Key Takeaways:
- Sheffield FC, founded on 24 October 1857, is recognised by both FIFA and the FA as the oldest club still playing association football, and now competes in the United Counties League Premier Division North.
- Hallam FC’s Sandygate ground has hosted football since Boxing Day 1860, when it staged the first inter-club match on record, and the Guinness Book of Records lists it as the oldest football ground in the world.
- Notts County, formed in 1862, is the oldest professional club anywhere, and Wrexham, formed in October 1864, is the oldest in Wales.
- Every club in the top 20 is English, Scottish or Welsh, because the game was codified in Britain in 1863 and did not spread abroad in club form until the 1870s and 1880s.
- Stoke City’s crest carries 1863, but academic research published in Soccer & Society found no contemporary record of the club before 1868, when The Field reported a new side forming in Stoke-upon-Trent.
Sheffield FC is the oldest football club in the world; it has been playing football since October 1857.
The club is older than the Football Association, the FA Cup, the offside law and every professional league on earth.
Nineteen other clubs formed in the fifteen years that followed are still going. Some sit in the Premier League. Most play in front of a few hundred people on a Saturday afternoon in the eighth, ninth or tenth tier of the English pyramid.
This list ranks the 20 oldest clubs still playing association football, in order of the foundation date their own records and the game’s governing bodies support. Where a date is contested, and several are, you get the evidence rather than the version that reads better.
What counts as the oldest football club
Three questions decide any version of this list, and different publications answer them differently.
- The first is whether the club was independent. Sheffield FC was formed by two members of a cricket club with no school, hospital or university behind it, and that is the specific reason FIFA and the FA hand it the title rather than Cambridge University AFC, whose surviving rules document is a year older.
- Second comes the question of code. Dublin University Football Club has a continuous history back to 1854, but it plays rugby union, so it does not belong on a list of association football clubs.
- Third is continuity. A club that folded and was later refounded by supporters under a similar name is a different entity, which is why the original Crystal Palace of 1861 does not put the current Premier League club near the top.
Applying all three leaves a top 20 running from 1857 to 1872, taking in an Army side, an amateur club in Chiswick, two Glasgow institutions and several clubs whose entire home crowd would fit inside one stand at Ibrox.
The 20 oldest football clubs in the world
1. Sheffield FC (1857)
Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest called the inaugural meeting at Parkfield House in Highfield on 24 October 1857. For three years there was nobody to play, so the club ran fixtures between married men and single men, and between one half of the alphabet and the other. The Sheffield Rules that followed introduced corners, free kicks and the header. Sheffield joined the FA in 1863 and then kept playing its own code until 1878. In 2004 FIFA awarded the club its Order of Merit, held by only one other club in the world, Real Madrid. Sheffield now plays at the Home of Football Stadium, in the ninth tier of the English pyramid.
2. Cray Wanderers (1860)
London’s oldest club grew out of lunchtime kickabouts between villagers from St Mary Cray and the labourers building the railway viaduct across the Cray Valley. The Wands then spent most of the next century and a half without a ground of their own. Planning permission for a new home at Flamingo Park in Chislehurst had to survive Bromley Council, an objection from the Mayor of London and a call-in by the Secretary of State before it was granted. The floodlights went on there for the first time in 2024, after roughly 45 years without a home of their own. Cray play in the Isthmian League Premier Division.
3. Hallam FC (1860)
Sheffield FC talked a second local cricket club into forming a football section, and Hallam has played at Sandygate ever since. The Guinness Book of Records lists Sandygate as the oldest football ground in the world, on a site that has hosted cricket since 1804. On Boxing Day 1860 the two clubs met there in the first inter-club match on record, Sheffield winning 2-0. The fixture is still played as the Rules derby, and in January 2025 a crowd of 1,496 came through the gates at Sandygate to watch it. Hallam won the Youdan Cup in 1867, the world’s first football tournament, and now sits in the Northern Counties East League.
