March 10, 1919: Arsenal Are Elected to the Football League's Division One

Sir Henry Norris

March 10, 1919: With World War I over, the Football League, England's soccer organization, holds a meeting to reorganize. In the leadup to this meeting, it was suggested -- as it turned out, correctly, even more than they suspected -- that the postwar market for football would be insatiable, and that Division One should be expanded from 20 to 22 teams.

This would seem to have been great news for West London team Chelsea, which had finished 19th in Division One; and for Middlesex team Tottenham Hotspur (in North London from 1965 onward), which had finished 20th and last. Now, in spite of their grand ineptitude, these 2 teams could keep their spaces in Division One and not be relegated; while the top 2 teams from Division Two in the last completed season, 1914-15, Derby County and Preston North End, could still keep their hard-earned promotions.

But it was revealed that the April 2, 1915 game at Old Trafford, which Manchester United had won 2-0 over Liverpool. had been fixed. There you have it: Proof that Manchester United were cheating bastards 26 years before Alex Ferguson was even born.

Man U were then desperate to avoid relegation: Had they lost, they, rather than Chelsea, would have finished 19th. Liverpool were willing to accept this loss: Man United were only 33 miles away, and, with transportation costs being what they were, the Scousers didn't want to lose a close, therefore relatively cheap, roadtrip.

Imagine Liverpool giving the club that has become their most hated opponents a break that saves them from relegation. Better yet: Imagine Man United being in position to be relegated. A wonderful thought.

By all rights, Chelsea were screwed out of 18th place and safety. By all rights, Man U should have been kicked out of the League. After all, it's not as though people in the Manchester area would be without a team: Manchester City, Manchester Central, Bolton Wanderers, Oldham Athletic, Bury F.C., Rochdale F.C. and Stockport County were all already in business. (Wigan Athletic would come later, in 1932, effectively if not geographically replacing Manchester Central, who went out of business due to the Great Depression.) But Man U were already one of the biggest clubs in the North of England, and a lot of people didn't want them kicked out.

Enter Sir Henry Norris, a real estate developer, a Member of Parliament who had been knighted for his work supporting the war effort, and also the chairman of Arsenal Football Club, of North London. He had a plan: He would bring several clubs in to vote to keep Man U in the League... if Man U and their allies would vote to bring Arsenal into Division One.

It worked: Chelsea rightly got the 21st spot, and Arsenal got the 22nd, even though they had finished 6th in Division Two in 1915. (A later check of the results showed they should have been listed as 5th, but that doesn't matter now.)

This election would seem to have screwed not only Tottenham, but Barnsley F.C. (a Yorkshire club that had finished 3rd in Division Two), Birmingham-area team Wolverhampton Wanderers (a.k.a. Wolves, 4th), and Birmingham City (a.k.a. Brum or the Brummies, officially 5th) out of that 22nd place. Yet all 3 of those clubs have been in the Premier League in recent years, and while their fans don't particularly like Arsenal (many fans admire Arsenal, but few genuinely like them), they never bring up the fact that "You screwed us out of the first division in 1919!"

Only Tottenham fans, separated from Arsenal by 4.7 miles, do that. To this day, Tottenham fans claim that there must have been bribery, that Norris must have paid off some of the club chairmen to vote Arsenal into Division One.

It has been over 100 years. More than a full century. Not one shred of evidence has ever been publicly produced that Norris bribed anyone to make it happen.

You want to call Norris' move underhanded? It might have been. But it was not corrupt. Not until 1987 would the League make a team's promotion be automatic: Until then, it was always by election. Granted, those elections nearly always turned a rightful promotion into a formality and a reality. But not always. Sometimes, it was based on other factors, such as convenience for the clubs' business managers.

This was one of the times that it was decided based on something other than finishing position, and, while it may have been odd, it was done within the rules of the time. Norris did not break the rules, he used the rules to his advantage. Possibly unfair, but absolutely legal at the time.

Indeed, there is more evidence that Tottenham bribed their way into the League at all in 1908 than there is that Arsenal bribed their way into Division One in 1919. Certainly, no one at the time publicly suggested that Norris had bribed anyone.

According to Andy Kelly from the website Untold Arsenal:

It looks like no one really questioned the events of 1919 for 33 years. Bernard Joy suggested that something underhand may have occurred in his book "Forward, Arsenal!" in 1952. Since then, every Arsenal history seems to have built on this, and Tottenham fans have latched on to it.

Why was nothing questioned at the time or in 1927, 1929, 1934 (when he died), or at any other time before someone decided to write a book?

Brian Glanville wrote an Arsenal history around the same time as Joy, but didn't feel the need to question the decision. However, following Joy's book, Glanville has increasingly vilified Norris even though no new evidence has come to light since.

And with Joy's and Glanville's histories full of holes and second-hand accounts, it's difficult to give them any credibility.

And, besides, as the team that finished last in the last season, Tottenham had far less right to gripe about Arsenal screwing them over than did Barnsley, Wolves or Brum. Spurs were last, and on merit, too.

Yet the story persists, and fans of other clubs who hate Arsenal are more than happy to pass the lie along.

Tottenham did rightly win promotion to Division One at the end of the 1919-20 season. You would think that, since (presuming that they were screwed at all) they were only screwed for 1 year, they would have gotten over it by then.

But since they can't claim to be a more successful club than Arsenal, or a bigger one, or a more admired one around the world, Tottenham fans hang onto this myth that Arsenal were corrupt in 1919 and cheated them.

It makes me wonder why they never blame Man United for screwing them. After all, if United hadn't fixed that game in 1915, they would have been 19th, and thus entitled to remain in Division One, and Arsenal wouldn't have been able to make arrangements, legal or otherwise, to get that 22nd spot. So why don't Spurs fans hate United?

Because hating Manchester United requires taste. And if Tottenham fans had any taste, they wouldn't be Tottenham fans.

On May 24, 1919, a friendly (what Americans would call an exhibition game) was played between Arsenal and Tottenham, at the Arsenal Stadium, known as Highbury for its neighborhood. This was technically a home game for Tottenham, as White Hart Lane, their home stadium since 1899, had been impounded by the British government for war-related activities. (The reverse was done for World War II: The government impounded Highbury, and Arsenal were forced to play at White Hart Lane until League play resumed in 1946.) The game ended 0-0.

It had been 10 weeks since the decision to give promotion to Arsenal and deny it to Tottenham had been made. And yet, not only had Tottenham decided to continue playing matches (there had been matches during the war, just not League or FA Cup matches) at Highbury until The Lane was given back to them at the start of the next season, they agreed to play this completely unnecessary friendly against their local rivals.

If Tottenham -- management, players or fans -- were so angry at that time about Arsenal using corrupt means to keep them out of Division One, then why would they have agreed to play this game at all? And why play this game, or any game, at Highbury? Why not find some other place to play, if The Lane hadn't yet come back under their control? Money? If the money was that good, surely, another nearby club could have gotten them a similar amount.

Yet another fact to demolish the lie that there was any thought, at the time, to Arsenal's "corruption." Whenever that story started, it wasn't in the Spring of 1919.

*

March 10, 1919 was a Monday. In North American major league sports, Baseball was in Spring Training, football was out of season, professional basketball barely existed.

In hockey, the Vancouver Millionaires beat their arch-rivals, the Victoria Cougars, 11-8 at the Denman Arena in Vancouver, to win the regular-season title in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association. And yet, over the next 4 days, they would lose the league's playoff title to the Seattle Metropolitans.

The Metros would play the Montreal Canadiens, Champions of the NHL, for the Stanley Cup. But the worldwide flu epidemic would interrupt the Finals, and no winner was crowned.