The Long Read: Bradford, the Avenue, and the Great Betrayal
There used to be two League clubs in Bradford, but since 1970 there's only been one. And it gets far more complicated than that, the further back you go.
Bradford Football Club was formed in 1863, but chose the rugby version of the game over the association version after the Football Association encoded the latter in October of that year. The club grew steadily over the next two decades, but they wouldn't have the city to themselves for very long.
In 1880, on the other side of town, Manningham FC founded. It made sense that this should happen. Bradford's newly opened Horton Park Avenue ground was on the south-east side of the city, not an inconsiderable distance from its centre. Having a new club for the north side of Bradford was, perhaps, a natural evolutionary step for football in the city to take.
The two clubs quickly developed distinct and somewhat differing identities. Bradford quickly became the “glamour club”, with well-known players and excellent facilities, whilst Manningham preferred to try to develop their own players, playing on open ground at Wetley Hill before finding themselves somewhere permanent on the site of a quarry at Valley Parade. This soon solidified into a rivalry which found its focus when League competition was first introduced in 1892, by which time Bradford was said to be one of the wealthiest sports clubs in the country.
In the same year, charges of professionalism were brought against two clubs, Bradford and Leeds by the Rugby Football Union. The charged clubs weren't paying players a full-time wage. They were instead compensating working players for the risks that they were taking by playing the game in the first place. Playing and training ate into the hours that working class players could work for. And on top of this, the risk of injury was great.
And all of this in an era before the creation of the NHS, when players had to pay for their own medical bills and risk possible destitution if they weren't careful. Clubs such as Bradford, who wanted to secure the services of the best local players, had to pay for their services.
In 1893, the heat turned up a little higher when Yorkshire clubs complained that southern clubs were over-represented on the Rugby Football Union Committee, and that committee meetings were held in London at times that made it difficult for Northern members to attend. Their implication was a London bias within the RFU, and this related back to the matter of missed time payments.
The clubs also submitted a proposal that would allow players to receive up to six shillings when they miss work because of match commitments. The idea was voted down by the RFU, who retaliated against this insubordination with widespread suspensions of Northern players and clubs.
On 27 August 1895, at a meeting in Manchester, nine Lancashire clubs agreed that they would support their erstwhile rivals in the formation of the Northern Rugby Football Union. Two days later in Huddersfield, the new organisation was formed with 22 clubs.
The response of the Rugby Football Union was incandescent, issuing sanctions against clubs, players and officials involved in the new organisation, including amateurs who played with or against Northern Union sides. This, however, had the opposite effect to what the RFU had probably intended. The Northern Union was quick to adopt professionalism, but that didn't mean amateur clubs couldn't join them.
So many in the north of England did. In just a few short years, the Northern Rugby Football Union had more member clubs than the Rugby Football Union. Bradford FC began playing association football in 1895, alternating home Saturdays at Park Avenue with the Northern Union, though this withered away after a few seasons. The first season of the Northern Union saw Manningham become its inaugural champions,
but issues over travelling led to a split into two county leagues, the Yorkshire and Lancashire Leagues, which would last until 1902. By the time the league reconvened as one, however, its first champions were in trouble. Manningham had found themselves remaining in the shadows of Bradford FC and were teetering on the brink of closure.
With only an archery tournament having saved the club from closure during the summer of 1902. The club's annual income had dropped by 70% in the seven years since the formation of the Northern Union. While the summer archery competition had staved off closure the once, the 1902-03 season had started with little indication that there was going to be any improvement in the club's circumstances.
Association football, meanwhile, was already thriving elsewhere across the country, and in particular in the north of England. This codification of the game had been quicker to accept professionalism, with the FA allowing that from 1885, and its leading professional clubs had quickly formed themselves into a league, which had started three years later.
Attempts made by the West Riding FA to form a League team in the area, however, had fallen flat, and some blamed the Northern Union rugby clubs for deliberately crowding out the round ball version of the game. In January 1903, however, James White, a sub-editor of the Bradford Observer newspaper, met a representative from the Football Association at Valley Parade to discuss establishing a football league club within the city. Manningham FC were interested.
