World's oldest football club to reform in Edinburgh

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Edinburgh FC, the world’s oldest football club, is set to join a Sunday league some 184 years after it was founded.

The club has officially been reformed by Kenny Cameron, a 27-year-old city youth worker from the Muirhouse area of Edinburgh, who was inspired to resurrect the team after a trip to the Scottish Museum of Football at Hampden.

Mr Cameron expressed his desire to carry on the work of the club’s founder, John Hope, an Edinburgh University law student who established the team in 1824 to help poor children in Dalry.

Speaking of the work carried out by Mr Hope, Cameron said: “We want to keep that aspect going. It was something that has stayed in the back of my mind since I learned about it at Hampden, and we were wanting to start up a football club anyway, so this all made sense.”

Strips for the newly-reformed club have been provided by major sporting manufacturer Umbro, and even FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who has committed to attending the team’s first dinner in October, has given the initiative his seal of approval.

With the help of two close friends, Alex Collop and Alex Downie, Cameron, a football enthusiast and Hearts fan, plans to put local coaches through SFA qualifications, and get as many young people involved in the project as possible.

The original team, named The Foot Ball Club of Edinburgh, was made up of lawyers, doctors and accountants from the New Town area, would play on a weekly basis every Saturday. As well as entering a competitive Sunday league, the club aims to honour this tradition by staging a weekly event at Leith Academy.

“On a Saturday it will be a bit like a golf club where members come and play against each other," Cameron explained. “We are also going to pick two charities, one local and one international, that we want to donate to. There is no shortage of people wanting to get involved.

It was thought for a long time that the oldest football club was Sheffield FC, founded in 1857. However, documents were found by the National Archives of Scotland which indicated that Edinburgh FC had been formed 33 year earlier.

Scottish Football Museum curator Richard McBrearty said: “This discovery has tremendous ramifications for Scotland's place in world football. What Mr Cameron is doing is terrific."

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