Patrick Comerford
The football season begins properly today, and Aston Villa have their first match of the season with an away fixture with West Ham at the London Stadium that kicked off at the at 5:30 – a Premier League match between two sides who play at home in claret and sky blue.
I became a fan of Aston Villa because of the accident of geography rather than any childhood obsessions – Villa Park and Aston are just 30 minutes by train from Lichfield, and Aston is the last but one stop on the train into Birmingham. There were other choices: Villa has a fierce local rivalry with both Birmingham City and West Bromwich Albion, and Walsall is closer to Lichfield, as the crow flies – but Lichfield is not in Birmingham, I’m not a crow, and, in any case, Lichfield is a Villa stronghold … the odd Albion and Walsall fan apart.
Aston Villa was formed in 1874, and the club is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. I found myself on the same trainline between Birmingham and Lichfield again yesterday, and decided to visit Villa Park as this anniversary season kicks off.
Aston Villa is one of the oldest and most successful clubs in England, having won the Football League First Division seven times, the FA Cup seven times, the League Cup five times and the European Cup and the European Super Cup once. During its history over the last 150 years, Aston Villa has spent 110 seasons in the top-flight, the second highest of any club, and has provided 77 England internationals, also the second highest of any club.
Like many English football clubs, Aston Villa has its origins in church life in Victorian England. The club was formed on 21 November 1874, by members of the Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel in Handsworth, which is now part of Birmingham and within walking distance of the site of Villa Park.
The story has long since been part of claret and blue folklore. Four gentlemen stood under a gas lamp on Heathfield Road in 1874 and their conversation brought about one of the greatest clubs in the world.
In different circumstances, Aston Villa might have become a rugby club. Four members of the Male Adult Bible Class at the Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel – Jack Hughes, Frederick Matthews, Walter Price and William Scattergood – were also members of the chapel’s cricket team.
These four were looking for a way to stay fit during the winter months and a winter sporting activity to complement their thriving cricket section. They had just watched one of their colleagues, William Mason, in action with an oval ball at Heathfield Park. But they concluded that rugby was too physical a game, and decided instead that Association Football was their best option. And so, that conversation beneath the gas lamp resulted in the birth of a football institution.
Due to the lack of local football teams Aston Villa’s first match was against the local Aston Brook Saint Mary’s Rugby team. As a condition of the match, Villa had to agree to play the first half under Rugby rules and the second half under Association Football rules. Villa still won this first game 1-0.
Villa soon established itself as one of the best teams in the Midlands, winning its first honour, the Birmingham Senior Cupm in 1880. The club went on to lift the trophy nine times in the next 12 seasons.
Since the 1880s, Aston Villa has been a leading club and it was influential in the game’s move to professionalism in 1885, and the team pioneered the modern passing game. This short, quick combination passing style was introduced by a Scotsman George Ramsay, who was appointed as the world’s first professional football manager in 1886.
A Villa director, William McGregor, founded the world’s first Football League in 1888. Following the professionalisation of football, clubs needed regular income to pay players’ wages. Frequently friendlies were cancelled due to opponents’ FA Cup or county cup matches or clubs failed to honour a fixture in favour of a more lucrative match somewhere else.
McGregor took action after seeing Villa matches cancelled, on five consecutive Saturdays, to the increasing frustration of fans. He wrote to the committee of his own club and the committees of Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Preston North End and West Bromwich Albion in March 1888, proposing a league competition that would provide a number of guaranteed fixtures for its member clubs each season.
The world’s first Football League season began six months later in September 1888 with 12 member clubs from the Midlands and north of England: Accrington, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Derby County, Everton, Notts County, Preston North End, Stoke, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Villa won the Double in 1897, and that year it moved to its present home, the Aston Lower Grounds. Supporters coined the name Villa Park, although no official declaration listed the ground as Villa Park, and the club has remained there ever since.
George Ramsay’s trophy haul of six League Championships and six FA Cups established Aston Villa as the most successful club in England, a position it held from the 1890s until the 1970s.