The competition from Bradford FC was too much. So, after a series of meetings held throughout the spring at the club's AGM on 29 May 1903, the committee of Manningham FC elected to leave the Northern Union and switch to Association Football instead, changing their name to Bradford City Association Football Club. They were immediately voted into the Football League without ever having played a single match.
That this should have happened isn't that surprising with the benefit of hindsight. When the Football League was founded in 1888, rugby was still a strictly amateur sport. That was ultimately what the split of 1895 was all about. But Northern Union rugby had grown in Yorkshire and parts of Lancashire.
Across the vast four counties of Yorkshire, association football had only really taken off in its original heartland of Sheffield, many miles to the south-east of Leeds and Bradford. Manningham couldn't make Northern Union work financially. They'd been outgrown by Bradford FC, whose ethos was simply better suited to growing as a professional club during this era. And the decision was vindicated on all fronts. Bradford City were a success. They found their feet with three seasons in mid-table in the second division, but were promoted to the first division in 1908 and won the FA Cup in 1911.
For the FA and the Football League, it was also a success. Football had been slow to take hold in West Yorkshire. Leeds City were only formed in 1904, a year after Bradford City, and Huddersfield Town came along in 1908. In echoes of what would happen in Bradford, Leeds City were elected into the Football League in 1905, a year after their formation, and Huddersfield Town in 1910, two years but only one full season after theirs.
If there was a co-ordinated effort to blow the Northern Union out of the water in the first decade of this century going on, it was working. Financially speaking, it was a triumph for the new club. They were soon bringing in a higher income than Bradford FC, and the rugby club soon found their income plummeting as the football club went from strength to strength. This was, however, an existential matter for Bradford FC. They'd always been the big club in the city, for most of the time the centre of attention. Now Manningham had switched codes and were already vastly outgrowing them.
In 1907, the club decided to put the matter to a vote of committee members over whether they should join Bradford City in association football or not. The meeting called was on the 15th of April 1907. It was a fractious evening. Initially, it seemed as though the vote was going to go in favour of staying in the Northern Union, while others preferred switching back to Rugby Union.
But the vote, with some reports stating under undue pressure from the chairman of the club, eventually swung in favour of switching to Association Football. It became known as the Great Betrayal. The minority split to form Bradford Northern, whilst others drifted away to local rugby union sides. Northern Union, which wouldn't change its formal name to Rugby League until 1922, was inextricably linked to working-class identity for some, even though it should have been clearly evident by 1907 that football had drastically eaten into that idea.
Neither did Bradford get an automatic place in the Football League, like City had four years earlier. They had to play a season in the Southern League first, which they ended in 13th place out of 20 in the table, before being elected into the Football League anyway, in 1908. To avoid confusion with Bradford City, it became commonplace to put Park Avenue after their name in brackets, after they registered that way as a limited company. They most commonly remain known as just Bradford to most, though. There was no obvious reason why the city of Bradford couldn't support two professional football clubs, and it did for just over six decades.
Bradford FC marked their election into the Football League by spending more than £6,000 on renovating Park Avenue. At the centre of this work was a remarkable new grandstand designed by the noted football stand civil engineer Archibald Leach, the roof of which was punctuated by three large and evenly spaced gables.
This side of the ground also played host to the Doll's House, a pavilion which sat on the end of the stand, which on its other side had a balcony for the adjacent cricket pitch. The cricket side of the pavilion also featured a clock that ambitious cricket batsmen would aim for during matches. Wayward shots would occasionally end up sailing over the stand and onto the football club's pitch.
By the time work had finished, Park Avenue had a capacity of 37,000 and might well have been a better ground than Valley Parade. The new club had chosen red, black and amber hoop shirts before switching to green and white hoops on account of the appointment of the former Celtic player Tom Maley as their manager in 1911.
