By Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (August 18^th 2020)

FIFA’s Quandary

Established in 1904, the International Federation of Football Associations (FIFA) had only existed for six months before Galt FC won the second Olympic Games Football Tournament. It remains the best performances by Canadian or US teams in Olympic football.

However, FIFA was in a quandary. While the International Olympic Committee (IOC) recognises the titles of 1900 and 1904 – partly to acknowledge the history of football in the Olympic Games, FIFA could not recognise these tournaments as legitimate, because they were not competitions for national football teams.

Argentina, Uruguay, the USA and Canada as well as European nations had already played international matches – South Africa too.[1] There were national teams that could have competed in both Olympiads but that did not happen. That raises an important question. Why wasn’t the tournament organised to reflect this? It wasn’t a problem that would go away.

Football at the Unofficial Olympics

Athens’ second Olympic Games took place in 1906, ten years after its first. Initially, it was recognised as an Olympiad, but it lost that status as it was out of sequence and an Olympiad every ten years after the first was not considered an idea to continue with, partly because there would be years when both the four year gap and the decade after the first Olympiad would coincide.

Ironically, the two occasions when that would have occurred were the cancelled Games of 1916 and the infamous 1936 Games – both of which Berlin was to host. The 1906 Games are now referred to as the Intercalated Games. Football was one of the sports. Again, it involved club teams rather than national teams.

Club or Country

It involved club teams from the Ottoman Empire (Smyrna and Thessaloniki – the latter ironically consisting of Greeks), the hosts Greece (Athens) and a Denmark team put together by the Copenhagen Football Association.

Denmark beat Smyrna 5-1 and Athens beat Thessaloniki 5-0 in the semi-finals. Bizarrely, the teams from the Ottoman Empire did not feature native Turks – Smyrna consisted of Armenians, English and French players.

Sportsmanship

Denmark walloped Athens 9-0 in the final, but the Greek team exhibited very poor sportsmanship by refusing to continue after half-time. They were disqualified and ejected from the tournament for refusing to play a match for second place. Arguably, they should have been disqualified for walking off at half-time in the final anyway.

Smyrna thrashed Thessaloniki 12-0 for second place. Medals and recognition were given at the time, but it is not considered an Olympiad now. And it was mainly club teams again.

The 12-0 hiding was the worst performance to secure a medal until the newly independent Czechoslovakia easily surpassed it in the ice-hockey in 1920, the seventh Olympiad of the modern era – 1916 is counted as the sixth Olympic Games despite it being cancelled due to World War I – with a mind-bogglingly poor performance.

The Football Tournament at Antwerp’s Olympic Games in 1920 proved controversial as Czechoslovakia also walked off the pitch in the final – this time to protest the officiating.

The Great Danes

Denmark, however, would feature prominently in the next two Olympic tournaments and these would count for FIFA as they involved national teams. Niels Nørland had the distinction of winning a gold medal at the Intercalated Games and two silvers (1908 and 1912).

Nørland also has the unenviable distinction of being a forward who played 14 internationals without ever scoring.

A Global Sport

Football had been taken all over the world. But in its early years, despite attracting members in different continents there was no tournament to determine the best nation in the world.

The Olympic Games Football Tournament was still a long way from filling that void, but it would grow.

London’s first Olympiad in 1908 would begin that process, but it too was far from a genuine World Championship, even an unofficial one. Other controversies were not far away either as FIFA grew, but included countries whose racist policies had little difference from those which resulted in South Africa’s suspension and then expulsion in the 1970s.

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[1] South Africa had toured South America before the first Olympic Games run by FIFA. South Africans, or Britons born in South Africa, had played in England too. Some had played for England too. The Cape Town born William Rawson was among the first – he was the first African-born FA Cup winner – winning the prestigious tournament in 1874.