Recreativo Huelva

Background

Huelva was introduced to football by the British employees of the Rio Tinto Company Limited (RTCL), who began to arrive in 1873 to work at the copper mines of Rio Tinto. Huelva thus became the home to a vast British colony, among whom a certain William Bice stood out, as he was the one who began organizing the first "kick-abouts" between the club's members, which were possibly the very first kick to a football ball on Spanish soil. This colony eventually gave birth to a club in 1878, the Rio Tinto English Club (known in Huelva as Club Inglés Bella Vista), where the mine workers played their favorite sports, such as cricket, rugby, and football. The first president of this club was the Scot John Sutherland Mackay, the newly-arrived company doctor. There are reports of football games between Rio Tinto and Huelva as early as 1882, but these teams were never officially established, so there is no legal record of their existence.

Rio Tinto FC was the catalyst of the Sociedad de Juego de Pelota (Spanish: "Ball Game Society"), which was founded in 1884 by Dr. William Alexander Mackay, the brother of John Sutherland, who was a lover of sports and thus wanted to use physical exercise to improve the health of his patients. He began organizing football and cricket games, usually between his compatriots living in Riotinto and those crews of the British ships, which were held in a large area of marshes filled with flooded soil opposite the Gas Factory run by fellow Scotsman Charles Wilson Adam, who also played in some cricket matches himself.

The earliest known example of this dates dating to March 1888, when the club played football and cricket matches against the sailors of a merchant ship called Jane Cory who had just arrived in port; Mackay even invited a Spaniard Ildefonso Martínez to play. Eventually, in the late 1880s, the local population began gathering there to watch this curious sport, which soon gained followers among the local youth, and as they became familiar with its rules, some of them asked Mackay to participate, which he happily accepted, as he did not conceive of his recreational club as something exclusive to the British colony. Ildefonso Martínez, José García Almansa, Alfonso Le Bourg, and some others, thus became the first Spaniards to play football.

Foundation and first matches

After a few years of consolidating these sports practices, Mackay and Adam decided to take a further step, so on 18 December 1889, they were among the seven men who founded Huelva Recreation Club, thus becoming the first-ever football club in Spain, although it was originally founded as a sports club that provided physical recreation for the Rio Tinto mineworkers to improve their health. The remaining five founding members were Edward Palin, Alfred Gough, Gavin Speirs, and the only two Spaniards: Pedro Nolasco de Soto and José Muñoz Pérez, both of whom had studied in Britain and thus had a great knowledge of the English language, with Nolasco having previous experience as a director of a sailing club, while Muñoz had a position within the local press. Even though Mackay was the fundamental head behind the club's creation, it was Adam who was elected as the club's first-ever president since he was the eldest of the group and owner of the land where the games were played. This position was then ratified as such at the meeting of 23 December 1889, in which four more members were added for a total of 11; the 27-year-old Speirs, an engineer, was named vice-president, and Palin was named secretary, while Mackay was appointed only as a member of the club's first board of directors.

After Recreativo de Huelva, Sevilla FC is the next-oldest club in Spain, having been founded just a month later, on 25 January 1890, by Isaias White and Edward Farquharson Johnston, the British vice-consul of Seville, and unlike the Huelva clubs, Sevilla was solely devoted to football, so many considered Spain's first football club. Two months later, on 8 March 1890, these two clubs played the first official football match in Spain at the Hipódromo de Tablada, which was refereed by Johnston, the president of Sevilla, who won the match 2–0; Huelva line-up the following players: William Alcock, Yates, George Wakelin, Guillermo Duclós, Coto, Kirk, Benito Daniel, Curtis, Gibbon, Geraldo Brady, and Smith.

Following the success of the first match, the clubs decided to play a return fixture in Huelva just three weeks later, on 7 April 1890, in front of a crowd of 500, and even though Sevilla scored the opening goal via Gilbert Pollock, thus becoming the first-ever player to score an away goal on Spanish soil, Huelva managed to fight back to win 2–1, partly because they had been fortified by "some athletes from the British colony of Rio-Tinto".

1890s

The Recreation Club demonstrated an organizational capacity that was out of the ordinary for a sports club of that time, playing many more matches against Sevilla and the Club de Río Tinto in the early 1890s, fielding the likes of Wakelin, Alcock, James Reeves, and captain Almansa, who scored a late winner against Sevilla in February 1892. In 1892, Mackay created the club's first crest, the blue and white heart, because those were the colors of the Mackay clan crest, the flags of Scotland and Huelva, and even Lybster FC, his hometown club.

In that same year, Mackay and Adam formed the club's subcommittee charged with planning and supervising the works of the so-called Campo del Velódromo on the plot of land located on the Seville road opposite the Hotel Colon, which was the first sports venue built in Spain for the practice of football, and which was inaugurated on 20 August, just in time to host the sporting events that had been organized by Recreativo in commemoration of the IV Centenary of the Discovery of America. After the departure of Edward Palin in 1891, Muñoz became the new secretary of the club, and as such, he played a key role in the organization of this event that took place between August and October 1892, and whose program remains the oldest surviving original document from Recreativo, in which the club has specific and established rules for football, cricket, and tennis games, hence making them the oldest rules that had been created in Spain in relation to the practice of football.