They would revert back to their original colours in 1924 before going back to green and white again in 1956 after a season so bad that the chairman of the club reportedly deemed that the traditional colours of Bradford City had been so disgraced by the previous season that they should not be worn again. They changed them back 11 years later.
For half a century, Bradford Park Avenue were every inch the match for Bradford City. They spent three seasons in the first division, which ended in 1921, and spent only one season below the top six in Division II between 1929 and 1934, without getting promoted.
In the years before the Second World War, though, the club's fortunes waned on the pitch, and this continued after the first full programme resumed in 1946. Avenue were relegated into Division Three North in 1950, and would never play in the top two divisions again. The FA Cup, however, did provide the club with its final splash of success in the years immediately after the war. With just three months between the end of the war in Europe and the theoretical start of a league season for 1945-46, there was no time to arrange a full league programme.
This left space for the FA Cup to expand,and it went to two legs up to the semi-finals for this season only, in order to guarantee at least a sliver of income for all clubs who entered. This format seemed to suit Avenue, who put eight goals past Manchester City at Maine Road on the way to losing over two legs to Birmingham City in the quarter-finals.
Two years later, they beat Arsenal in the Third Round. The year after that, they beat Newcastle United at the same stage and then held Manchester City to two draws before losing a second replay at Maine Road in front of a crowd of almost 83,000. In the League, however, the slow decline continued. Avenue's first four seasons in Division 3 North saw the club finish in 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th place in the table in consecutive seasons. But when regionalisation was abolished in 1958 and Division Four was introduced, Avenue were placed into the bottom tier, after having finished in 3rd from bottom place in the Division Three North table at the end of the previous season.
There was a brief period of revival at the start of the following decade, when Bradford were promoted into the third division after finishing in fourth place at the end of the 1960-61 season. But the club only lasted two years before being relegated back again. During this period, the success was fired by a young striker called Kevin Hector. The club sold him too cheaply. for just £34,000 to Derby County in 1966.
But this time, the decline turned out to be terminal. After a couple of reasonable seasons back in Division Four, Avenue fell to pieces from 1966 on. Their final four seasons in the Football League saw them finish 23rd, 24th, 24th and 24th in the table. By the end of the 1967-68 season, they'd managed a miserable four wins and just 23 points.
Bradford would go on to win just eleven more matches as a Football League club; five over the course of the 1968-69 season, and six throughout the 1969-70 season. During their final season in Division Four, they were also knocked out of the FA Cup by non-league South Shields.
Come re-election time in 1970, there were three candidates scrambling for two places, votes-wise. Cambridge United, a forward-looking side who'd just won the last two successive Southern League Premier Division Championships, Notts County, who had finished above Bradford in the League that season but had received 11 fewer votes than Bradford's 38 the previous year, and of course, Avenue themselves.
When the votes came in, it was very bad news for Bradford (Park Avenue) FC indeed. Cambridge United and Newport County had both received 31 votes each, and Bradford received just 17. After 62 years, Bradford FC, Bradford Park Avenue if you prefer, were out of the Football League and were placed into the Northern Premier League for the following season.
With a professional squad retained, there was a degree of optimism before the start of the season that the club might make a quick return to the Football League. But things didn't work out that way. The club finished 14th place in the Northern Premier League at the end of the season.
They made a somewhat desultory application to join the Football League at the end of the season regardless, but only received one vote. In the summer of 1973, Bradford had to leave Park Avenue, which was useless to property developers on account of a covenant restricting its use to recreational purposes only, and moved across the city to ground share with Bradford City at Valley Parade. Crowds, which had already shrunk down to around the thousand mark, halved again. Some supporters simply refused to set foot inside Valley Parade as a home fan.
The club played the 1973-74 season in full knowledge of the end being nigh. On 8 April 1974, it was confirmed that Bradford would not be continuing after the end of that season. A 1-0 win against Great Harwood turned out to be Bradford FC's last hurrah, played in front of just 698 people at Valley Parade. On 3 May 1974, the shareholders agreed to liquidate the company, which had debts by that time of £57,652.
