There is a village in the foothills of the Pyrenees; a small, quiet village with a railway slipping through it on its way from the Mediterranean two hours to the south towards the snow on the high peaks that mark the French border. The lower part of the village on one side of the embanked tracks is in small rectangles. Its three “calles”, its streets, are lined with neat, terraced brick-built workers' houses that have something of a local look but also something else. The clue to the something else is in the street-names themselves. The middle of the three is Escocia, Scotland. To the left is Paisley and to the right is Coats. The upper part of the village has the church, the graveyard and larger, newer houses and it middle part has old, large houses and buildings that have the air of other use, of administration but not office. And it is to this seemingly insignificant village that football first came not to Spain as a whole, that claim is Andalusia's, but to Catalonia.
The reason for football's arrival lies via two short tunnels in the railway embankment. Through there is the mill. Perhaps today it is flying the Catalonian flag from its central tower. When I was there it was The Saltire. The mill closed in 1955 after sixty years. Parts of it now are used for other purposes. Parts are empty but much of it including the chimney still stand. And in the valley beyond the river fed from the hills still flows and the canal that feeds of it further up-stream is still full. It once brought the river water that powered the whole factory. It still passes behind the late-Victorian-Edwardian pavilion that overlooks the sports field, the old factory field, with nets stowed away but its goalposts ready for the next game.
Coats, for that is the name of the builders of the mill and the lower village, came to Borgonya in 1894. They came from Paisley, just as they were to go to
Pawtucket
in the United States and elsewhere, to
Ipiranga in Brazil and from Borgonya to
Barcelona. And everywhere they went football would surely follow, not because they had an intrinsic interest in the game but because the people they employed carried a passion for it that they would deeply if unknowingly implant wherever they were sent.
The people were Scots. All of them worked for Coats. Many of them came from Paisley not to settle where the company willed them, although some did, but to pass on what they knew to locally-recruited workers. To do so took time, time enough for them to begin to do what they did at home. They lived their lives. Some raised families and had children with wives that came with them from home. Some started new families with wives they found in their new locations. They drank. They went to church. They associated. They played music and they played sport. The Asociacion de Torello was formed in 1895 and exists to this day. And in Borgonya and being mainly Scottish sport meant football.
When and where the first football was played in the village no-one knows. It must have been soon after the factory opened and was likely to have been a kick-about, perhaps at the end of Calle Coats on the open space that is now Placa del Pla de Can Salvans. What is known is that a proper game was already arranged in 1895. Fragments of those days remain, players’ names, predominantly Scottish names, Cochran, team captain, Paton, English, Munro, Lyle, Gerard, Cooper, Al. Nichol, A. Tong, H. Tong, Rushton and King. All with the exception of English are Paisley names of the time. All took part in a game against a Barcelona Football Society team in the Catalan capital, a game lost 6:3 but with Cochran at centre-forward scoring a hat-trick.
Coats clearly found the Spanish thread market to its liking. In 1900 it acquired a second, existing factory in Sant Andreu, now a north- Barcelona suburb, and once a centre for textiles and dyeing. The factory is still there, preserved as an arts-centre. The centre of its operations then moved from rural Borgonya to the bustle of the Catalan capital. But it does not change the fact there it was in Borgonya not Barca that football in North-East Spain began.