How, when and where was Sunderland AFC formed and why it wasn’t in October 1879 at The British Day School.
1880/81 — The Birth of Sunderland AFC
For more than a century, Sunderland AFC’s formation has been placed in October 1879. It is the year carried by the club, repeated in books and articles and accepted by generations of supporters. Yet no contemporary evidence has ever been produced to show that Sunderland AFC—or any organisation from which it developed—existed at any point during 1879.
What follows is not an attempt to alter the club’s history. Quite the opposite. It is an attempt to restore Sunderland AFC’s original, evidence-based founding story: the story recorded in the newspapers when the events actually took place.
It was later writers who altered that story. The first error was made by a journalist in December 1887, seven years after the club had been formed. Other details were subsequently added to make the incorrect year appear more convincing. The more often the revised account was repeated, the more firmly it became embedded. Eventually, people forgot that none of it had appeared in 1879.
The genuine founding story survived undisturbed for only seven years. The mistaken version has been in circulation since December 1887.
It is high time the original story was restored.
Before Sunderland AFC
Football had been played on Wearside long before Sunderland AFC existed, although these earlier activities bore little resemblance to an organised association football club.
The earliest reference I have found dates from January 1667, when the burial register at Bishopwearmouth recorded that Richard Walker of Sunderland had been “killed at football”. Nothing more is known about his death. The game he played would have been a rough, largely unregulated affair involving some combination of kicking, carrying and physical confrontation.
During the 1850s, Irish labourers employed in the construction of Sunderland’s docks played another form of football. Reports described as many as 300 men taking part, some showing considerable ability in running, dribbling and long kicking. The games could last for hours and often ended in fighting.
Neither Richard Walker’s fatal game nor the contests played by the Irish labourers founded Sunderland AFC. They merely show that various forms of football had existed locally before the modern game arrived.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, organised football in Sunderland meant rugby. Clubs such as Sunderland Rugby Football Club and Sunderland Rovers received regular newspaper coverage. Association football—the round-ball code from which the modern game developed—had not yet established itself in the town.
That distinction is essential. People kicking or carrying a ball did not constitute an association football club. A club required an identifiable organisation: members, officials, rules, a name, a ground, opponents and the intention to arrange matches. None of those things can be connected to Sunderland association football before September 1880.
James Allan arrives
The man who changed that was James Allan.
Allan was born in Ayr on 9 October 1857, the son of William Allan, a shoemaker, and his wife Hellen. He trained at the Glasgow Church of Scotland Training College, passing its entrance examination at Christmas 1875 and completing his two-year course in 1877.
He is often described as a Glasgow University graduate, but the records tell a more complicated story. Allan attended university summer courses in medicine and botany, but there is no evidence that he was a full-time student or that he graduated. His principal qualification was as a teacher.
In April 1879, the Sunderland School Board appointed him second assistant master at Hendon Boys’ School. He was twenty-one years old, newly arrived from Scotland and earning £60 a year, rising eventually to £90.
Scotland possessed the most advanced football culture in Britain. Queen’s Park and other Scottish clubs had developed a passing and combination game that frequently exposed the limitations of English opposition. Allan therefore arrived with knowledge of a sport that was largely unknown in Sunderland.
There is no doubt that he became the central figure in introducing association football to the town. What is not supported by the evidence is the claim that he founded Sunderland AFC within six months of arriving.
Allan was beginning a new career in an unfamiliar industrial town. He had to establish himself professionally, find accommodation, form friendships and settle into life on Wearside. It is possible that he talked about football or demonstrated aspects of the game to friends and pupils. What cannot be shown is that he formed a football club in 1879 and ask yourself if, at that time, you think forming a football club would be a priority for Allan?
There is no contemporary evidence that he or anyone else was even kicking an association football around Sunderland during that year.
No evidence of a 1879 kickabout
The traditional account has become more elastic as the absence of evidence for a football club in 1879 has been exposed. The argument has sometimes shifted away from a definite founding meeting towards a looser suggestion that Allan and his colleagues may have begun by kicking a ball around “somewhere in Sunderland”?
That suggestion is also unproven.
No contemporary newspaper reported such activity. No school logbook mentioned it. No letter, diary or minute survives. We have no date, no names, no result and no description written at the time. The supposed kickabout is a retrospective possibility, not a historical event supported by evidence.
