The non-league team that beat Real Madrid 100 years ago – and now want a rematch

Manchester City understandably came away from last week’s first leg of their semi-final against Real Madrid happy. Avoiding defeat at the Santigao Bernabeu is never a bad result. Taking a 1-1 draw back to the Etihad means City are just about favoured to reach their second Champions League final.

Pep Guardiola and his players would be sitting more comfortably, though, if they had matched the 100-year-old achievement of a club currently playing in the 10th tier of English football.

This week marks the centenary of the first time Madrid lost to an English club in Spain. That club was Nelson, hailing from a mill town on the outskirts of Burnley with a population just over 33,000 people and currently plying their trade in the North West Counties Division One North.

Their ground Victoria Park is only around 30 miles north of the Etihad and yet it is a long way from the bright lights of the Champions League semi-finals. Their 4-2 win against Madrid on 15 May 1923 is a relic of a different era, predating competitive European football as we know it by more than three decades.

But it has not been forgotten in this part of east Lancashire. And now, if possible, they would like a rematch.

Nelson beating Madrid is a source of immense pride among those who follow the club, not least Peter Smith, the Soccer Saturday reporter who is as passionate about Nelson as presenter Jeff Stelling is about Hartlepool United.

Smith’s dad was a teacher in Nelson during the 1970s and was given access to Victoria Park — known as ‘Little Wembley’ locally — for games lessons and after-school football practice.

His grandfather, meanwhile, was a keen student of football’s history and would tell tales of his days attending games while working in Liverpool during the 1920s. “The two stories that stuck with me were Dixie Dean’s 60 goals (for Everton in 1927-28) and Nelson beating Real Madrid.”

That knowledge meant Smith’s evenings playing on Nelson’s pitch with his dad and the older schoolboys were filled with wonder. “There’s me as a seven-year-old primary school kid training on the pitch, being aware that my local team was a team that beat one of the biggest in Europe,” he recalls. “It’s been massive in my life.”

Others learned of Nelson’s victory through their own research. David Wells, born and bred in Nelson, follows the club home and away as well as helping out as a volunteer and is something of a historian too.

As a teenager, he spent his spare time in the library, digging through archives. “It sounds a bit nerdy! It must have been a really bad day for the weather but I ended up in the library but I just got hooked.”

Wells’ search dragged up clippings from The Burnley News detailing Nelson’s brief stint as a Football League club during the 1923-24 season, which ended in relegation but included a 1-0 win at Old Trafford, the home of Manchester United. “That drew me in and I thought I need to find out more about this.”

Nelson had earned their place among the likes of Manchester United, Leeds and Leicester City by winning the Third Division North the previous year. Their reward was a three-week end-of-season tour of Spain.

After their final outing of the 1922-23 campaign, the squad embarked on a journey that took the best part of two days, leaving for London at 10.55am on a Sunday morning and — via Newhaven, Dieppe, Paris and Irun — they arrived in Santander early on Tuesday.

Their first games of the tour were against Racing Santander. A 2-1 defeat — with Nelson’s goal coming from former City forward Dick Crawshaw — was followed by a win by the same scoreline a few days later. Another double-header against Real Oviedo was pencilled in before they returned home.

Yet it was their next game, the 4-2 defeat of Madrid, that would still be spoken about in the town a century later. Given the meticulousness with which the local newspapers reported on Nelson’s travel plans, it is a shame that relatively few details about the game itself beyond the scoreline were recorded for posterity.

That might have something to do with Madrid’s more modest status at the time. What is arguably the biggest, most prestigious club in the world today was still in its infancy then — having only been formed in 1902; 20 years later than Nelson — and had only been granted the ‘Real’ title three years earlier by King Alfonso XIII.

The match was not played at the Bernabeu, either — because Madrid’s iconic home would not be built for another 24 years, and because Santiago Bernabeu himself was still playing for Madrid at the time.

It was instead held at Campo de Ciudad Lineal, where Madrid had first played at a few weeks earlier and had a capacity of just 8,000. The most detailed account of what happened that day is found in the letters sent back to east Lancashire by Nelson’s captain Michael McCulloch, which Wells uncovered in his research.

McCulloch’s pride in his side’s performance during their 4-2 win jumps off the page. “Our team played beautiful football, which has been greatly admired by the natives, whom we have found to be sportsmen of the highest type.”

After their victory, Nelson were invited to Madrid’s club headquarters for some light refreshments and a round of speeches. “What a reception we received,” wrote McCulloch. “It touched us very much by its sincerity and homeliness.

“As regards our football, they said words failed them to fully express their admiration at what they had seen. They said they had never seen anything so clean and so wonderful, and that we are the best British team who have visited Spain.“

The feeling was mutual. A second game a few days later ended in a 4-1 defeat for Nelson and left a deep impression on McCulloch. “The Real Madrid Club have a team that would give the best teams in England a run for their money,” he wrote.

“They play beautiful, cultured football. They haven’t just an idea of the game. No; they play it as it is played in Britain in its best sense; the ball trapped and placed along the ground, swerving and twisting and heading in the best approved British style.”

McCulloch’s slightly awe-struck tone reveals just how rare it was at the time for two footballing cultures to cross in this way and his admiration for the growth of Spanish football shines through.

“People at home would hardly believe the strides football has made in Spain,” he wrote. “I don’t stretch the truth when I say at present a picked Spanish team would step onto the field on equal terms with any international team at home.”