4. Notts County (1862)
The Nottingham Guardian reported on 28 November 1862 that a football club had opened at Cremorne Gardens in the Meadows, with sides picked by W. Arkwright and Chas. Deakin. The first recorded match came two years later, on 8 December 1864 against Trent Valley at the Meadows Cricket Ground. County are the oldest professional club anywhere, a founding member of the Football League in 1888, and the reason Juventus play in black and white stripes. A single FA Cup, won in 1894 with a Jimmy Logan hat-trick against Bolton, is still the club’s only major trophy. It also made County the first side from outside the top division to win it.
5. Civil Service FC (1863)
Eleven clubs signed up at the Freemasons’ Tavern on 26 October 1863 to found the Football Association. Ten are gone, or play rugby now. Civil Service, listed that night as the War Office, is the only one of the eleven still playing association football, and the Crystal Palace present that evening has no connection to the Premier League club of the same name. It entered the first FA Cup in 1871-72 and kept entering until 1951. The club has stayed amateur throughout and plays in the Southern Amateur League at Kings House Sports Ground in Chiswick.
6. Royal Engineers AFC (1863)
The Sappers were formed at Chatham in 1863 out of the Corps of Royal Engineers, and they became one of the main developers of the passing game at a time when almost everyone else dribbled. The Engineers trained together and lived together, which their opponents did not, and that cohesion took them to four FA Cup finals between 1872 and 1878. They lost the first, 1-0 to Wanderers in front of about 2,000 people at Kennington Oval in March 1872, and lost again in 1874 before beating Old Etonians 2-0 in a replay to win the 1875 competition. The club still plays in Army FA competition, and its players are still serving soldiers.
7. Wrexham AFC (1864)
Edward Manners raised the idea at a cricket club dinner at the Turf Hotel in October 1864, and the new club played its first match on 22 October against the Prince of Wales Fire Brigade at the Racecourse. For decades, Wrexham used 1872 as its foundation date. Newspaper evidence found when the National Library of Wales digitised its archive pushed that back eight years, and the club adopted 1864 officially in 2012. Wrexham won the first Welsh Cup in 1878 and has taken it a record 23 times since. Under Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds, who bought the club in 2021, it has climbed out of the National League and into the Championship.
8. Brigg Town (1864)
The Lincolnshire Chronicle carried a report in early January 1864 of a match between the Gentlemen of Brigg and the Gentlemen of Lincoln, called off because frost had left the pitch too hard. That report is the earliest clear reference to organised football in the town. Brigg reached the final of the first Lincolnshire Senior Cup in 1881-82, lost it to Spilsby, and lost the final to Spilsby again the following year. The Zebras were founder members of the Lincolnshire League in 1948 and won it eight times. They play at the Hawthorns in the Northern Counties East League.
9. Nottingham Forest (1865)
Forest began as a group of shinty players who decided to switch codes. Their first recorded match, on 22 March 1866, was a goalless draw with Notts County, probably on the Forest Recreation Ground. The EFL now recognises Forest as its second-oldest member club behind County, on the grounds that the evidence for Stoke’s 1863 claim does not hold up. What happened between 1977 and 1980 is the outlier in the club’s history and arguably in the history of English football: a league title in their first season back in the First Division, then the European Cup in 1979 and again in 1980 under Brian Clough.
10. Queen’s Park (1867)
The minute of the founding meeting records the moment precisely: “a number of gentlemen met at No. 3 Eglinton Terrace for the purpose of forming a football club.” Queen’s Park gave Scotland all eleven of its players for the first international against England in 1872, helped found the SFA, and has won ten Scottish Cups. No other Scottish club has reached an FA Cup final; Queen’s Park reached two, in 1884 and 1885. Amateur status held for 152 years. Members then voted 91 per cent in favour of turning professional in November 2019, and the club sold Hampden Park to the SFA and moved next door into a redeveloped Lesser Hampden.