Even if it had happened, it would not have formed Sunderland AFC. Friends having an informal game in a schoolyard, lane or field do not thereby create a football club. Without members, officers, a name, rules, a ground or fixtures, there is no organisation whose continuous existence can be followed.
Building the foundation of Sunderland AFC upon a wholly unrecorded kickabout, and then attaching a precise date to it, would be one of the most tenuous founding claims associated with any major association football club.
The surviving testimony points in the opposite direction. Walter Chappell reportedly admitted that he knew nothing about the game when Allan asked for his support. Allan’s 1911 obituary stated that, with the exception of Allan, the friends he recruited were “unacquainted with the mysteries of the Association code”.
These were not experienced footballers who had been operating a club for the previous year. They were men being introduced to a game that was new to them.
The Teachers’ Association
The Sunderland and District Teachers’ Association existed before Allan arrived. Its members were schoolmasters who met to discuss educational standards, attendance, professional representation and other matters affecting teachers.
On Saturday 13 September 1879, the association held a quarterly meeting at King Street School. The Sunderland Daily Echo reported upon it two days later. Attendance at local schools had fallen to approximately 55 per cent, and seven new members were admitted. Allan, recently appointed at Hendon, was probably among them.
Football was not mentioned.
The association met again on 13 March 1880. Sport briefly appeared in the proceedings, but the subject was the approaching Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. There was still no football club, no proposal to create one and no indication that association football was being played by the teachers.
These meetings matter because the traditional account claims that members of this same organisation had formed a football club in October 1879. If that were true, why was it not mentioned in March 1880? Why did an association supposedly responsible for establishing Sunderland AFC discuss education and rowing but say nothing about its own football club?
The Hendon Board School records are equally silent. They refer to ordinary matters of school life: staff, attendance, family hardship and pupils arriving late because a circus was visiting the town. They contain no reference to a football club being created.
The local press was not indifferent to sport. Rugby received extensive coverage, as did cricket, athletics, races and public meetings. Yet throughout the whole of 1879 and the first part of 1880, not a single contemporary report has been found of association football being played in Sunderland.
The silence before September 1880 is not simply an unfortunate gap in the evidence. It is itself part of the evidence.
The developing game in the North East
Association football remained a minority sport across the North East during 1879. Middlesbrough, formed in 1876, was the oldest of the region’s surviving senior clubs. Newcastle possessed only a small number of association teams, including Tyne and Rangers.
On 1 November 1879, Tyne hosted Blackburn Rovers in the FA Cup. It was the first FA Cup tie played on Tyneside, although the newspapers gave it only limited attention.
A more significant occasion followed on 2 January 1880, when a Tyne and District side met the touring Scotch Canadians at the Northumberland Cricket Ground. The visitors contained six Scottish internationals, including Queen’s Park centre-forward George Ker, one of the finest players of the period.
Approximately 2,000 people attended. The Scots displayed a level of skill and movement rarely seen in the region and won 5–1. Their ability to use their feet, heads and bodies without handling the ball impressed local observers. Several rugby players in the home side instinctively forgot themselves and used their hands.
Afterwards, Alfred Harrison of Tyne wrote to the press encouraging young men to take up association football. He listed the known clubs in Northumberland and Durham: Tyne, Rangers, Corbridge, Burnopfield and North Eastern Railway. He invited any others to contact him.
Sunderland was not mentioned.
On 23 January 1880, the Northumberland and Durham Football Association was formed at the Turks Head Hotel in Newcastle. Six clubs enrolled. Sunderland was again absent.
If Sunderland AFC had existed since October 1879, it was unknown to the region’s footballers, administrators and newspapers. Its members had ignored a public appeal for clubs and had made no attempt to join the new county association.
That is extremely difficult to reconcile with the traditional story. A small club playing a new sport needed opponents. It could not survive in isolation for thirteen months while making no contact with the few association organisations already operating nearby.
The obvious conclusion is that Sunderland AFC did not yet exist.
The Challenge Cup provides an incentive
On 31 May 1880, the Northumberland and Durham FA agreed upon the rules for a new Challenge Cup. A substantial silver trophy was commissioned, and entries were due to close on 25 October.
The competition gave Allan something that had not previously existed: a regional structure into which a Sunderland club could enter. There were now recognised opponents, an association to join and a cup to contest.
The timing is significant. The Teachers’ Association had met in September 1879 and March 1880 without forming a football club. The county FA then created its Challenge Cup, and before the entry deadline expired the teachers acted.
