The Best Team In the Land & All The World, Part One: The Many Faces of World Championships

From the informal naming of a match between cup winners from two countries to a bunch of amateurs becoming World Champions, club football has always struggled with identifying the best in the world.

Who’s the best in the village? Who’s the best in the area? Who’s the best in the county? Who’s the best in the country? Who’s the best on the continent? Who’s the best in the world? Football has been a race to the top since it first came into being, and in a very literal sense since the introduction of League football in 1888.

But if football was going to grow into a global game, what could come next? For international teams, the Olympic games were a natural home from 1900 on, while the World Cup would follow. But for club sides the situation was different. Even for most of those with no greater ambition than to take the game to continental Europe the only means of doing so was by boat, and the length of those journeys didn’t often sit well alongside a domestic season which ran from the end of August until the end of April.

None of this means that they weren’t prepared to try. Since the end of the 19th century there have been varying attempts to try and fashion a club world champion of football, but none of them have ever really stuck. This series is an attempt to tell that patchwork history, from tournaments which used the word ‘champion’ extremely liberally to the latter day attempts of FIFA to try and get European audiences into their dip into the club game.

The first game to labour under the title of being a ‘World Championship’ was the annual match between the winners of the FA Cup and the winners of the Scottish Cup, which was first played in 1876. The first nine iterations of the match were won by Scottish clubs, though the introduction of the Football League in 1888 (Scotland followed two years later) seems to have tipped the balance back a little. It’s also worth remembering, of course, that professional English clubs—from 1885; officially, at least—had a lot of Scottish players at the time.

But all the evidence is that these were little more than friendly matches, and that even the informal use of the name fell from favour as it became clear that this game was being exported across the world and that to call this a ‘world’ championship was at best a colossal overexaggeration and at worst an outright lie. The final iteration of this match came in 1904, the year of FIFA’s formation. Bury were the winners, beating Rangers 2-1 both home and away.

The next contender for being a world championship for clubs was marginally more convincing than the British case of a couple of decades earlier had been. The formation of the Torneo Internazionale Stampa Sportiva—or, should you prefer, The Sport Press International Tournament, where Sport Press were the sponsors and organisers—came in 1908, with four Italian clubs playing off to play teams from Germany, France and Switzerland in Turin.

Juventus were one of those knocked out in qualifying, only to be reinstated when the German entrants FC Freiburger withdrew after losing their semi-final 5-3 to the Swiss club Servette. Juve beat the French club US Parisienne to claim third place in the tournament, while in the final Servette beat Genoa 3-1 to lift the trophy.

But that same summer an expanded football competition was taking part at the Olympic Games in London, so what could be done to make this tournament more appealing? For the tournament’s Italian organisers, the answer was obvious. This competition needed at least a British competitor. No football competition being held in the first decade of the last century could realistically call itself a ‘World Championship’ unless at least someone from the country that had given the game to the world—and which already had an expansive and still growing league system—had taken part in it and either won it or been beaten during it.

Help was at hand in the form of Thomas Lipton. Born in the Gorbals in Glasgow in 1848, Lipton moved into tea in 1890 when he visited British Ceylon, purchased tea gardens (as well as their indentured workers) and started selling it across Europe. This, of course, made him phenomenally wealthy and allowed him to indulge his fancies as he saw fit. In 1897, for example, at the time of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee, he spent £20,000—£3.3m, allowing for inflation to 2025—on meals for London’s poor.

But it was in the sporting arena that he would gain his greatest fame, certainly in the USA. Between 1899 and 1930 he challenged the American winners of the America’s Cup on five separate occasions. And there were benefits to this for his business. His efforts to win the cup were extremely well-publicised, and even earned him a specially designed cup for “the best of all losers”. It made his tea famous in the United States, and to this day Lipton remains one of the biggest-selling brands of iced tea on the other side of the Atlantic.

Lipton’s interest in football was also considerable. In 1905 he provided the trophy for a tournament between the two countries on either side of the Río de La Plata—Argentina and Uruguay—with the condition that the teams be made up of only native born players. El Copa Lipton was played almost annually until 1925 and continued to be occasionally played until 1992. Argentina won the final trophy by virtue of drawing the final, as the away team, one of the competition’s more curious quirks.

Having been honoured in Italy in 1908, Lipton offered up The Thomas Lipton Trophy for the next tournament, an extraordinary piece of silversmithery which stood at three feet high and featured a model of a player taking a throw-in on top of it. In return for this, Lipton was charged with finding a club from England. Predictably, he received no assistance from the Football Association, whose insularity would become a common theme throughout the history of the game in this country in the 20th century.

The Football League couldn’t interrupt their schedule, but they were more open to the idea and suggested that Lipton instead turn his attention to the amateur game. The reason why a team of mineworkers from West Auckland were eventually invited isn’t entirely clear. The team joined the Northern League in 1908 but finished third from bottom out of twelve at the end of their first season. It has even been suggested that there may have been some degree of confusion between them and Bishop Auckland, who won the 1909 Northern League title.

There was no qualifying competition in 1909. This time around, the four teams were a Torino XI, made up of players from Juventus and Torino, the excellently-named German club Sportsfreunde Stuttgart, the Swiss club Winterthur and West Auckland. In the semi-finals, West Auckland beat Stuttgart 2-0 while the Torino XI were beaten 2-1 by Winterthur. West Auckland then beat Winterthur 2-0 to—somewhat inelegantly, one would imagine—lift the trophy. Two years later they won the trophy again, this time demolishing Juventus 6-1 in the final.

But how seriously can anyone take claims that these could in any way be considered ‘world champions’? West Auckland were not a successful Northern League club. The idea that they were in any way ‘the best in the world’ was somewhat fanciful. They weren’t even the best team with ‘Auckland’ in their name in the Northern League at the time. But they went, and they won.

Although the First World War would get in the way of all football in Europe, the ball was rolling in both the club and international games in terms of starting to broaden the horizons of who is ‘the best’. It’s just that more than a century on, it still feels as though the club game has never quite got to grips with determining who it should be while the international game, through the Olympic Games and later the World Cup, would absolutely find a way. West Auckland FC, on the other hand, folded in 1912 and had to be reformed two years later.