Madrid certainly left a better impression on McCulloch than Oviedo did. As the tour came to a close, Nelson’s captain reported that “an ugly incident” occurred between his team-mate Johnny Black and Oviedo’s left-half, who had been “roughing it” all game.

Black punched his opponent, who retaliated by planting his boot into Black’s back. The Oviedo player “would make a first-class donkey,” McCulloch wrote, “so well does he kick at everything”. Other players joined in, as did the linesman — who “had a whack at the left half” — and it was not long before the crowd broke onto the pitch.

Soldiers and civic guards were required to restore order, after which play restarted and McCulloch claims the remainder of the game was “bright and breezy until the close”. Even so, Nelson had to be escorted back to their hotel by the same soldiers who had dispersed the crowd.

Despite currently being nine promotions off the Premier League, Nelson’s footballing history is a rich one. The town was also the birthplace of Jimmy Hogan, the pioneering coach, born in 1882, whose ideas helped inspire Austria’s Wunderteam and Hungary’s ‘Mighty Magyars’. Hogan also had a spell at Nelson during his playing days.

Then in the early 1950s, the club also gave a future European Cup-winning manager his first break. Before his time at Liverpool and founding of Anfield’s historic ‘boot room’, Joe Fagan won the Lancashire Combination as player-manager of Nelson in his first season in charge.

It is the story of that victory against Madrid, though, that has been passed down the generations and it is a strange quirk of history that, on the week of the game’s 100th anniversary, the Spanish giants happen to be playing down the road.

Yet despite the stars aligning, attempts to commemorate the centenary have struggled to get off the ground, particularly when it comes to organising the one tribute Nelson would like more than any other: a rematch.

Of course, on the week of a Champions League semi-final, nobody is necessarily expecting Karim Benzema, Vinicius Junior and Luka Modric to rock up and play at Victoria Park, not least because a ground with only one stand would struggle to accommodate the visit of 14-time European Cup winners.

You would think some sort of rematch against some Madrid team somewhere should be possible, though, and those connected to the club have been trying to make it happen.

Eager to do his bit, Wells contacted Madrid. “I said when I emailed them that I don’t expect the first team, just a youth team or reserves — anybody, just a representative team. And not necessarily on the anniversary date, just sometime this year in the anniversary year.” He was told the request would have to come through club officials.

Darren Thornton, Nelson’s manager, has led the attempts over the past few months, sending out multiple LinkedIn invites as well as email after email to as many people connected with Madrid as possible.

Thornton has been in touch with Madrid’s communications department and Madrid-based journalists interested in covering the story, with one relaying Nelson’s request to Real legend Emilio Butragueno.

“He said the rematch sounds like it’s a difficult thing to do due to their fixed schedule but they’ll get in touch,” says Thornton, but as of the 100th anniversary on Monday, he was still waiting to hear back.

A few weeks ago, UEFA got in touch. “They sent us a message saying, ‘Hello Nelson from the banks of Lake Geneva. We’ve been alerted to the 100-year anniversary of your famous win against Real Madrid. I wonder if you had any plans for the big day?’”

Thornton asked for their help in arranging some sort of commemoration, particularly as Madrid will be nearby this week, “even if they just call up to the ground”. Though grateful for UEFA’s help, the best they could do was point him to Madrid’s communications department and essentially land him back where he started.

“There’s only so much you can do as a club, trying to get in touch with a club from another country, especially someone of that stature,” he says. The initial excitement of receiving emails with ‘@realmadrid.com’ in the address line has ebbed away. “We’ve exhausted all that we could.”

If he sounds slightly resigned to the possibility that the centenary year will pass without a match against a Madrid side to commemorate it, Thornton at least hopes the story will help earn the club some much-needed attention.

“Ultimately for a club like Nelson, where we are situated and the other clubs around us, it’s difficult to get people through the gates. Any kind of press that we could get on this — if you get a bumper crowd for one of the days, it probably sees us six months through the season.”

Thornton holds out hope that a message will pop out of the blue at some point during this centenary year, even if the only way would be to return to Spain. A local business owner has offered to pay for the squad’s flights if needs be.

At least this time the trip will not take two days. And Wells argues that, given the lengths the 1923 side went to make the match happen, something should be possible 100 years on.

“I just think it’s a bit sad really that they managed to do all this back in the 1920s, it took them two days to get there, all the travel that must have been involved. To do what they did at that time is amazing really, and it seems such a shame if it won’t be commemorated properly.”

Maybe a spot of subliminal messaging could do the trick. When Smith’s son visited the Bernabeu and browsed around the official club shop, he found a range of Madrid keyrings for every letter in the alphabet. He rearranged one row of them to read ‘N-E-L-S-O-N’.

“It shouldn’t be ignored,” Smith says. “This was a pioneering team. These were the first European matches because it was unheard of in the 1920s for teams to go across there and play.” To illustrate this point, he digs out a copy of John Motson’s history of the European Cup, published in 1980, from his garage.

In one chapter, the late broadcaster relays Nelson’s story, tracing a line between the 1923 tour, Santiago Bernabeu’s rise to Madrid’s club presidency in 1943, and his support for regular competitive matches between leading clubs across the continent: in other words, a European Cup.

Other students of European football’s history might have a bone to pick with Motson’s line of thinking, but after delving into the story of this small amateur team’s place in the history of arguably the biggest club in the world, it is hard not to resonate with his opening line to that chapter. “It was Nelson who started it.”

(Top photos: Mark Critchley/Nelson FC; design Sam Richardson)