In 1857 two young cricketers in Sheffield founded a football club, and the next year it wrote its own rules. Today Wikidata knows 45,931 association football clubs. This map plays their founding years forward, from one club in Yorkshire to 222 countries and territories, and shows which ones did not survive.
Every football club was founded by someone, somewhere, at some date, and a surprising number of those facts have been typed into Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia. Put them on a map in order and you can watch the game spread: out of Sheffield and the north of England, across the British Isles, into the ports and cities of Europe and South America, and then, decade by decade, to almost every country on earth.
The data are uneven, and that matters as much as the pattern. Wikidata has a founding year for 59% of its clubs, and a point on the map (the club's own, its ground's, or the town in its name) for 35%. The Netherlands alone has 2,857 clubs in it, more than Germany; India has 151. So read the map as a record of what has been catalogued, not a census of football. Press play, or drag the slider, and click any dot or country.
Dots: clubs with a founding year from 1857 and a point (their own coordinates, their ground's, or the town in their name), coloured by founding year; a hollow ring is a club Wikidata records as dissolved by that year. Countries are shaded once Wikidata records a club there, by the year of that first club. Clubs without a point still count in the totals. Source: Wikidata (CC0). Outlines: Natural Earth. Base map tiles © Esri.
The oldest club Wikidata records in England is Sheffield FC (1857), the club usually called the oldest in the world. Wales follows with Wrexham (1864), Scotland with Queen's Park (1867) and Northern Ireland with Cliftonville (1879). By 1900 55 countries and territories had a dated club, by 1914 87, and by 1950 173. The last place to get one in the record is Gibraltar (2021).
Many of these first clubs began as something else. The first in South America is the Lima Cricket and Football Club (1859); Switzerland's is a football and cricket club in Lausanne; Uruguay's a rowing club; Norway's and Italy's began as gymnastics societies, and Germany's is a sports club from 1858, older than the game itself in Germany. Wikidata gives the founding year of the whole club, so a first date here is the date a club that now plays football was founded, not the first kick.
The diffusion front: year of each country's first club, and how far it is from Sheffield
222 countries and territories. Each dot is the oldest dated club Wikidata records there. Hover for the club.
The front moves outwards, but not smoothly. Countries whose first club came before 1900 sit a median 1,966 km from Sheffield; those whose first club came after 1950, 6,894 km. The early leaps follow ships and trade rather than distance: Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, India and Australia all have clubs in the record before Hungary, Poland or Russia.
The oldest club in each country
Oldest dated club in Wikidata, from 1857. Click a row to see it on the map. The full table is in data/first_clubs.csv.
Of the 27,059 clubs with a founding year from 1857, 61% are European. Before 1900 the share is 93%, and 59% of all clubs founded before 1900 are in the United Kingdom. The busiest single year is 1919, with 475 new clubs, as the First World War ended, and Europe's busiest decade is the 1920s. Every other continent peaks in the 2000s, and since 2000 Europe's share of new clubs has fallen to 38%, with Asia at 26%.
Clubs founded per decade, by continent
27,059 clubs with a founding year from 1857. The 2020s run only to 2026. Hover a bar.
The recent peaks need care. Newer clubs are more likely to have a founding date in Wikidata at all, and some countries have been catalogued in bursts by enthusiastic editors. The rise after 1990 (29% of dated clubs) is partly real (new leagues, new countries, women's football) and partly a sign of who is editing now.
Of the 314 clubs Wikidata dates to before 1880, 258 are in the United Kingdom. Wikidata files most clubs simply under the United Kingdom, so I gave each one its nation from its point; 1,489 UK clubs have no point and stay as "United Kingdom". England's early list is a roll call of the clubs that wrote the rules: Sheffield, Hallam, Notts County, Stoke, Nottingham Forest, Sheffield Wednesday, and the London sides of the first FA Cup, many now gone.
Wikidata records a dissolution date for 4,091 clubs (9%). The single worst year is 1945, when 174 clubs ended, 143 of them in Germany or the former German Reich: the Allies dissolved German sports clubs after the war, and clubs in the lost eastern territories ceased to exist. The oldest club that died is the Wanderers (1859 to 1887), five times winners of the early FA Cup.
Clubs dissolved per decade
4,091 clubs with a dissolution date (P576) in Wikidata.
More than half of all recorded deaths (52%) are since 2000. Some of that is real, from mergers, bankruptcies and refoundings, but recent closures are also simply easier to record. Of the clubs with both dates, the median lifespan is 23 years and 791 lasted five years or fewer.
The busiest year for new clubs was 1919. The busiest year for dead ones was 1945.
Europe holds 61% of all clubs with a country in Wikidata and Africa 8%. Per head of population the differences are enormous: the Netherlands has 165 clubs per million people in Wikidata, Nigeria 0.6. Dutch, Swedish, Belgian, Baltic and Cypriot editors have catalogued their amateur and village clubs; most of the world's clubs have no entry at all. Half of the clubs have 2 or fewer sitelinks (Wikipedia articles in any language and other Wikimedia pages), and 44% have at most one.
Clubs in Wikidata per million people
The twelve highest, and the twelve lowest among countries of more than 20 million people. Population: Natural Earth estimates.
So the timing of a country's first club is more trustworthy than the number of its clubs, and even first dates are only as good as the oldest club someone thought to enter. If a country's first club looks late, it may simply mean its early clubs are missing.
Clubs. Every Wikidata item that is an instance of association football club or one of its subclasses, from a QLever query: 46,993 items in 48,286 rows (a club repeats for each type, ground or country). I kept one record per item and left out 1,062 that are not clubs in the usual sense: national and regional teams, beach soccer and futsal sides, reserve, B and under-age teams, and 169 Australian clubs whose names mark them as Australian rules football clubs, which Wikidata often files as football clubs. That leaves 45,931.
Dates. The founding year is the earliest inception date (P571); 86% of them are stored as 1 January, which in Wikidata means a bare year, so I use years throughout. 20 clubs have a founding year before 1857: these are cricket, gymnastics and sports societies older than football, plus a few errors, and they are left out of the timeline and the first-club table but kept in the data with a flag. The dissolution year is the latest P576 date.
Places. A club's point is its own coordinates (3,004 clubs), else its home ground's (10,046), else, if its English name contains a town or city in the same country from Natural Earth, that town (3,177, approximate). Its country is the present-day country its point falls in, else the country Wikidata gives; 98% of points fall in the country Wikidata names. Clubs whose only country is a former state (the Soviet Union, the German Reich, Czechoslovakia) and that have no point are counted in the totals but not in any country. The United Kingdom is split into its four nations, because each has its own football association. Continents follow Natural Earth.
What this is not. It is not a list of every club, nor proof of who founded which, and it cannot say who brought football to each country: Wikidata does not record founders' nationality, so nothing here measures the part played by British workers, sailors or students abroad. A country's first club is the oldest one in Wikidata with a date, which may be a multi-sport society, and may be wrong.