a copy of Mein Kampf.
KNOWLEDGE ARCHIVE: DID LAPLAND REALLY WIN THE WORLD CUP?
As every child knows, Father Christmas lives in Lapland, surrounded by magical elves (a bit like Sergio Busquets does at Barcelona). Less well-known is the story of Lapland’s World Cup triumph.
In 2003 the Nouvelle Fédération-Board was set up as the governing body of those regions, stateless peoples and unrecognised nations not permitted to join Fifa. Monaco, Occitania (comprising chunks of southern France, the Alps and Catalonia), and, yes, Lapland (or, more accurately, Sapmi) were among the founder members. Others – including the principality of Sealand, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Iraqi Kurdistan and a side representing the Aramean-Syriac people – have since joined their number.
The first World Cup organised by the NFB took place in 2006 and was scheduled to feature eight teams, but the path to the tournament was not a smooth one. After being stripped of the rights to host the event the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus set up a breakaway tournament to take place at the same time. The eight became six – West Papua, the Roma, Sapmi, Monaco, Occitania, the host nation, and Southern Cameroons. The Papuans, though, failed to show up for the 2006 General Assembly, and the Roma were, understandably, hampered by logisitical problems, so the final line-up featured just four teams. On the eve of the competition, visa problems meant the Cameroonians were refused entry to France, leaving the number of participants reduced to three.
Sapmi, boasting a side filled with professionals from the Norwegian league, waltzed through the group stage, beating Occitania 7-0 and hammering Monaco 14-0. Somehow, though, the principality secured a place in the final with a 3-2 win over the Occitanians. To say the final at Stade Perruc on 24 November was a one-sided affair would be something of an understatement – Sapmi ran out 21-1 winners, with three players scoring hat-tricks. You can be sure the memory of the triumph kept jolly old Saint Nick warm on his deliveries a month later.
One of the hat-trick scorers, Tom Hogli, has since gone on to win 23 caps for Norway, but his former national side have since failed to repeat their success – in 2008 they finished third (although the women’s side did seal their inaugural title) and were third again in 2009 as Padania, helped by the former Internazionale striker Maurizio Ganz, took the crown for the second time.
KNOWLEDGE ARCHIVE: THE TRUCE MATCH
“Did the Christmas football matches between British and German troops in the First World War trenches really take place?” wondered a sceptical Sandy Brook in 2012.
As you imply in your question, Sandy, most folk raise an eyebrow nowadays at the thought of Tommy and Jerry getting together for a spot of festive soccer on a patch of no-man’s land so churned it made the Baseball Ground circa 1972 look like the gardens of Tresco. It seems highly improbable, especially to modern minds conditioned by social media, that petty grudges could be set aside in the name of peace and goodwill to all men. But some contemporary reports suggest that’s exactly what happened on Christmas Day 1914.
To borrow (and then misuse) one of the oldest football zingers in the book: in the middle of a fight, a football match broke out. A report in the Guardian on Boxing Day 1914 described how in one region “every acre of meadow under any sort of cover in the rear of the lines was taken possession of for football”. In their letters home, British soldiers told of shaking hands with their German counterparts and swapping cigarettes. A Scottish brigadier described how the Germans “came out of their trenches and walked across unarmed, with boxes of cigars and seasonable remarks. What were our men to do? Shoot? You could not shoot unarmed men.”
While there was undoubtedly continued gunfire along many sections of the front, most soldiers appear to have laid down their arms and called an unofficial truce that day, with fußball uppermost in the minds of many. A letter published on New Year’s Day from a British officer reads: “I hear our fellows played the Germans at football on Christmas Day. Our own pet enemies remarked they would like a game, but as the ground in our part is all root crops and much cut up by ditches, and as, moreover, we had not got a football, we had to call it off.” A letter in the Times, meanwhile, from a major reported that a German regiment “had a football match with the Saxons [regiment], who beat them 3-2”.
One match appears to have started between the Germans and a regiment from Cheshire, one of whom years later explained how a ball suddenly came hurtling over the top from the German side. “I should think there were about a couple of hundred taking part. I had a go at the ball. I was pretty good then, at 19. Everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves. There was no sort of ill-will between us. There was no referee, and no score, no tally at all. It was simply a melee – nothing like the soccer you see on television.”
Nevertheless, the young men were organised enough to arrange a festive feast of a hare for the winners. “The grey-tunicked Germans the one side, and the kilted Jocks the other. The game was won by the Germans, who captured the prize. But more was secured than a hare. A sudden friendship had been struck up, the truce of God had been called, and for the rest of Christmas Day not a shot was fired along our section.”
Amid the atrocities of the Great War, then, came a great moment for humanity, love and mutual understanding. One that has fortunately survived as a lesson for us all, even if the details are sketchy, down the ages – albeit with the unfortunate side effect of reminding a blighted generation from the 1980s of Paul McCartney’s ear-bothering No1 hit single, Pipes of Peace.
KNOWLEDGE ARCHIVE: PUTTING A DOWNER ON THE PUDDING
“Has any club ever been cruel enough to give their manager the boot on Christmas Day?” wondered Simon Briggs back in the day.
Heartless as it sounds, Simon, a club has been known to sack its manager on Jesus’s birthday, and they were even brave enough to ruin the festivities for one José Mário dos Santos Mourinho Félix. “I was nine or 10 years old and my father [Félix] was sacked on Christmas Day,” recalled the Chelsea manager, during an interview back in 2004. “He was a manager, the results had not been good, he lost a game on December 22 or 23. On Christmas Day, the telephone rang and he was sacked in the middle of our lunch. So I know all about the ups and downs of football, I know that one day I will be sacked.”
Explore our previous Christmas specials in the Knowledge archive, including: Which football teams appear in the Bible? What happens when football’s Christmas parties turn bad? And who were the first team to use the Christmas tree formation?
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