1880–81 Aston Villa F.C. season
Aston Villa 1880–81 football season

The 1880–81 English football season was Aston Villa's 2nd season in the Football Association Cup, the top-level football competition at the time. In 1881 Villa departed the FA Cup at the fourth-round stage.
In 1881 the referee is introduced to decide disputes between the umpires. The caution (for "ungentlemanly behaviour") and the sending-off (for violent conduct) appear in the laws for the first time.
FA Cup
Birmingham Senior Cup
Holders, Aston Villa participated in the 1880–81 Birmingham Senior Cup. They were runners-up to Walsall Swifts following a 1–0 defeat in the final at Aston Lower Grounds.
Villa, began the competition with a 6–0 victory away to Newport (Salop) on 6 November despite having to divide their squad as they also had a Staffordshire Senior Cup match scheduled for the same day. and had beat Sutton Coldfield 10-1 in the second. They benefited with a bye in the third round.
Walsall Swifts gained a surprise 1–0 win over Villa in the final, to gain the club's greatest success.
“1880–81 Aston Villa F.C. season” enters the record as aston Villa 1880–81 football season. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Aston, Villa and season can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q137862796. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1880 and 1881.
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This entry incorporates text from “1880–81 Aston Villa F.C. season” 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.