The name was quickly picked up by a group of former supporters of the old club, who formed a Sunday league team of the same name. They switched to Saturday football in 1988, and rose slowly through the years, finding a home at the Horsfall Athletic Stadium.
The club now plays as Bradford Park Avenue in the, in the Northern Premier League. A conflation of different circumstances tipped them into this crisis in the mid-1960s. Bad business acumen is difficult to prove at this remove, but the undervalued sale of Kevin Hector hints at a lack of business acumen on the part of the directors of the club. However, the end of the post-war attendances boom, the arrival of regular televised football and the sudden growth of nearby Leeds United towards become one of the nation's giants likely didn't help matters either.
The final nail was probably banged into the coffin with the appointment of one Herbert Metcalf as the club's chairman towards the end of 1969. Metcalfe had, by most accounts, the club's best interests at heart, but he had no experience whatsoever in football and an unfortunate tendency to get a little more involved in matters of team selection than any supporter would probably like from their chairmen.
One of Metcalfe's first decisions was to sack manager Laurie Brown and replace him with a personal friend with no managerial experience of his own called Frank Tomlinson, but with Metcalfe himself picking the team. On one occasion, it was reported, when a local news reporter criticised Metcalfe over his team selection, Metcalfe rang the newspaper to tell the reporter that he could pick the team himself for the next match.
Tomlinson lasted four months before Metcalfe realised the error of his ways and replaced him with Don McCallman, who himself had been relieved of his duties as manager as Park Avenue and replaced by Brown a little over a year earlier. It has been said that this level of absolute chaos behind the scenes may have been one of the driving factors behind the collapse of the club's vote when it went for re-election for the fourth year in a row in the summer of 1970. Metcalfe's antics had already cut the last of the club's credibility as a football league club to pieces.
Metcalf's very final act of all also proved to be a further death knell for the club. Whilst on a scouting trip to Glasgow in October 1970, he died suddenly, and it subsequently became apparent that he had been putting £500 per week, that's £9,900 per week adjusted for inflation to 2025, into the club just to keep it afloat.
Without that money, any lingering hopes of returning to the Football League vanished. Avenue were forced to become a selling club, offloading whichever players they could just to keep their heads above water. This, coupled with crowds that had already dropped and halved again upon leaving Park Avenue, made the ongoing viability of the club entirely implausible.
Park Avenue itself was not redeveloped after the club's demise, though. Instead, it entered a slow decline. The mainstand, Doll's House and Horton Park and roof were all demolished by 1980. By then, the pitch was covered in trees, rubble and litter. The reformed Bradford Park Avenue did play on it for a while after it was renovated in the early 1980s, but in 1988 an indoor cricket centre was built over half of the site and any remaining lingering hopes of it becoming a football stadium again died forever.
All that remains now of Park Avenue is the base of a turnstile and an area of terracing covered in trees and the outline of part of a football pitch. Fascination with the site, however, remains, and in 2013, a complete geophysical survey of the former pitch began, which led to three years' worth of work, and eventually the 2017 William Hill Sportsbook of the Year-nominated book, Breaking Ground.
After the Great Betrayal, Bradford Northern were relatively nomadic for a while, but in September 1934, they moved into the brand new Odsal Stadium, which was built on land located for the club by the local council and which was the biggest stadium in England outside of Wembley. It would hold a record attendance of over 102,000 people for a Rugby League Challenge Cup final between Warrington and Halifax in 1954.
Bradford Northern's fortunes, however, declined sharply in the early 1960s and they went out of business in 1963. A reformed club replaced them immediately. And when Rugby League rebranded itself as the Super League in 1995, everybody got rebranded. And Bradford Northern became Bradford Bulls. They would become the most successful club in British Rugby League for a while. Northern had only ever won two league titles back-to-back in 1980 and 1981, but Bulls won the Super League four times and the Rugby League Challenge Cup twice in just eight years.
These good times, however, didn't last, and in 2012, the club was forced into administration. In November 2016, they entered administration for the third time in four years, and this time the Rugby Football League had enough, and first suspended and then cancelled their membership. Bradford Bulls went into liquidation at the very start of the following year.