11. Sheffield Wednesday (1867)
A cricket club came first. The Wednesday Cricket Club had been going since 1820, named after the half-day its members took off work, and on 4 September 1867 it added a football section that eventually outgrew it. The word “Sheffield” was not added to the official name until 1929. Wednesday joined the Football League in 1892, won four First Division titles and three FA Cups before the Second World War, and took the League Cup in 1991 with a 1-0 win over Manchester United at Wembley. The club has not played top-flight football since 2000.
12. Stoke City (1868)
Stoke’s crest says 1863. Research by Martyn Cooke and Gary James, published in Soccer & Society in 2020, found no contemporary record of any football club in Stoke until 1868, when The Field reported a new club forming in Stoke-upon-Trent for the practice of association rules under H. J. Almond. Almond had arrived that year to work as an engineer on the North Staffordshire Railway. Stoke Ramblers played their first documented match on 17 October 1868, fifteen a side, a 1-1 draw with E. W. May’s XV, with Almond scoring. Stoke were founder members of the Football League in 1888.
13. Kilmarnock (1869)
Killie exist because of an argument. Kilmarnock Rugby Football Club, formed in 1868, split in early 1869 when part of the membership wanted to play association rules instead. The breakaway group became Kilmarnock FC on 5 January 1869, which makes it the oldest professional club in Scotland. Killie played in the very first match of the very first Scottish Cup, a 2-0 defeat to Renton at Hampden Park in Crosshill on 18 October 1873. Rugby Park has been home since 1899, named after the club’s previous ground, which hosted rugby and cricket first. A league title in 1965, a Fairs Cup semi-final in 1966-67 and a League Cup won against Celtic in 2012 are the club’s high points.
14. Maidenhead United (1870)
Maidenhead formed in October 1870 and played its first match that December, away at Bond’s Meadow against Windsor Home Park. It moved to the cricket club’s ground at York Road in February 1871 and has played there without a break since, which the FA and FIFA recognise as the longest continuous use of a senior football ground by a single club anywhere in the world. A blue plaque inside the home turnstiles records it. The Magpies entered the first FA Cup and reached the quarter-final three times during the 1870s. In 2026 the club published plans for a 5,000-seat replacement at Braywick Park, on the grounds that York Road cannot be expanded, hemmed in as it is by a road, a railway and a canal.
15. Marlow (1870)
Formed at the Compleat Angler Hotel on the Thames on 22 November 1870, Marlow put in a share of the £25 that paid for the first FA Cup trophy. The club has applied to enter every FA Cup since the competition began and has missed only one, in 1910-11. Cuthbert Ottaway played for Marlow in that first competition and captained England against Scotland the following year in the first recognised international. Marlow’s best run came in 1882. The club reached the semi-final and lost 5-0 to eventual winners Old Etonians at the Oval.
16. Stranraer (1870)
Scotland’s third-oldest club came out of an amalgamation of the town’s sides in 1870, though there are reports of games being played in Stranraer as early as 1865. It spent the next eighty years in regional competition in the south west, which made sense when getting a team to the central belt took the best part of a day. Stranraer moved to Stair Park in 1907 and stayed there. Floodlights did not arrive until 1981, by which point Stair Park was the last senior ground in England or Scotland to install them. The club’s one national final came in 1996, when it beat First Division champions St Johnstone 1-0 to win the Scottish Challenge Cup.
17. Reading (1871)
A group of young townsmen met at the Bridge Street Rooms over Christmas 1871, with Joseph Edward Sydenham in the chair. The first match followed on 21 February 1872, a goalless draw with Reading School at the Reading Recreation Ground, now King’s Meadow. Reading’s first trophy was the Berks and Bucks Senior Cup in March 1879, won with two internationals in defence, John Morgan of Wales and Edgar Field of England. The club moved to an enclosed ground at the Reading Cricket Ground in 1878. Reading is the oldest club ever to have played in the Premier League.