Allan’s enthusiasm was essential, but so too was the appearance of a practical reason to organise. A casual interest in football could now become a sustainable club with a competitive purpose.
Saturday 25 September 1880
On Saturday 25 September 1880, members of the Sunderland and District Teachers’ Association assembled at Rectory Park School. They had gathered to hear T. E. Heller, secretary of the National Union of Elementary Teachers and a member of the London School Board, speak about union and educational matters.
The meeting was reported at length in the Sunderland Daily Echo on Monday 27 September.
In the same edition appeared a shorter announcement of enormous importance:
“The teachers of Sunderland and District have formed a football club and the office bearers have been appointed as follows: Captain and treasurer, Mr Singleton; Vice Captain, Mr Allan; Secretary, Mr Elliott, 4 Rudland Terrace; Committee, Messrs Gibbons, Chappell, Coates and Sewell.”
This was the public announcement of the organisation from which Sunderland AFC developed.
Its language could hardly be clearer. The teachers “have formed a football club”. It does not refer to an old club, an existing club, a reorganisation or a revival. It records something that had just happened.
Because the Teachers’ Association can be placed at Rectory Park School on Saturday 25 September, immediately before the announcement, the logical conclusion is that the football club was formed during or in connection with that meeting.
The newspaper does not explicitly state, in a single sentence, that the formation decision was taken inside the school. We should therefore distinguish between what is proven and what is strongly supported by chronology. The teachers were together at Rectory Park on the Saturday. Two days later their newly formed club was announced.
To accept an alternative location, we would have to believe that the teachers attended the Rectory Park meeting, worked a six-day week, and then assembled secretly at another building—possibly on the Sunday—to do what they could easily have done while already together on the saturday. There is no contemporary evidence of this second meeting.
The balance of evidence therefore places the formation of Sunderland and District Teachers’ Association Football Club at Rectory Park School on Saturday 25 September 1880.
The British School story
The claim that the founding meeting took place at the British Day School in Norfolk Street did not appear at the time. It entered the story retrospectively.
James Allan’s 1911 obituary mentioned the British School. John Grayston’s 1931 recollections referred to Cameron’s School, which he placed in Norfolk Street, although the school appears to have stood in Vine Place.
No newspaper report from 1879 or 1880 connects the British School with the formation of Sunderland AFC. No founding member has been firmly linked to the school in a way that explains why the group would have assembled there. The contemporary formation notice does not mention it.
The first relevant football appearance by a School came after Sunderland AFC had been formed, when Diamond Hall School played Rectory Park School in December 1880.
By contrast, Rectory Park provides a documented Teachers’ Association meeting held immediately before the new club was announced. One of Sunderland’s founders, John Coates, taught there. The school also featured prominently in the first association football matches reported in the town.
The British School claim is part of the later attempt to give the mistaken 1879 story a location. Rectory Park belongs to the contemporary evidence.
A club appears
Once the football club was formed, everything that had been missing during the supposed previous year suddenly appeared.
The founders obtained Blue House Field at Hendon as their ground. The rent was £10 a year—a serious burden for a group with no established income. The surrounding wall was too low to prevent people watching without paying, making it difficult to collect a gate.
Navy blue was adopted as the club’s colour. Red and white would not appear until later.
The first recorded practice match took place at Blue House Field on Saturday 9 October 1880, two weeks after the formation meeting. Captain Robert Singleton and vice-captain James Allan selected opposing sides. Allan’s team won 5–0.
The Echo reported the game on the following Monday. This is important because it shows that the newspaper was willing to publish even an internal practice match. If Sunderland’s teachers had been playing organised games during 1879/80, it is difficult to believe that every one of them escaped notice.
On Saturday 16 October, the Newcastle Daily Journal reported:
“A club has been started at Sunderland, playing under the Association rules, the name being ‘the Sunderland and District Teachers Association Football Club’.”
The article confirmed that Blue House Field had been secured, that the club would wear navy blue and that it intended to join the Northumberland and Durham FA and enter the Challenge Cup.
It also stated that, although formed by teachers, membership was not restricted to their profession. This was probably a practical necessity. The founders needed more players if the club was to survive.
A second practice match was played that day. Afterwards the members met and decided to change the name to Sunderland Association Football Club. Singleton was elected to represent the club on the Northumberland and Durham FA committee.
The decision was reported in the Echo on Monday 18 October.
