Celtic FC History / Information

Celtic Football Club was the brainchild of a Marist Brother who trundled the damp and bleak cobbled streets of the East End of Glasgow wracking his brain to come up with a way to raise money for the poor and needy of the area.

The year was 1887 and there was manifest necessity for organised aid despite Glasgow being known as the Second City of the Empire.

Shipbuilding and heavy industry were the lifeblood of the ever-growing Victorian metropolis and thousands flocked to the city in search of work, housing and a life above the pitiful poverty line.
And a large percentage of the new breed came over the sea from Ireland, a country that was still feeling the effects of the potato famine that blighted the lives of millions.

Therein lay the problem though, the influx that crossed the Irish Sea were mainly Catholic and they quickly realised that the streets of Glasgow were not paved with gold and there weren't enough jobs to go round but if there was employment available, it was low-paid and the spectre of national and religious nepotism raised its ugly head in the job stakes.

Poverty was rife, disease was a daily obstacle, child mortality affected the lives of many and soup kitchens presented those afflicted with a vital foothold in their day-to-day existence.

It was to subsidise these soup kitchens that Brother Walfrid set the fund-raising wheels in motion to drive poverty from the stricken streets of the East End.

Football was a fledgling sport at the time but the simplicity of the basic essentials to play the game on the street and the relative ease of promoting it as a spectator sport made it a sure-fire winner with the public.

And so the seed was planted in Brother Walfrid's mind and at a meeting with local Irish businessmen at St Mary's Hall in the Calton on November 6, 1887, the decision was made to found a football club and from that acorn a giant oak grew with roots firmly embedded in Scotland and Ireland but a trunk that developed so strong, the limbs and branches stretched and weaved their way throughout the world.

In the early days of football clubs generally drew support from the surrounding area but Brother Walfrid could little have known that the pull of Celtic would quickly outgrow the Parkhead area, interlace throughout the streets of Glasgow and mushroom all over Scotland and beyond as the appeal magnified beyond all comprehension.

Celtic played their inaugural game on May 28, 1888 in a friendly 5-2 win watched by a crowd of 2,000 as the team of; Dolan, Pearson, McLaughlin, W Maley, Kelly, Murray, McCallum, T Maley, Madden, Dunbar and Gorevin took to the field as the first ever Celtic XI and Neil McCallum had the honour of scoring the first ever Celtic goal 10 minutes into the match.

The opposition that day was team from the other end of the city known as Rangers and ironically the history of both clubs was to be forever intertwined in the years that followed.

But as Walfrid watched the club grow in its formative years and noted the steady flow of Brake Clubs making their way to matches on horse-drawn coaches, he couldn't have envisaged that within 80 years' time, the descendents of those same fans would be flying in a great iron bird at 30,000 feet to see the Bhoys in green and white lift the European Cup at Lisbon...

Or that now, in the year 2002, supporters from far-flung locations as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Montreal, Johannesburg, Hong Kong, Sydney, Melbourne or any one of the world's great cities would be flying into Glasgow to attend domestic league games at Celtic Park alongside the thousands who travel over from Ireland for each game.

But it was the intervening years that cemented Celtic's appeal from their East End base in Glasgow - a shrine that is known as Celtic Park in the postal address book but as Paradise to countless thousands of supporters the world over.

From the outset this young upstart 'Irish' club changed the face of Scottish football on and off the park. Their play was vibrant, scintillating and cavalier with the onus on attack and it wasn't long before they were outmanoeuvring the established clubs on the field of play and rocking the establishment who governed the sport.

In the days prior to definitive Old Firm rivalry, it was Hampden-based Queen's Park, as practitioners of all that was initially tactically superior and staunch advocates of the amateur ethos predominant in those days, who were Celtic's main adversaries.

Clubs the length and breadth of the country followed Celtic's philosophy and the writing was on the wall for the old school with the bastion of amateurism given the cold shoulder and the stage was set for Rangers to get into bed with Celtic as the dominant force in Scottish football and the term Old Firm was inscribed in the supporters' dictionary.