18. Uxbridge (1871)
The inaugural meeting was held on 3 February 1871. William Mansfield Gardiner, a local solicitor, was made president, subscriptions were fixed at two shillings and sixpence, and the colours were agreed as white shirts with a light blue Maltese cross. Two of the men in the room were the brothers Hubert and Frank Heron. Hubert won England caps while still an Uxbridge player, before moving to Wanderers. The club entered the FA Cup in 1873, beat Gitanos in the first round and then lost 2-1 to eventual finalists Royal Engineers. Uxbridge plays at Honeycroft in Yiewsley.
19. Rangers (1872)
Four teenagers walking through West End Park, now Kelvingrove Park, in March 1872 decided to start a club. Moses McNeil, his brother Peter, Peter Campbell and William McBeath were rowers first. Moses took the name from Swindon Rangers, which he had come across in a book about English rugby. The first match, in May 1872 on the public pitches at Fleshers’ Haugh on Glasgow Green, finished goalless against Callander, a club that folded two years later. Rangers has won more than fifty Scottish league titles and moved into Ibrox, designed by the stadium architect Archibald Leitch, in 1899.
20. Dumbarton (1872)
Founded on 23 December 1872, the Sons were a founder member of the Scottish Football League in 1890 and are the only club from that group still playing in it. They shared the first league title with Rangers in 1890-91, then won it outright the following season. The Scottish Cup came in 1883, after a replay against local rivals Vale of Leven. Their ground, The Rock, sits directly beneath Dumbarton Castle.
Why almost every club on the list is British
The FA was formed in London in 1863 and wrote the first set of laws that clubs from different towns could agree to play by. Before that, every school and town used its own code, which is why so many clubs founded in the 1850s and 1860s ended up as rugby sides. Football then travelled out of Britain with railway engineers, sailors, teachers and traders, and that took time.
Le Havre AC, set up in 1872 by English Protestants living in the Normandy port, is the oldest surviving club in France. Kjøbenhavns Boldklub in Denmark dates from 1876 and now sits inside FC København. FC St Gallen was founded on 19 April 1879 at the Restaurant Hörnli, and Royal Antwerp grew out of an athletics club started by local cyclists in 1880.
The gap runs to roughly two decades in every direction.
One club outside Britain has a genuine claim to belong in this company. Lima Cricket and Football Club was founded by the city’s British community in Peru in 1859 and describes itself as the oldest football-playing club in the Americas. It has always been a multi-sport club, and how much of that 1859 date attaches to football specifically is not well documented.
The clubs that just missed out
Every published version of this list differs, partly because sources disagree and partly because the cut-off falls in a crowded decade.
Other published lists also carry Harefield United, Fordingbridge Turks, Abingdon Town, Southall, Darwen, Cefn Druids and Halesowen Town. Their foundation dates come from aggregator sites rather than club or archive records, so none is ranked here.
Cambridge University AFC and Oxford University AFC are both left out on institutional grounds. Cambridge has the oldest documented date of any club in this article, a set of eleven rules from 1856 held at Shrewsbury School, and the FA marked its 150th anniversary with a plaque in 2006. FIFA and the FA still give the title to Sheffield, because Cambridge was attached to a university rather than open to all, and the same reasoning keeps Oxford, formed on 9 November 1871, out of the ranking.
More Information
FAQs
Which is the oldest football club in the world?
Sheffield FC, founded on 24 October 1857 and recognised by FIFA and the FA as the oldest club still playing association football. It was formed by two members of a Sheffield cricket club and spent three years with nobody to play against. The Sheffield Rules it wrote introduced corners, free kicks and the header.
What is the oldest professional football club?
Notts County, formed in Nottingham in 1862. Sheffield FC and Hallam are both older, but each stayed amateur after declining to turn professional in the 1880s. County were one of the twelve founder members of the Football League in 1888, and in 1894 became the first club from outside the top division to win the FA Cup, with a 4-1 win over Bolton in the final.
Which is the oldest football ground in the world?
