In the late 19th century, the spread of foundational football codes resulted in three landmark first “international” matches in one decade—Rugby in 1871, Soccer in 1872, and Aussie Rules in 1879—with only two currently recognised by their world bodies. Geoffrey Gold revisits those formative contests, where local loyalties, emerging identities, and sporting innovation collided, shaping the distinct global paths of sporting competitions.
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| The world's first 'capped' international footballers of the first Rugby International in 1871 - Left: Scotland's (back): R. Munro, J.S. Thompson, J.W. Arthur, T. Chalmers; (standing): A. Buchanan, A.G. Colville, W. Forsyth, J.A. Mein, R.W. Irvine, W.D. Brown, A. Drew, W. Cross, J.F. Finlay, F.J. Moncrieff, G. Ritchie; (sitting): B. Ross, W. Lyall, T.R. Marshall, J.H. McFarlane, A.H. Robertson; and Right: England's J.E. Bentley, A.E. Gibson, F. Tobin), D.L.P. Turner, F. Stokes, J.H. Clayton, R.R. Osbourne, J.H. Luscombe; (middle): A.St G. Hammersley, W. MacLaren, C.W. Sherrard, A. Lyon, C.A. Crompton; (middle above): H.J.C. Turner, R.H. Birkett, J.F. Green; (below): A. Davenport, A.G. Guillemard, J.M. Dugdale, B.H. Burns. |
Each first international match was played on a cricket ground. Each involved contested rules and local rivalries. And each reflected a defining moment when the various distillation of folk games became something more organised, codified, and competitive on a grander scale.
Code Origins
The first rules of Association Football were laid down in late 1863 by Englishmen of the newly-formed Football Association (FA). The idea was to bring order to chaos for the dribbling game, fusing various English school and club customs into one code.
Rugby Union followed in 1871, when 21 clubs formed the Rugby Football Union (RFU) in England and, in June that year, restructured the game’s heritage of Rugby School rules of 1848, and other versions, into the first official standard laws of that handling code.
The first written rules of Australian Football were set down 17,000 km from London in the Colony of Victoria on 17 May of 1859 by members of the Melbourne Football Club, led by the likes of Australian-born Tom Wills, Englander JB Thompson, and Scotsman Alex Bruce. They aimed to create a winter game, originally for cricketers, suited to the hard, dry grounds of the southern antipodes and one distinct from the crowded, kicking-heavy English traditions and were quickly rewarded by its adoption by new clubs, beginning with Geelong in July.
Raeburn Place: Birth of Test rugby
The world’s first international in any football code came on 27 March 1871 at Raeburn Place, a cricket ground in Edinburgh, when Scotland hosted England in what would become formally known as Rugby Union. It followed the informal public challenge in Bell’s Life sporting magazine to the footballers of England by the captains of five Scottish rugby-playing clubs. England accepted.
In the absence of a functioning rugby football union in either realm, Edinburgh Academicals FC organised the event, “with ad hoc national committees selecting the respective teams”. A crowd of 4,000 watched the Scots prevail by a goal and a try to a solitary English try.
The RFU had been formed just two months before the 1871 game, the first standard rules were not confirmed until that June, and the Scottish Rugby Union was not formed until 1873. Yet today, World Rugby formally recognises the match as the first official international.
The first Rugby Union international outside the British ‘Home Nations’ wouldn’t arrive until May 1924, over half a century later, when France faced Romania in Paris during the Olympic Games.
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| The first Rugby international match - between England and Scotland on the Raeburn Place Cricket Ground on 27 March 1871 |
Hamilton Crescent: Soccer’s modest beginnings
The first official soccer international followed on 30 November 1872, at Hamilton Crescent, again a Scottish cricket ground, this time in Glasgow’s west end. A Scottish side drawn entirely from Queen’s Park FC played England, who fielded a composite team from nine clubs. The match ended 0–0 before a crowd of 4,000.
The FA had been in existence in England for nine years, but the Scottish Football Association wouldn’t be founded until March 1873, months after this first international had already kicked off.
Remarkably FIFA, the game’s global governing body, recognises a game also played between two British teams, one lacking a governing body and drawn from a single club, as football’s first official international match.
It would be 30 more years before two truly foreign nations, Austria and Hungary, met in a full international. But England vs Scotland had already written the script.