The Sunderland and District Teachers’ Association Football Club had existed under that title for little more than twenty days. Its original purpose had been fulfilled. The teachers had created the organisation, but they now opened it to the town.
The sequence is natural and complete:
- On 25 September 1880, the teachers formed their club.
- On 27 September, its creation and officials were announced.
- Blue House Field was secured.
- Navy blue was adopted.
- On 9 October, the first practice match was played.
- Membership was opened beyond teachers.
- On 16 October, the name Sunderland Association Football Club was adopted.
- The club joined the Northumberland and Durham FA and entered its Challenge Cup.
- The first outside match followed in November.
Nothing remotely comparable exists for 1879.
Sunderland AFC’s first match
The draw for the first Northumberland and Durham Challenge Cup had paired Ferryhill with Darlington Grammar School. Darlington declined to play, leaving Ferryhill without its anticipated fixture on 13 November. A friendly was hastily arranged with the new Sunderland club at Blue House Field.
This was Sunderland AFC’s first recorded match against outside opposition.
Sunderland lost the toss and had to play into a strong wind. The team appeared to score, but the effort was disallowed. Before half-time Ferryhill found the net, and that proved to be the only goal.
Sunderland pressed after the interval but could not equalise. The club’s first match ended in a 1–0 defeat.
The subsequent report claimed that Sunderland had fielded a poor side, with five of its best players absent. Even in the club’s first weeks, somebody was prepared to explain away an unfavourable result.
Robert Singleton captained the side from goal. Taylor and Shirlaw played at full-back, with Gibbons and Andersen as half-backs. The six-man attack consisted of Edward Guy Watson, Barron, Dove, fifteen-year-old Frank Woodward, Walter Chappell and James Allan.
Some of those men left little trace. Shirlaw and Gibbons do not appear regularly in later reports, and Shirlaw’s name may have been incorrectly recorded. Others remained important to the club and to Sunderland’s educational life.
Singleton was a master at Gray School and later became a councillor. He played in goal and at full-back before serving on the committee. His life ended tragically in 1895 after a fall during a drinking bout.
Woodward was only two months beyond his fifteenth birthday when he faced Ferryhill. He became a highly regarded teacher and eventually took responsibility for pupil-teacher instruction under the Sunderland School Board. He died in 1897, aged thirty-two.
Chappell rose to become a headmaster but died from pneumonia and paralysis in 1898 at the age of forty-five.
Allan continued to dominate the early story. A skilled dribbler and prolific scorer, he could also be selfish and overly physical. He remained involved with Sunderland AFC for several years before leading the creation of Sunderland Albion in 1888. His place as Sunderland’s de facto founder, however, is beyond reasonable doubt.
The first victory
Sunderland did not play on the following Saturday. Allan, unable to remain away from the new game, refereed a cup tie between Tyne and Corbridge.
On 27 November, Ovingham visited Blue House Field for Sunderland’s second recorded match against another club. John Grayston played in goal, with Singleton moving to full-back.
A strong wind blew along the ground. Ovingham used it during the first half but could not score. Sunderland defended well, while Allan and Coates occasionally relieved the pressure with attacking runs.
After the interval, Sunderland took control. Secretary William Elliott scored the opening goal, becoming Sunderland’s first recorded goalscorer against outside opposition. Watson added a second before Allan scored twice.
The 4–0 victory was Sunderland AFC’s first win.
There was still no mention in the press of any other association football club operating in the Sunderland district.
The first cup ties
Sunderland received a bye in the opening round of the Northumberland and Durham Challenge Cup. In December, Burnopfield visited Blue House Field for the second round.
The match ended 2–2, although the Echo did not publish a full report and Sunderland’s goalscorers remain unknown.
Under the competition rules, Burnopfield’s captain was allowed to choose the venue for the replay. Unsurprisingly, he selected his own ground at Rowlands Gill.
Sunderland travelled there on 18 December. The pitch was covered in snow, and after Singleton lost the toss, his team had to play into a strong wind carrying snow towards its goal.
Despite the conditions, Sunderland defended strongly and attacked whenever possible. During the second half the visitors hemmed Burnopfield in. Allan scored after twenty minutes and then added a second following what was described as brilliant work.
Sunderland won 2–0 and progressed to the semi-final of the inaugural Challenge Cup.
Only a few months after its formation, the club stood one victory away from the final of the region’s first organised association competition.