Sandygate in Sheffield, home to Hallam FC since 1860 and listed as such by the Guinness Book of Records. Cricket has been played on the site since 1804. A separate record belongs to York Road in Maidenhead, which the FA and FIFA recognise as the senior ground used continuously by a single club for the longest period, since 1871.
Do any of the oldest football clubs still play in the top flight?
Three do in the 2026-27 season: Nottingham Forest in the Premier League, plus Rangers and Kilmarnock in the Scottish Premiership. Wrexham and Stoke City are in the Championship, with Sheffield Wednesday and Notts County in League One. Most of the twenty play below the National League and its Scottish equivalent, in front of crowds numbered in the hundreds.
The 20 Oldest Football Clubs in the World
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Key Takeaways:
Sheffield FC is the oldest football club in the world; it has been playing football since October 1857.
The club is older than the Football Association, the FA Cup, the offside law and every professional league on earth.
Nineteen other clubs formed in the fifteen years that followed are still going. Some sit in the Premier League. Most play in front of a few hundred people on a Saturday afternoon in the eighth, ninth or tenth tier of the English pyramid.
This list ranks the 20 oldest clubs still playing association football, in order of the foundation date their own records and the game’s governing bodies support. Where a date is contested, and several are, you get the evidence rather than the version that reads better.
What counts as the oldest football club
Three questions decide any version of this list, and different publications answer them differently.
Applying all three leaves a top 20 running from 1857 to 1872, taking in an Army side, an amateur club in Chiswick, two Glasgow institutions and several clubs whose entire home crowd would fit inside one stand at Ibrox.
The 20 oldest football clubs in the world
1. Sheffield FC (1857)
Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest called the inaugural meeting at Parkfield House in Highfield on 24 October 1857. For three years there was nobody to play, so the club ran fixtures between married men and single men, and between one half of the alphabet and the other. The Sheffield Rules that followed introduced corners, free kicks and the header. Sheffield joined the FA in 1863 and then kept playing its own code until 1878. In 2004 FIFA awarded the club its Order of Merit, held by only one other club in the world, Real Madrid. Sheffield now plays at the Home of Football Stadium, in the ninth tier of the English pyramid.
2. Cray Wanderers (1860)
London’s oldest club grew out of lunchtime kickabouts between villagers from St Mary Cray and the labourers building the railway viaduct across the Cray Valley. The Wands then spent most of the next century and a half without a ground of their own. Planning permission for a new home at Flamingo Park in Chislehurst had to survive Bromley Council, an objection from the Mayor of London and a call-in by the Secretary of State before it was granted. The floodlights went on there for the first time in 2024, after roughly 45 years without a home of their own. Cray play in the Isthmian League Premier Division.
3. Hallam FC (1860)
Sheffield FC talked a second local cricket club into forming a football section, and Hallam has played at Sandygate ever since. The Guinness Book of Records lists Sandygate as the oldest football ground in the world, on a site that has hosted cricket since 1804. On Boxing Day 1860 the two clubs met there in the first inter-club match on record, Sheffield winning 2-0. The fixture is still played as the Rules derby, and in January 2025 a crowd of 1,496 came through the gates at Sandygate to watch it. Hallam won the Youdan Cup in 1867, the world’s first football tournament, and now sits in the Northern Counties East League.
4. Notts County (1862)
The Nottingham Guardian reported on 28 November 1862 that a football club had opened at Cremorne Gardens in the Meadows, with sides picked by W. Arkwright and Chas. Deakin. The first recorded match came two years later, on 8 December 1864 against Trent Valley at the Meadows Cricket Ground. County are the oldest professional club anywhere, a founding member of the Football League in 1888, and the reason Juventus play in black and white stripes. A single FA Cup, won in 1894 with a Jimmy Logan hat-trick against Bolton, is still the club’s only major trophy. It also made County the first side from outside the top division to win it.
