The yarn, as is often the case, is an excellent one. The story goes that the founders of Real Madrid – that famous old football club whose white shirts are perhaps the most identifiable outfits in European sport – were inspired to choose their pristine image by an afternoon at The Oval. Alas, they weren’t great admirers of WG Grace or inspired by an SF Barnes cutter. But supposedly, just before the club was established in 1902, two of Real’s founders were in London and watched Corinthian, the old association football side known for their gentlemanly spirit, play at the Kennington ground. So impressed were they by the sportsmanship and dignity on show, that they took the team’s white shirts as their own.

But again, as is often the case, the tale isn’t quite as we would like it. Well, possibly not.

The Corinthian Football Club (the “s” was added later) was founded in 1882, just as football was establishing itself in the national consciousness. The idea was to help improve the England team, but also to promote “sportsmanship, fair play and playing for the love of the game”, rather than competing for anything as gauche as trophies or money. Corinthian were amateurs and thus would only take part in friendlies (even though they did for years supply many members of the England team – indeed, they remain the only domestic team to supply all XI internationals for an England game, and did so twice: against Wales in 1894 and 1895). That policy eventually changed as they began to compete in assorted official competitions from around 1900, but their attitude to gentlemanly fair play did not.

The example most frequently cited of the Corinthian ethos is their attitude to penalties. The story goes that they believed no gentleman would ever deliberately commit a foul, therefore the notion of accepting a penalty was anathema. When awarded one, they would deliberately miss. When given to the opposition, the Corinthian goalkeeper would lean against the post and allow one to be scored. There is an element of hyperbolic apocrypha, a cartoon of an old sportsmanlike spirit that some still hanker after but possibly never existed, but Corinthian players also frequently advised the referee of any incorrect decisions, even if – especially if – it proved detrimental to their own fortunes.

They were a successful team, often embarrassing their professional rivals, and probably would have won leagues and FA Cups had they competed, but that was only half the point of the club. Geoffrey Green, the great chronicler of the game, and for years football correspondent for the Times, once wrote of them: “It cannot honestly be said that the Corinthians set the field alight. But every now and then they brought off a surprising and resounding enough triumph which set people buzzing. Yet, more than that, they brought into the whole family of footballers a camaraderie and a sense of fair play and ethics of behaviour on the field that did incalculable good in many directions.”

Corinthian Football Club had an ethos and players, but they didn’t have a home. Not a permanent one anyway, but they did find an occasional one in south London, at The Oval. Just as cricket clubs and grounds today have to be imaginative when it comes to making money, so they had to be in the early days. When Charles Alcock became Surrey secretary in 1872, he discovered the club’s parlous finances. “Both ends had been hardly met,” he said, so alternative sources of revenue were sought, and other sports – including athletics, hockey and even baseball – became that source.

Football was first played at The Oval in 1870, but thanks to Alcock’s influence it essentially became the hub of the game in London by the mid-1870s. The first international, between England and Scotland, was held at the ground, as were a further 14 encounters with Scotland and Wales. Games between Old Etonians and Old Harrovians, London and Sheffield, and international touring teams were hosted there, as well as 20 of the first 22 FA Cup finals, and on it went. According to Nick Yapp’s nook, A History of the Foster’s Oval, between 1881 and 1897 over a million people watched football there.

But this state of affairs wouldn’t last for long. Thanks to an application by Corinthian – who wanted to play five games in 1895 on terms considered unacceptable by the club committee – a vote was held to stop football from being played at the ground. “One may regret, as many undoubtedly do,” said Alcock at the time, “that the exciting contests in which the giants of football of generation after generation took part are numbered among the things of the past. But necessity has no law. And in this case one can honestly say, even though a footballer, that it was stern necessity.”

For a time, football was not welcome at The Oval, but Corinthian had previously played there enough to make an impression. Their first game was in January 1885 a 3-2 win over Preston North End who, when the Football League was formalised three years later, would win the first two titles. Preston got revenge in Kennington the following year, but Corinthian would go on to thrash Stoke 5-1, Notts County 7-0, and welcome “foreign” opposition for the first time when Queen’s Park and Celtic travelled down from Scotland (both were defeated). They played their last game at The Oval as Corinthian in March 1895, but in the preceding 13 years had played 40 times there – enough to make an impression on those who travelled and spread the game beyond Britain’s shores.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alfredo Di Stéfano poses with his five European Cups. Photograph: Real Madrid/Real Madrid/Getty Images

Arthur Johnson was a key figure in Real Madrid’s history. The Englishman was among the men who founded the club in 1902, playing as a centre-forward in the early years, scoring Real’s first ever goal and eventually becoming its full-time coach in 1910. In a country where organised football was still in its infancy, Johnson was among the few who had much experience. “The only guy who really knew what he was doing back then was the Englishman Johnson,” said Julián Palacios, the man who became Real’s first president, in Phil Ball’s book White Storm: 100 years of Real Madrid. “Lovely chap too, but he took the game very seriously. He got married here in Madrid on a Saturday and turned up to play the match on the following morning. I don’t know what his bride thought.”