A new club was invited to join under the same name, and the current iteration of Bradford Bulls now plays in the Championship, the second tier of the league system. In the summer of 2020, they confirmed that they could no longer afford to play at Odsal, and moved to ground share at Dewsbury for two years instead. They played their last match at Odsal Stadium on 1st September 2020.
Bradford City are the healthiest of the lot, even if their supporters might not always think that they are. They had two seasons of Premier League football at the turn of the millennium, and their unlikely win against Liverpool on the last day of the 1999-2000 season to claw their way to safety will live long in the memory.
The club's position is more modest now, but in 2015 they reached the League Cup final, their first major trophy final since 1911, and only the second time, after Rochdale in 1962, that a Third Division or equivalent club has reached one. They were well beaten in the final by Swansea City, but the adventure was in the journey, where they beat Arsenal and Aston Villa, as part of a thrilling run to Wembley.
Bradford City was also, of course, touched by a tragedy of a different magnitude to relegation or bankruptcy on 11 May 1985, when 56 people were killed at Valley Parade, when the main stand, which was built in 1908, caught fire. Those deaths form part of the identity of the club now, just as much as the uniquely lopsided Valley Parade, or those distinctive claret and amber colours. Bradford City are structurally ready for the Premier League, but they remain marooned in the lower divisions for now.
We have a tendency to romanticise the past and the founding story of professional football was written by the victors for whom the idealisation of values long dead legitimises their own existence. We worry a lot about the state of the game and in particular the effects of its over-commercialisation but it can be easy to forget that the past could be as ruthless as the present is. The Football Association and the Football League were both keen to grow the games in parts of the country in which it hadn't quite yet taken hold. So the effective parachuting in of clubs was considerably more commonplace then than it ever could be in the modern era.
And rumours of financial irregularity were as common as they are today. It’s now been 106 years since the expulsion of Leeds City from the Football League over financial irregularities. The past isn't always as rosy as our glasses make them out to be.
What would you make of it if one of the big clubs, or all of the big clubs, came out and said that they were going to break away and form a new version of football, with the independence to set themselves up effectively as their own sport? We get a sense of the extent to which emotions were heightened in Bradford by the fact that Bradford FC's decision to switch to association football readily became known as the “Great Betrayal”.
And it's understandable. The owners of Manningham FC and Bradford FC made their decisions in very much the same way that, say, Robert Maxwell decided to merge Oxford United and Reading in the 1980s. Nothing personal. It's just pure, hard-headed economics. And pointedly, when Manningham FC did become Bradford City AFC, they immediately attracted considerable support from across the city. West Yorkshire, it seems, wanted more association football in the first decade of the 20th century than it had.
This story also serves to remind us of the fact that the formations of football that we have today are a result of the schisms that took place a long time ago. Rugby League, Rugby Union and Association Football are all ultimately different branches of the same game, and their histories are considerably more intertwined than they are often given credit for being.
All three of these clubs have survived those tumultuous early years. Even now, in 2019, City, Park Avenue and even Northern - albeit in the form of the second incarnation of the Bulls, who were originally formed as a rebranding of the second incarnation of Northern - are still with us. And all this because one rugby club became jealous because a previously smaller club was starting to outgrow them, more than a hundred years ago.
Thanks for a very informative piece. I was one of the 698 at Valley Parade on 2 May 1974 who saw Park Avenue going out of existence. The programme (3p) for the game is devoted mostly to the club's various fund-raising schemes and there's a resigned, we-did-our-best, almost matter-of-fact air to the contributions with the only real nod to the future being that the social committee would be continuing with its team in the local Sunday League. I think it was from this that the new club formed a few years later. There really wasn't much love for the club beyond its immediate support at the time which is very sad. There was also a "Farewell to Park Avenue Evening" planned for the following Wednesday at the Edwardian Club featuring "cabaret, dancing and buffet" all for 40p (including supper). I wonder how that went.