5. Civil Service FC (1863)
Eleven clubs signed up at the Freemasons’ Tavern on 26 October 1863 to found the Football Association. Ten are gone, or play rugby now. Civil Service, listed that night as the War Office, is the only one of the eleven still playing association football, and the Crystal Palace present that evening has no connection to the Premier League club of the same name. It entered the first FA Cup in 1871-72 and kept entering until 1951. The club has stayed amateur throughout and plays in the Southern Amateur League at Kings House Sports Ground in Chiswick.
6. Royal Engineers AFC (1863)
The Sappers were formed at Chatham in 1863 out of the Corps of Royal Engineers, and they became one of the main developers of the passing game at a time when almost everyone else dribbled. The Engineers trained together and lived together, which their opponents did not, and that cohesion took them to four FA Cup finals between 1872 and 1878. They lost the first, 1-0 to Wanderers in front of about 2,000 people at Kennington Oval in March 1872, and lost again in 1874 before beating Old Etonians 2-0 in a replay to win the 1875 competition. The club still plays in Army FA competition, and its players are still serving soldiers.
7. Wrexham AFC (1864)
Edward Manners raised the idea at a cricket club dinner at the Turf Hotel in October 1864, and the new club played its first match on 22 October against the Prince of Wales Fire Brigade at the Racecourse. For decades, Wrexham used 1872 as its foundation date. Newspaper evidence found when the National Library of Wales digitised its archive pushed that back eight years, and the club adopted 1864 officially in 2012. Wrexham won the first Welsh Cup in 1878 and has taken it a record 23 times since. Under Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds, who bought the club in 2021, it has climbed out of the National League and into the Championship.
8. Brigg Town (1864)
The Lincolnshire Chronicle carried a report in early January 1864 of a match between the Gentlemen of Brigg and the Gentlemen of Lincoln, called off because frost had left the pitch too hard. That report is the earliest clear reference to organised football in the town. Brigg reached the final of the first Lincolnshire Senior Cup in 1881-82, lost it to Spilsby, and lost the final to Spilsby again the following year. The Zebras were founder members of the Lincolnshire League in 1948 and won it eight times. They play at the Hawthorns in the Northern Counties East League.
9. Nottingham Forest (1865)
Forest began as a group of shinty players who decided to switch codes. Their first recorded match, on 22 March 1866, was a goalless draw with Notts County, probably on the Forest Recreation Ground. The EFL now recognises Forest as its second-oldest member club behind County, on the grounds that the evidence for Stoke’s 1863 claim does not hold up. What happened between 1977 and 1980 is the outlier in the club’s history and arguably in the history of English football: a league title in their first season back in the First Division, then the European Cup in 1979 and again in 1980 under Brian Clough.
10. Queen’s Park (1867)
The minute of the founding meeting records the moment precisely: “a number of gentlemen met at No. 3 Eglinton Terrace for the purpose of forming a football club.” Queen’s Park gave Scotland all eleven of its players for the first international against England in 1872, helped found the SFA, and has won ten Scottish Cups. No other Scottish club has reached an FA Cup final; Queen’s Park reached two, in 1884 and 1885. Amateur status held for 152 years. Members then voted 91 per cent in favour of turning professional in November 2019, and the club sold Hampden Park to the SFA and moved next door into a redeveloped Lesser Hampden.
11. Sheffield Wednesday (1867)
A cricket club came first. The Wednesday Cricket Club had been going since 1820, named after the half-day its members took off work, and on 4 September 1867 it added a football section that eventually outgrew it. The word “Sheffield” was not added to the official name until 1929. Wednesday joined the Football League in 1892, won four First Division titles and three FA Cups before the Second World War, and took the League Cup in 1991 with a 1-0 win over Manchester United at Wembley. The club has not played top-flight football since 2000.
