Blackpool F.C.
association football club in Blackpool, England

Blackpool Football Club is a professional association football club based in the seaside resort of Blackpool, Lancashire, England. The team competes in EFL League One, the third tier of the English football league system.
Founded in 1887, the club formerly played its home games at Raikes Hall and the Athletic Grounds before moving to Bloomfield Road in 1901. Blackpool were founder members of the Lancashire League in 1889 and were invited into the Football League Second Division in 1896. They failed re-election in 1899 but had their Football League membership reinstated the following year. From 1923 onwards, Blackpool have worn the tangerine shade of orange shirts, traditionally accompanied by white shorts and tangerine socks.
Blackpool remained in the Second Division until they won the league title in 1929–30, though they were relegated after three seasons in the First Division. Promoted again in 1936–37, the club entered a golden period under the stewardship of long-time manager Joe Smith. Blackpool lost the 1948 and 1951 FA Cup finals before winning the competition in 1953, the so-called "Matthews final", in which they beat Bolton Wanderers 4–3, overturning a 3–1 deficit in the closing stages of the game. That same year, four Blackpool players were in the England team which lost against Hungary at Wembley.
The public source identifies “Blackpool F.C.” as association football club in Blackpool, England. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Blackpool, association and football.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19449. The first chronological checks are 1887, 1901, 1889 and 1896.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blackpool F.C.” 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.