Football History

Glasgow has a strong claim to be one of the birthplaces of modern football. Queen’s Park, founded in 1867, is the oldest association football club in Scotland, and its players made up the Scotland side for the world’s first official international, a goalless draw with England at Hamilton Crescent in Partick on 30 November 1872. The origins of football in Glasgow covers those early years, when Scottish players developed the passing game that spread around the world.

The city’s two great clubs were founded within fifteen years of each other. Rangers began in 1872, after a group of young rowers discussed forming a club on a walk through West End Park, now Kelvingrove Park. Celtic was founded in the East End in 1887 to relieve poverty among the city’s Irish community. Their rivalry, the Old Firm, became one of the most intense in world sport, with all the religious and political tensions that came with it; the football riots of 1909 and 1980 are part of that story.

Hampden Park, home of Queen’s Park and of the national team, was for decades the largest stadium in the world. Its record crowd of 149,415, for Scotland against England in 1937, is still a European record. Hampden has staged many European finals, among them the 1960 European Cup final in which Real Madrid beat Eintracht Frankfurt 7-3, often called the greatest match ever played.

Glasgow football is not only the Old Firm. Partick Thistle, formed in 1876, and Clyde have long histories of their own, and Third Lanark, which folded in 1967, is still remembered. On the European stage, Celtic became the first British club to win the European Cup in 1967, and Rangers won the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1972.