12. Stoke City (1868)
Stoke’s crest says 1863. Research by Martyn Cooke and Gary James, published in Soccer & Society in 2020, found no contemporary record of any football club in Stoke until 1868, when The Field reported a new club forming in Stoke-upon-Trent for the practice of association rules under H. J. Almond. Almond had arrived that year to work as an engineer on the North Staffordshire Railway. Stoke Ramblers played their first documented match on 17 October 1868, fifteen a side, a 1-1 draw with E. W. May’s XV, with Almond scoring. Stoke were founder members of the Football League in 1888.
13. Kilmarnock (1869)
Killie exist because of an argument. Kilmarnock Rugby Football Club, formed in 1868, split in early 1869 when part of the membership wanted to play association rules instead. The breakaway group became Kilmarnock FC on 5 January 1869, which makes it the oldest professional club in Scotland. Killie played in the very first match of the very first Scottish Cup, a 2-0 defeat to Renton at Hampden Park in Crosshill on 18 October 1873. Rugby Park has been home since 1899, named after the club’s previous ground, which hosted rugby and cricket first. A league title in 1965, a Fairs Cup semi-final in 1966-67 and a League Cup won against Celtic in 2012 are the club’s high points.
14. Maidenhead United (1870)
Maidenhead formed in October 1870 and played its first match that December, away at Bond’s Meadow against Windsor Home Park. It moved to the cricket club’s ground at York Road in February 1871 and has played there without a break since, which the FA and FIFA recognise as the longest continuous use of a senior football ground by a single club anywhere in the world. A blue plaque inside the home turnstiles records it. The Magpies entered the first FA Cup and reached the quarter-final three times during the 1870s. In 2026 the club published plans for a 5,000-seat replacement at Braywick Park, on the grounds that York Road cannot be expanded, hemmed in as it is by a road, a railway and a canal.
15. Marlow (1870)
Formed at the Compleat Angler Hotel on the Thames on 22 November 1870, Marlow put in a share of the £25 that paid for the first FA Cup trophy. The club has applied to enter every FA Cup since the competition began and has missed only one, in 1910-11. Cuthbert Ottaway played for Marlow in that first competition and captained England against Scotland the following year in the first recognised international. Marlow’s best run came in 1882. The club reached the semi-final and lost 5-0 to eventual winners Old Etonians at the Oval.
16. Stranraer (1870)
Scotland’s third-oldest club came out of an amalgamation of the town’s sides in 1870, though there are reports of games being played in Stranraer as early as 1865. It spent the next eighty years in regional competition in the south west, which made sense when getting a team to the central belt took the best part of a day. Stranraer moved to Stair Park in 1907 and stayed there. Floodlights did not arrive until 1981, by which point Stair Park was the last senior ground in England or Scotland to install them. The club’s one national final came in 1996, when it beat First Division champions St Johnstone 1-0 to win the Scottish Challenge Cup.
17. Reading (1871)
A group of young townsmen met at the Bridge Street Rooms over Christmas 1871, with Joseph Edward Sydenham in the chair. The first match followed on 21 February 1872, a goalless draw with Reading School at the Reading Recreation Ground, now King’s Meadow. Reading’s first trophy was the Berks and Bucks Senior Cup in March 1879, won with two internationals in defence, John Morgan of Wales and Edgar Field of England. The club moved to an enclosed ground at the Reading Cricket Ground in 1878. Reading is the oldest club ever to have played in the Premier League.
18. Uxbridge (1871)
The inaugural meeting was held on 3 February 1871. William Mansfield Gardiner, a local solicitor, was made president, subscriptions were fixed at two shillings and sixpence, and the colours were agreed as white shirts with a light blue Maltese cross. Two of the men in the room were the brothers Hubert and Frank Heron. Hubert won England caps while still an Uxbridge player, before moving to Wanderers. The club entered the FA Cup in 1873, beat Gitanos in the first round and then lost 2-1 to eventual finalists Royal Engineers. Uxbridge plays at Honeycroft in Yiewsley.