Association football spreads through Sunderland
The timing of the first school fixtures is another important part of the founding evidence.
In December 1880, Rectory Park School defeated Diamond Hall 8–0 in what appears to have been the first association match reported in Sunderland that did not involve Sunderland AFC. The teams included teachers and pupils, some of whom may have been only fourteen or fifteen.
Rectory Park then defeated the British School 2–1. The game was probably played on the ground of the Bishopwearmouth Mutual Improvement Association on Chester Road.
The fact that the Echo reported these modest school matches is significant. It shows that once association football appeared in Sunderland, the newspaper took an interest in its development. The suggestion that Sunderland AFC or its founders had played throughout 1879/80 without receiving a single line of coverage becomes even less credible.
On 20 February 1881, Rectory Park and Hendon Board School met in another game between combined teams of teachers and pupils. The match was goalless at half-time. Hendon scored after the interval, but Rectory Park equalised from a free kick near the end.
This appears to have been Hendon Board School’s first recorded association match. It came five months after Sunderland AFC had been formed.
If organised football had been played in Hendon’s schoolyard from 1879, why was there no earlier school fixture? Why did football appear at both Hendon and Rectory Park only after their teachers had helped create Sunderland AFC?
The evidence suggests that the formation of Sunderland AFC encouraged association football within the schools, not that a developed school game produced the club.
The Echo effectively confirmed this in October 1881 when it wrote:
“The Teachers’ Football Club, which introduced the Association game to Sunderland last winter, has resumed its practice at Hendon.”
This contemporary statement is devastating to the 1879 claim. The newspaper credited the Teachers’ club with introducing association football during the winter of 1880/81. If a club had existed and football had been played since October 1879, it could not truthfully have been described as arriving “last winter”.
The statement fits the September 1880 foundation perfectly.
It also requires us to reconsider the respective places of Hendon and Rectory Park in the story. Hendon supplied Allan, Grayston, Chappell, Woodward and other early participants. Blue House Field became the club’s first ground. Its importance is beyond question.
Rectory Park, however, is where the evidence places the Teachers’ Association immediately before the formation announcement. Its teacher John Coates was one of the founders, and its team participated in the first three reported school association matches in Sunderland.
Hendon was central to the club’s earliest football. Rectory Park was almost certainly its birthplace.
The semi-final at St James’ Park
Sunderland’s Challenge Cup semi-final against Newcastle Rangers took place at St James’ Park on 12 February 1881. Newcastle United would not be formed for more than a decade, making Sunderland the first present-day League club to appear on the ground.
Rumours had reached Newcastle that Sunderland possessed several exceptional players and perhaps even an international. The stories were greatly exaggerated, but they helped attract a sizeable crowd. A “goodly company” travelled from Sunderland to support the young club.
The pitch was covered with approximately two inches of snow. Rangers proved much the stronger side and won 5–0 through goals from Mitchelson, Simms, Lockhead, another from Simms and Bain.
The Newcastle press offered a patronising but not entirely unreasonable assessment. Sunderland lacked the combination necessary for success, but it was a young club and would improve with experience.
Rangers went on to win the trophy by defeating Haughton-le-Skerne in the final, so Sunderland had at least been eliminated by the competition’s eventual winners.
For the founders, the defeat would have been disappointing. More pressing, however, was the need to keep the club alive. The players paid their own travel expenses and received no wages, but the rent and other costs still had to be met.
The concert and the canary
A fundraising concert was held at Hendon Church Institute on 8 March 1881. John Wright Wayman, the club’s vice-president, was expected to preside but was indisposed, so Robert Hudson of the River Wear Commissioners took the chair.
The programme included songs, piano performances, readings and recitations. Walter Chappell delivered “The Fireman’s Wedding”, while the other performers provided an evening of popular entertainment.
The concert reflected the nature of the early club. Sunderland AFC was not yet a commercial sporting institution. It depended upon the enthusiasm and social networks of teachers, friends and local supporters. A concert could be as important to survival as a football match.
This may have been the occasion of the famous green canary raffle. According to Allan’s 1911 obituary, Sunderland’s funds once fell so low that a member offered a canary to be raffled. The first raffle raised seventeen shillings and sixpence. The winner then returned the bird to be raffled again. The second winner was not present, so a small consolation was sent to him and the canary remained with its original owner.
The story appears only in the obituary, and no date was supplied. We cannot confidently place it at the March concert. Yet it is so detailed and peculiar that it may well be true. It captures the fragile circumstances of a club that was kept alive by ingenuity, goodwill and very small sums of money.