Villa scored 128 goals in the 1930-1931 season, and this remains an all-time top-flight record. However, the club began its first decline in the mid-1930s. The 1940s and 1950s were generally mediocre, and were followed by a steep decline in the 1960s and then Villa’s first and only relegation to the third tier of English football in 1969-1970.
Villa returned to the elite ranks from the mid-1970s under Ron Saunders, who led the club to a seventh top-flight league title in 1980-1981. Villa became only the fourth English club to win the European Cup, in 1981-1982, followed by the European Super Cup in 1982.
Aston Villa was one of the founding members of the Premier League in 1992, one of just three clubs to have been founding members of both the Football League in 1888 and the Premier League, along with Blackburn Rovers and Everton. Villa regularly qualified for European football in the 1990s.
Doug Ellis sold his stake in the club to the American billionaire Randy Lerner, whose ownership of the club ended with Villa’s first and only relegation from the Premier League in 2015-2016.
The Chinese businessman Tony Xia bought the club for £76 million in 2016. But, following failure to secure promotion to the Premier League, the club faced significant financial difficulties, and there were rumours that administration was imminent. The NSWE Group, a consortium of the Egyptian billionaire Nassef Sawiris and the American billionaire Wes Edens, bought a controlling 55% stake in the club in 2018, and Sawiris took over as club chairman.
A year later, Villa gained promotion back into the Premier League after a three-year absence. On the eve of Villa’s return to the Premier League in 2019, NSWE bought out the Recon Group’s minority share, and Xia no longer had any stake in the club. The club is currently owned by V Sports, a company owned by Sawiris and Edens, and an American investment company Atairos.
In the early years, the team wore several different kits, from all white, blue and black, red and blue to plain green. By 1880, black jerseys with a Scottish lion on the chest were introduced by Villa’s Scottish leaders McGregor and Ramsay. The colours changed to chocolate and sky blue in 1886.
The chocolate colour later became claret, but nobody is quite sure why claret and sky blue became the colours. Several other football teams adopted these distinctive colours, including West Ham United, Burnley, Scunthorpe United and the Turkish club Trabzonspor; Crystal Palace also played in Villa’s colours until the 1970s. Perhaps that explains David Cameron’s gaffe in 2015 when he had claimed he was a Villa fan but spurted out that he was a West Ham fan.
Today, the club colours are a claret shirt with sky blue sleeves, white shorts with claret and blue trim, and sky blue socks with claret and white trim.
Villa’s famous and celebrity fans have included Prince William, the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, cricketers Ian Bell and Chris Woakes, television and film stars Tom Hanks, David Bradley, Oliver Phelps and Brendan Gleeson, musicians Ozzy Osbourne and Nigel Kennedy and Simon Le Bon and Roger Taylor of Duran Duran. The Irish players have included Paul McGrath, Steve Staunton, Andy Townsend abd Ray Houghton. But Aston Villa retains a loyal, locally-based core of supporters, who are mainly working class, and with a catchment area that extends as far north as Lichfield.
As this new season kicks off today, Aston Villa ranks fifth in the all-time English top flight table since its creation in 1888 and as the seventh most successful club in English football by competitive honours.
To mark this year’s 150th anniversary, Aston Villa is planning an unforgettable 2024-2025 season that does justice to the club, its storied history and pays tribute to all fans, players and custodians of Aston Villa. This evening is the start of a season that promises to be an exciting one packed with anniversary events and celebrations.
One of these celebration events sees Aston Villa giving it name to a new beer from a Lichfield brewery. The Trinity Brew Co are launching the Up The Villa ale inspired by the team. The 5% New England IPA uses English hops and will see the likes of Gary Williams, Tony Morley and Gary Shaw involved in the brewing process. The brewery is named Trinity after the Trinity Road stand at Villa Park.
Up the Villa will be available at the Trinity Brew Co taproom as well as bars and pubs around the Midlands from 14 September. The brewery is also hoping to host a question and answer session with some of the stars of the team next month.
Aston Villas fans who know their team, who know their club, who know its history and who cherish its traditions, have an abiding affection for the Holte End of Villa Park. But more about Villa Park, hopefully, tomorrow, and more about Aston Hall and the Holte family – and their links with the Comberford family – in the days to come.