When the club was being formed, Johnson wrote down four key principles of how he believed football should be played, all of which sound relatively obvious now but were not in the early days. He wrote that each team should have a captain, that players should stick to a single position rather than wandering all over the place, that they should pay attention to what he called “combination” (which basically translates as passing the ball to each other), and that players should take less time in retrieving the ball when it went out of play. This would lead to less “smoking and idle chat”, he said, a marvellous thought that conjures images of players sparking up their pipe and discussing matters of the day whenever a throw-in was awarded.

Johnson also wanted to imbue in his new team the spirit of fair play, synonymous with a team from back home. It’s often said that Johnson turned out for Corinthian, something that’s tricky to establish. Records from the late 1800s are, as you might expect, a little sketchy, but Johnson’s name does not appear in the official records of games before he travelled to Spain. What’s clear is that he was inspired by the club, and that was at least partly why he encouraged Real to choose white for their kit. Corinthian played in white shirts with black shorts, but Madrid’s first strip comprised of white shirts and shorts with a red and yellow trim and black socks. The idea that these colour details were a nod to MCC is tempting, but a little more likely are patriotic concerns: Madrid even then were positioning themselves as the club of Spain, rather than Cataluyna’s Barcelona. The shirt, though, was Corinthian white.

It’s perfectly plausible that Johnson made a trip to The Oval to see Corinthian, but for a man so intrinsically linked to founding one of the world’s biggest football clubs, it’s surprising how little has been written about him. It’s almost impossible to absolutely confirm whether he even saw a Corinthian game, let alone had a “Eureka!” moment at The Oval, but we can be quite certain that he was around at the time. Johnson was born in 1879, so he would have been about 16 when Corinthian last played at the ground. Our myth could have more than a whiff of truth.

What is more commonly accepted is another story about Corinthian’s influence on Madrid – a tale that could have been conflated with Johnson’s origins to form the old romantic notion of Corinthian being at the very heart of the club’s identity. In 1926, a couple of Real’s players, Félix Quesada and Perico Escobal, were travelling through England and were said to have watched Corinthian play. This would certainly have not been at The Oval, but more likely at Crystal Palace which became the club’s de facto home from about 1922. The two defenders were so impressed with what they had seen that they determined to take it back home.

Once back in Madrid, they persuaded club president Pedro Parages to copy Corinthian’s kit, by switching from white to black shorts. While Parages wasn’t entirely convinced, he gave it a try. The experiment only lasted a year. After a couple of heavy defeats, notably 5-1 to Barcelona in the semi-final of the Copa del Rey, Parages decided the black shorts had brought bad luck, and promptly reverted to the all-white kit.

As professionalism in English football became more prevalent, the appeal of Corinthian faded. But that didn’t mean the connection between the club and The Oval weakened. In 1939, Corinthian merged with Casuals FC, an amateur club formed in 1883 that initially featured players from Eton, Westminster and Charterhouse schools, before welcoming those from other public schools. Like Corinthian, they too would tour around London and the country but not take any special interest in genuine competitive football.

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The new club, like all good double-barrelled couples, would be called Corinthian-Casuals, and retained the spirit of their forebears as much as possible. “The aims of the Club are to promote fair play and sportsmanship,” reads the club’s website. “To play competitive football at the highest level possible whilst remaining strictly amateur and retaining the ideals of the Corinthian and the Casuals Football Clubs.”

They managed to get one game in before football was suspended for the second world war. When the sport resumed after hostilities ceased, like Corinthian before them they needed a home, and in 1950 they moved into The Oval, playing on a pitch marked out at the Vauxhall End and being careful – as young scamps playing on fields across the country are told to be – to avoid the square. They were only permitted to play between September and March, turfed out once the cricket season took over, and quite right too. They stayed at The Oval until 1963 when, with attendances declining, they moved a few miles east to share Champion Hill with Dulwich Hamlet.

It feels appropriate that Corinthian were the last football side to play regularly at The Oval, keeping alive those links with the past that join the ground with Real Madrid. And today, when Real sign a new player, he is paraded in front of the fans with that famous old white shirt. One wonders how many of them know that they could be carrying a symbol thought up on an afternoon at The Oval, lifetimes ago.

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