125 years since the ad in Los Deportes

A young sports enthusiast from Switzerland called Hans Gamper (known as Joan in Catalonia), arrived in Barcelona in 1898, and was surprised to find that there was practically no organised football happening in the city, and no proper fields on which to play it.

He contacted Jaume Vila, who ran the Tolosa gymnasium, knowing that some of its members played the game on an improvised pitch at the old velodrome in the Bonanova district.

Rejection

However, Gamper's offer to organise a proper team at the Tolosa was turned down, seemingly because Vila and his friends were somewhat reluctant to accept a foreigner. Instead, Gamper turned to Francesc Solé, owner of another gym called the Solé (at number 5, Montjuïc del Carme, just off Las Ramblas), and which also happened to be the headquarters of the Catalan Gymnastics Federation.

He found more support there. Through the gym a sports magazine called Los Deportes was published every week, and Gamper was told that he could place an announcement looking for people to join him in setting up a team.

The famous announcement

The ad published by himself and his compatriot Walter Wild appeared in issue 34 of the mag on 22 October 1899, in the ”Miscellaneous" section at the back, and it simply said: “Our friend and colleague Mr Kans Kamper [sic], of the foot-vall [sic] section of the Sociedad de Deportes and former Swiss champion, wishing to organise some games in Barcelona, asks anybody with an affection for said sport to get in touch with him and for said purpose to come to our offices on Tuesday or Friday evenings between 9 and 11.”

The spelling mistakes suggest that whoever printed the piece didn't have too much of an idea of what football entailed. But that was typical of the time, when the few articles in the press that mentioned football usually had to include some kind of description along the lines of: “It is a game in which the ball must be struck through a wooden gate and which is guarded by the assigned custodians pertaining to each team.”

FC Barcelona, in motion

However, given the circumstances, the announcement was a success. A month later, Los Deportes followed up the ad by saying that “our friends Wild and Gamper have gone a long way with their work to organise a Foot-ball Society. This afternoon the teams will play a game at the Hippodrome.”

Just ten days after that, on 29 November 1899, Joan Gamper, Wild and ten other men (Catalans Lluís d’Ossó, Bartomeu Terrades, Pere Cabot, Carles Pujol and Josep Llobet; Enric Ducay from Aragon, Otto Kunzle from Switzerland, John and William Parsons from England and Otto Maier from Germany) sat down in the Solé gymnasicum and officially founded FC Barcelona. Gamper had got his way!

Today, exactly 125 years later, the three Catalan sports dailies have all re-published a tiny little ad, at the time inconsequential to most people, but which was the seed that would eventually grow into the greatest football club in the world.