1871 in sports
overview of sports-related events during the year of 1871
1871 in sports describes the year's events in world sport.
American football
College championship
College football national championship – none
Events
The 1871 college football season is the only one since the first season in 1869 until the present day that no games are played in the entire season. Thus 1871 is the only year since play began in which no college football national champion can be named, retrospectively or otherwise.
Association football
England
Inaugural FA Cup competition begins with four matches played on 11 November. The 15 clubs entering the competition are all amateur and mainly from the London area: Barnes, Civil Service, Clapham Rovers, Crystal Palace (1861), Donnington School, Hampstead Heathens, Harrow Chequers, Hitchin, Maidenhead, Marlow, Reigate, Priory, Royal Engineers, Upton Park, The Wanderers and Queen's Park (Glasgow).
The Wanderers win the Cup on 16 March 1872.
Baseball
National championship
National Association of Professional Base Ball Players champion – Philadelphia Athletics
Events
March — ten NABBP clubs found the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, the first professional sports league. (Today it is commonly considered the first major league and usually called simply the "National Association" or "NA".) Thirty-three clubs establish a parallel amateur NAABBP that withers away.
There are nine NA teams in the field and Athletic of Philadelphia wins the championship in the final game, 30 October.
Boxing
Events
With the main American Championship title claimant Mike McCoole inactive this year, attention focuses on two fights between Jem Mace and Joe Coburn.
The public source identifies “1871 in sports” as overview of sports-related events during the year of 1871. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around sports, overview and sports-related.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2791054. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1871, 1869, 1861 and 1872.
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This entry incorporates text from “1871 in sports” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.