1896–97 Aston Villa F.C. season
season of football team
The 1896-97 English football season was Aston Villa's 9th season in the Football League. Villa were champions for the third time matching Sunderland's three wins. For good measure, the FA Cup was also won, to make Villa the second team to complete "The Double" after Preston North End in 1888–89.
It was the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and the Council had organised celebrations for 22 June 1897. The programme headlined "The Villa with the Cup". To the acclaimation of the crowd, the players sat on two long benches, facing each self-consciously, as a horse-drawn wagonette proceeded through Aston with the FA Cup in the centre.
This was the season during which Villa moved from Wellington Road to their current home at Villa Park. With growing crowds, it became increasingly apparent that the existing ground was inadequate. Vice-President, Charlie Johnstone's invaluable foresight was pivotal in the acquisition of Villa Park. The land at the Wellington Road ground had initially been sub-let to the club for £5.00 a year but, as Villa became more successful, the rent kept rising and rising and the landlord would not grant a sufficiently long lease to justify the massive expenditure need to improve the facilities to match the club's ambition.
“1896–97 Aston Villa F.C. season” enters the record as season of football team. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Aston, Villa and season can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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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 Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4557114. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1896, 1888 and 1897.
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This entry incorporates text from “1896–97 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.