Sunderland Albion F.C.
football club
Sunderland Albion Football Club was an English association football club based in Sunderland, England, formed in 1888. The club played in the Football Alliance, a rival to the Football League, before disbanding in 1892.
History
Foundation
In December 1887, Sunderland A.F.C. beat Middlesbrough in an FA Cup replay. Middlesbrough protested on the basis that Sunderland had brought in three outsiders from Scotland, one of whom played under an assumed name; the FA upheld the protest and disqualified Sunderland.
Dissatisfied with the disqualification, on 13 March 1888, A.F.C.'s vice-captain James Allan held a meeting at The Empress Hotel in Union Street to form a new club, Sunderland Albion, to play on purely amateur lines. Seven Sunderland players defected to Albion along with Sunderland AFC's first President (Alderman George Potts).
The "amateur" nature of the new club led to cynicism that the "amateurism" was merely a device to enter Cup competitions, and that players - including the Scottish professionals - had been enticed away by some form of remuneration. The club denied this, stating its role was to fill a geographical gap, being primarily a representative of Bishopwearmouth rather than Monkwearmouth. However the club soon gained sponsorship from wealthy individuals, most noticeably from Allan's neighbour James Hartley, who owned the Wear Glass Works at Monkwearmouth, and breweries found sinecure jobs for players - Jimmy Hannah became landlord of the Free Gardeners Arms in Williamson Terrace, with the tenure taken over by John Rae - which enabled the players to claim still to be amateurs.
Albion's first fixture was on 5 May 1888 against Shankhouse.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sunderland Albion 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.