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| The first Association Football (Soccer) international match - between England and Scotland on the Hamilton Crescent Cricket Ground on 30 November 1872 |
East Melbourne: Where the Colonies collided
Australian Rules’ first international-style contest came on Tuesday 1 July 1879, a public holiday in Melbourne celebrating Victoria’s 1851 independence from New South Wales. Around 10,000 spectators turned up at the East Melbourne Cricket Ground to see the Victorian Football Association (VFA), which had been formed in May 1877, host the South Australian Football Association (SAFA), which was three weeks older, in what was billed as the first ‘inter-colonial’ match.
Playing under the ‘Victorian Rules of Football’, the Victorians thrashed their guests 7–0. As a goodwill gesture, or perhaps to soften the blow, a follow-up match was played four days later under the SAFA’s rules, but the result was no better: Victoria prevailed again, 4-1.
The games sparked intense local debate. One South Australian letter-writer lamented in the South Australian Register that “It behoves all South Australian footballers after the disastrous defeat of our team in Victoria, to consider what steps should be taken to prevent a repetition of the same. No doubt we were not represented by our best team, and the team labours under the drawbacks of playing under the Victorian code of rules, which does not permit slinging, and I have no doubt that had we adopted that code pure and simple a few years back we should now have been in a more forward position.”
The defeat stung. The following year, the SAFA formally aligned its playing rules with the Victorian Rules, including the banning of dangerous plays such as ‘tripping, hacking, rabbitting, and slinging’ (the latter described as the act of ‘catching a player by or around the neck and throwing him to the ground’).
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| The first Australian Rules Football international match - between Victoria and South Australia on the East Melbourne Cricket Ground on 1 July 1879 |
Recognition … delayed or denied?
Today, both FIFA and World Rugby unambiguously acknowledge those early Scotland v England matches as their first internationals—even though, in both cases, one of the participating teams had yet to form a governing body.
But the Australian Football League, the code’s peak body and inheritor of the laws of the game, has yet to formally recognise the 1879 clash as the sport’s first international. Instead, the game is still referred to as ‘inter-colonial’.
That might seem a quibble of terminology, but it speaks volumes about national identity and whose version of history gets to be told.
The long shadow of rivalry
Why the hesitation? Perhaps it’s a cringe, or lack of confidence on the world stage. Perhaps it’s the awkwardness of applying the term ‘international’ to a match between two future members of the same federated nation.
Or has it to do with South Australia’s long-held resentment towards its more populous and powerful neighbour? In 1879, the SAFA proudly rejected the full Victorian rulebook and had to swallow a bitter pill in aligning with it. As SAFA Chairman J. H. Sinclair remarked soon after, “although Victoria held the palm for footballers … the time was not far distant when the South Australians would be able to haul down the colours of the sister colony.”
The bruises from those first losses and the forced change in philosophy would linger for generations. Over 100 years later the rivalry between Victoria and South Australia exploded again in State of Origin battles during the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, where ‘Kick a Vic’ became the infamous chant of South Australian fans. Even in the 21st century, echoes of resentment linger, with accusations of AFL ‘Victorian bias’ never far from the surface.
What’s in a first?
Each of football’s early three has its own origin myth, with the same core irony: the ‘first international’ was less a meeting of nations than a contest of regions, tribes, and neighbours.
These were matches born not of geopolitics but of proximity – and rivalry. And yet, their outcomes rippled across continents and decades.
In rugby and soccer, today’s governing bodies embrace these origins, however makeshift they were.
It’s time the AFL caught up and acknowledged that the great 1879 clash between South Australia and Victoria was more than intercolonial. It was, by any meaningful definition, international.
It remains the only one of the three first international matches to be played between entirely separate polities – entities that would not federate until two decades later, in 1901.
Each of those first international matches – the 1871 rugby clash in Edinburgh, the 1872 soccer draw in Glasgow, the 1879 intercolonial in Melbourne – are more than equal footnotes of sports history. They were foundation meetings of political, cultural, and footballing identities, cross borders, under banners, in front of cheering crowds, that still influence today.
And if that’s not worthy of ‘international’ respect, what is?
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Geoffrey Gold is editor of Sports Asia and a sports diplomacy pioneer,
This article was first published in The Footy Almanac.