A canary may not literally have saved Sunderland AFC, but the fact that such a story was remembered says much about how close to the margin the club operated.
The end of the first season
Sunderland’s final recorded match of 1880/81 took place at Ferryhill on 2 April. A cold wind blew across the ground, and fewer than fifty people attended.
The game ended goalless. Allan made several good runs and attempts at goal, but neither side scored. Only ten Sunderland players were named, suggesting that the club may have played a man short.
The first season was over.
Sunderland had played only six recorded matches, winning two, drawing two and losing two. It had scored eight goals and conceded eight. The results were modest, but results were not the true measure of its achievement.
The club had survived.
It possessed a ground, colours, officers, a committee and a nucleus of players. It had joined the Northumberland and Durham FA, entered the Challenge Cup, reached its semi-final and begun attracting support. Association football was now spreading through Sunderland’s schools.
None of the founders could have imagined what they had created. They were young teachers struggling to raise a team and pay £10 rent on an unenclosed field. Their club would outlive them all.
Allan’s teaching career was also progressing. In May 1881, the Sunderland School Board appointed him first assistant master at Thomas Street Boys’ School. His salary began at £90 a year and would rise to £100.
At the end of June, the teachers and pupils of Hendon Board School presented him with a silver watch in recognition of his work. After little more than two years in Sunderland, he had established himself professionally and introduced a new sport to the town.
Sunderland’s own account
The evidence for 1880 did not disappear after the first season.
In September 1883, The Northern Athlete examined the association clubs of the North East and listed Sunderland AFC as having been formed in September 1880. The information appears to have come from the Durham Football Association, with which Sunderland was registered.
The Football Annual, published with the sanction of the Football Association, also recorded Sunderland’s formation as September 1880. Clubs supplied information including their date of establishment, location and football code.
Most importantly, Sunderland AFC’s own season ticket for 1884/85 declared:
“Established 1880.”
This was not the opinion of a modern historian. It was Sunderland AFC describing itself only four years after it had been formed. The founders remained active and the events were still within recent memory.
If Sunderland AFC had been founded in October 1879, why would the club state that it had been established in 1880?
Independent football historian Martin Westby later examined the Football Annual evidence and reached the same conclusion. Sunderland was formed in September 1880 and celebrated its centenary eleven months too early.
Other Sunderland historians, working separately, have followed different routes through the evidence and arrived at the same answer.
All of the contemporary evidence points towards September 1880. None points towards October 1879.
How the wrong story began
The 1879 claim first appeared in December 1887, when the Sunderland Echo commissioned what became the earliest substantial history of the club.
The journalist responsible admitted that his editor had given him the assignment on a Saturday evening and required the first instalment no later than Tuesday. He did not have time to conduct proper archival research and instead relied on conversations with current players and officials, several of whom had not been involved in the club’s formation.
Had he examined the back copies of his own newspaper, he would have found the announcement of 27 September 1880.
Instead, he wrote that the club had been formed “towards the end of 1879”.
There was no month, no date and no supporting evidence.
The series proved popular and was republished as a penny booklet. Hundreds and possibly thousands of copies circulated. The mistake was now contained in the first widely read history of Sunderland AFC.
The authentic account had lasted only seven years.
Once the incorrect year entered circulation, later writers began filling in the gaps. This is a classic feature of retrospective historical construction. When the central story is wrong, details are often created or borrowed to make it appear coherent. Each new addition lends the previous one an air of credibility, even though the structure remains unsupported.
In 1895, “Referee” added October and the British School in Norfolk Street. In 1931, Grayston’s memories supplied further names and anecdotes, some of which can be shown to be wrong. By 1990, the precise date of 17 October had appeared in a private club history without any identified source.
The modern date was assembled in three stages across 103 years:
- The year 1879 was introduced in 1887.
- The month October was added in 1895.
- The 17th appeared by 1990.
No contemporary evidence supports any of them.
This is how mythology becomes accepted as history. The story is repeated from book to book and article to article until familiarity replaces proof. Future writers assume that earlier authors must have seen evidence, so they do not return to the original records. Eventually, questioning the myth is described as an attempt to rewrite history.
In this case, it was the story introduced in December 1887 that rewrote Sunderland AFC’s history. Restoring September 1880 returns us to the contemporary evidence.