19. Rangers (1872)
Four teenagers walking through West End Park, now Kelvingrove Park, in March 1872 decided to start a club. Moses McNeil, his brother Peter, Peter Campbell and William McBeath were rowers first. Moses took the name from Swindon Rangers, which he had come across in a book about English rugby. The first match, in May 1872 on the public pitches at Fleshers’ Haugh on Glasgow Green, finished goalless against Callander, a club that folded two years later. Rangers has won more than fifty Scottish league titles and moved into Ibrox, designed by the stadium architect Archibald Leitch, in 1899.
20. Dumbarton (1872)
Founded on 23 December 1872, the Sons were a founder member of the Scottish Football League in 1890 and are the only club from that group still playing in it. They shared the first league title with Rangers in 1890-91, then won it outright the following season. The Scottish Cup came in 1883, after a replay against local rivals Vale of Leven. Their ground, The Rock, sits directly beneath Dumbarton Castle.
Why almost every club on the list is British
The FA was formed in London in 1863 and wrote the first set of laws that clubs from different towns could agree to play by. Before that, every school and town used its own code, which is why so many clubs founded in the 1850s and 1860s ended up as rugby sides. Football then travelled out of Britain with railway engineers, sailors, teachers and traders, and that took time.
Le Havre AC, set up in 1872 by English Protestants living in the Normandy port, is the oldest surviving club in France. Kjøbenhavns Boldklub in Denmark dates from 1876 and now sits inside FC København. FC St Gallen was founded on 19 April 1879 at the Restaurant Hörnli, and Royal Antwerp grew out of an athletics club started by local cyclists in 1880.
The gap runs to roughly two decades in every direction.
One club outside Britain has a genuine claim to belong in this company. Lima Cricket and Football Club was founded by the city’s British community in Peru in 1859 and describes itself as the oldest football-playing club in the Americas. It has always been a multi-sport club, and how much of that 1859 date attaches to football specifically is not well documented.
The clubs that just missed out
Every published version of this list differs, partly because sources disagree and partly because the cut-off falls in a crowded decade.
Other published lists also carry Harefield United, Fordingbridge Turks, Abingdon Town, Southall, Darwen, Cefn Druids and Halesowen Town. Their foundation dates come from aggregator sites rather than club or archive records, so none is ranked here.
Cambridge University AFC and Oxford University AFC are both left out on institutional grounds. Cambridge has the oldest documented date of any club in this article, a set of eleven rules from 1856 held at Shrewsbury School, and the FA marked its 150th anniversary with a plaque in 2006. FIFA and the FA still give the title to Sheffield, because Cambridge was attached to a university rather than open to all, and the same reasoning keeps Oxford, formed on 9 November 1871, out of the ranking.
More Information
FAQs
Which is the oldest football club in the world?
Sheffield FC, founded on 24 October 1857 and recognised by FIFA and the FA as the oldest club still playing association football. It was formed by two members of a Sheffield cricket club and spent three years with nobody to play against. The Sheffield Rules it wrote introduced corners, free kicks and the header.
What is the oldest professional football club?
Notts County, formed in Nottingham in 1862. Sheffield FC and Hallam are both older, but each stayed amateur after declining to turn professional in the 1880s. County were one of the twelve founder members of the Football League in 1888, and in 1894 became the first club from outside the top division to win the FA Cup, with a 4-1 win over Bolton in the final.
Which is the oldest football ground in the world?
Sandygate in Sheffield, home to Hallam FC since 1860 and listed as such by the Guinness Book of Records. Cricket has been played on the site since 1804. A separate record belongs to York Road in Maidenhead, which the FA and FIFA recognise as the senior ground used continuously by a single club for the longest period, since 1871.
Do any of the oldest football clubs still play in the top flight?
Three do in the 2026-27 season: Nottingham Forest in the Premier League, plus Rangers and Kilmarnock in the Scottish Premiership. Wrexham and Stoke City are in the Championship, with Sheffield Wednesday and Notts County in League One. Most of the twenty play below the National League and its Scottish equivalent, in front of crowds numbered in the hundreds.
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