Where Football Clubs Come From: Founding Years of Association Football Clubs in Wikidata, from Sheffield FC in 1857 to Today

Association football spread from a handful of clubs in northern England in the 1850s and 1860s to almost every country on earth. I use Wikidata, the open knowledge base behind Wikipedia, to map that spread from the bottom up: every item that is an association football club, with its founding year, its dissolution year and a location. After removing national teams, reserve and youth sides, beach soccer and futsal teams and probable Australian rules clubs, 45,931 clubs remain, 27,079 (59%) with a founding year and 16,227 (35%) with a point. The oldest dated club Wikidata records in each of 222 countries and territories traces a diffusion front: 55 had a club before 1900 and 173 before 1950, and first clubs founded before 1900 lie a median 1,966 km from Sheffield against 6,894 km for those founded after 1950. Before 1900, 93% of new clubs were European and 59% were in the United Kingdom; the busiest year is 1919 (475 clubs), Europe's busiest decade the 1920s, and every other continent's the 2000s. Wikidata records 4,091 dissolutions, peaking in 1945 (174 clubs, 143 of them German). Coverage is very uneven: the Netherlands has 165 clubs per million people in Wikidata and Nigeria 0.6. The atlas maps what the open record says about where clubs come from, and is explicit about what it cannot say, including who founded them. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/football-origins/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/football-origins. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/football-origins/.