Rediscovering Sunderland’s foundation
I first attempted to verify October 1879 in 1999 while working as the freelance editor of Sunderland AFC’s original official website and contributing to the club’s official history.
Over several Saturdays, I searched the Sunderland Echo microfiche at Sunderland Central Library. I examined October 1879 and then widened the search to September, November and December.
I found nothing.
At that time, examining old newspapers meant working laboriously through rolls of microfilm. Without a search facility, extending the investigation over several years would have taken an enormous amount of time. The question therefore remained unresolved.
The position changed in 2011 when the British Newspaper Archive came online. Its search facility made it possible to locate references that had been hidden within thousands of pages.
The announcement of 27 September 1880 was found quickly. Further examination revealed the Teachers’ Association meeting at Rectory Park two days earlier, the practice matches, the name change and the subsequent sequence of fixtures.
Keith Graham of StatCat was conducting his own investigation and reached the same conclusion. Other historians, including Mark Metcalf, considered and supported the evidence. Martin Westby independently identified September 1880 from football’s annual records.
This is not a theory dependent upon one researcher or one source. It is a conclusion reached by several people through contemporary records.
Since that research was published, no document has emerged linking Sunderland AFC to 1879. There is still no newspaper report, school entry, meeting minute, fixture, player list, ground or club notice. Nor has anyone produced evidence of the supposed kickabouts now used to prop up the story.
Restoring the founding story
Recognising September 1880 does not change Sunderland AFC’s history. It restores it.
The history was correctly recorded when the club came into existence. The Echo announced the formation. It followed the practice matches and name change. The regional football authorities recorded September 1880. The club itself later printed “Established 1880”.
The incorrect account came afterwards.
That matters as Sunderland approaches its 150th anniversary. The centenary celebrations in October 1979 took place eleven months too early because the real evidence had not then been assembled. Repeating the same error when the contemporary record is now known would serve neither the club nor its history.
The proper anniversary falls in September 2030.
Acknowledging that date should not be treated as an admission of embarrassment. Historical understanding changes when lost evidence is recovered. Earlier writers worked with the material available to them, and many repeated the traditional date in good faith.
The important thing is that we now know more.
There is also a fitting geographical ending. Rectory Park School stood close to the old Vaux site on the south bank of the Wear, only 842 metres from the present Stadium of Light.
When Sunderland AFC left Roker Park in 1997, the club moved to the nearest practical site to its true birthplace. Rectory Park School, had it survived, would have been visible from the area around the river crossing.
It had taken Sunderland AFC 117 years, but without anyone realising it, the club had come home.
The evidence-based conclusion
There is no contemporary evidence that Sunderland AFC was formed, founded or established in 1879.
There is no contemporary evidence of a founding meeting at the British Day School in Norfolk Street.
There is no contemporary evidence that Allan and his colleagues were kicking an association football around Sunderland during 1879.
Even if they had been, an informal kickabout would not have formed a football club.
The evidence instead provides a coherent and continuous chronology:
- The Sunderland and District Teachers’ Association met at Rectory Park School on Saturday 25 September 1880.
- On Monday 27 September, the Sunderland Daily Echo announced that the teachers “have formed a football club”.
- Singleton, Allan, Elliott, Gibbons, Chappell, Coates and Sewell were named as its officials and committee.
- Blue House Field was secured and navy-blue colours adopted.
- The first recorded practice match took place on 9 October.
- Membership was opened beyond the teaching profession.
- On 16 October, the club adopted the name Sunderland Association Football Club.
- Sunderland joined the Northumberland and Durham FA and entered its Challenge Cup.
- Its first outside match was played against Ferryhill on 13 November.
- School association football appeared in the town only after Sunderland AFC had been formed.
- In October 1881, the Echo stated that the Teachers’ club had introduced association football to Sunderland during the previous winter.
- The Northern Athlete recorded “September 1880”.
- Football Association records gave September 1880.
- Sunderland AFC’s own 1884/85 season ticket stated “Established 1880”.
The case does not depend upon speculation. It rests upon contemporary documentation, the immediate sequence of events and the club’s own recorded understanding of its origins.
Sunderland and District Teachers’ Association Football Club was formed on Saturday 25 September 1880, almost certainly at Rectory Park School. Its formation was announced two days later. On 16 October, it became Sunderland Association Football Club.
That is not a revised founding story.
It is Sunderland AFC’s original founding story—finally restored.
