Charles William Miller
April 14, 1895: What is generally recognized as the first soccer, or "football," game in Brazil is played. Although it is unquestionably the match that popularized the sport in the largest nation in South America, its status as the first match is in dispute.
One alternate theory is that the 1st game was played in 1874, by foreign sailors on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. In 1878, crew members of the ship Criméia faced each other in an exhibition for Princess Isabel, daughter and regent of Emperor Pedro II. There appears to have been a match in Pará in May 1890, between two groups of employees of English corporations.
Charles William Miller, the son of a railway company employee, is widely credited as the "father of Brazilian football." Miller was born in 1874 in São Paulo, to a Scottish railway engineer and a Brazilian mother of English descent. He went to England to study at Banister Court School. He became interested in football, and, in 1894, when he returned to Brazil, he brought with him two balls in his suitcase. In an interview in 1952, a year before his death, he recalled:
On a cold fall afternoon in 1895, I gathered my friends and invited them to play a game of football. The name was a novelty in itself, since they had only known cricket at that time.
- What is this game like? - some ask.
- What ball are we going to play with? - others asked.
- I have the ball. What we need to do is to fill it up.
- Fill it with what - they asked.
- With air.
- Then go and get it and I'll fill it up.
And on April 14, 1895, at Várzea do Carmo in São Paulo, Miller captained a team of employees of the São Paulo Railway Company to a 4-2 win over employees of the São Paulo Gaz Company. All of them were Englishmen, or, like Miller, Brazilian-born sons of Englishmen.
In 1902, Miller founded the soccer team at the São Paulo Athletic Club, and their league, Liga Paulista de Foot-Ball, now known as the Campeonato Paulista, the State Championship of São Paulo. SPAC won it in 1902, 1903, 1904 (all with Miller in goal) and 1911. He also founded SPAC's rugby team, and is thus also considered the father of rugby union in Brazil. Although the Club stopped playing soccer in 1912, it has won rugby's Campeonato Brasileiro 10 times, most recently in 1999. Miller got rich in real estate, and died in 1953, at the age of 78.
By that point, Brazil had become one of the defining countries of soccer -- but, to their 1950 dismay, not yet the defining country of it.
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April 14, 1895 was a Sunday -- Easter Sunday. There were no scores in North American sports on this day: Baseball was in Spring Training, football was out of season, basketball barely existed, and hockey season had ended a month earlier, with the Montreal Victorias winning the Stanley Cup.
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