Arsenal promotion 1919

Sir Henry Norris, chairman of Arsenal, had done the Football League’s bidding since he took over Woolwich Arsenal.    He had turned them professional, with the aim of bringing professional football to London (and instantly bringing about the wrath of the London FA from which Woolwich Arsenal were expelled).   And then he had moved the team to Highbury, on the doorstep of Tottenham Hotspur, a club that for one reason or another had generated the dislike of both the League and individual clubs. 

Sir Henry had twice asked for payback from the League – once in his application to merge Fulham with Woolwich Arsenal, and once in seeking permission for Woolwich Arsenal to ground share with Fulham.   Both requests were denied.  These denials annoyed Norris, but added to the level of payback he required.

The move to Highbury had cost Norris dear – something in the order of £200,000 all told – an astronomic sum in the early 1900s.   Then disaster had struck – the ever expanding world of football had come off the rails, along with the rest of civilisation, with the outbreak of war in 1914.   The league struggled on to complete its fixtures in April 1915, and then ceased activity for the duration.   Norris had to bide his time – but he certainly was not going to forget that the League owed him.  Twice.

Read any history of Arsenal and you will be told that after the war the club was promoted from the second division to the first despite having only finished fifth in the final pre-war league.   What you won’t find is any explanation of how Arsenal managed to do it.  The details of the discussions are lost in the mists of time” and that “no knows what happened at the meeting” are the phrases you find.

By the time of the Football League AGM in June 1919 Norris had but one agenda.  Arsenal in the first division.   The promotion of two clubs from the second division to the first was well established by that time – the only problem being that Arsenal had come fifth in 1915.   There was nothing that gave them the right to go up.

But there was a loophole.   With the war over it was decided to enlarge the first division by two clubs.   The tradition of moving clubs between the leagues at the moment of expansion was simple – there was no tradition – it happened differently every time, and this was what Norris set out to exploit.   The only given standard was that the clubs in the league would vote on how to arrange the expansion – exactly what Norris needed.   There were two logical approaches – either the two clubs due to be relegated from the first division should stay up, or the clubs that ended third and fourth in the second division should go up.  Or there could be a combination – one of the two relegated clubs staying up and the third team coming up.   But no one ever said the League was logical.

Match fixing.

The top five in division 2 in 1915 were Derby, Preston, Barnsley, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Arsenal.   The two teams due for relegation from the 1^st division were Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea – both London teams.

But there was a subplot – as there invariably is with football.    Throughout the years up to 1915 there were ever increasing allegations of match fixing – mostly by players who were betting on results.  What was clear was that the authorities were powerless to do much about it, so widespread was the problem.   Indeed it is more than likely that the dominant viewpoint of the period was that any attempt to clean up the system would result in giving unwelcome publicity to the problem.   Better to pretend that it never existed.

However one match in that final pre-war season was so outrageously and obviously fixed that the authorities eventually had to act – not least because every newspaper in the country was carrying the story of the fix, and the effects that it had.

As a result the issue of Manchester Utd 2 Liverpool 0 became the first football ever to go to court, and the High Court ruled that the match was indeed a fixed.  What made the matter so difficult for the League was that this result had a direct affect on the bottom of the league – had the result been reversed Manchester United and Tottenham would have been in the two relegation spots rather than Chelsea and Tottenham.   Chelsea therefore were facing relegation as a result of a fixed match.

The League might have tried to fight its way out of its corner by ordering a re-match – but by the time the court had heard the case it was far too late – the country was at war and the league was in hibernation.  If anything was going to be done to resolve the injustice, it had to be done at the 1919 meeting of the League Management Committee.

How to expand

Prior to the war crowds had been rising, the game was more popular than ever, and the nation had been starved of its national sport for 4 years.   What’s more no one knew what the quality of the football being played would be like, with well over half of the men who were playing football before the war now either injured, deceased or too old to play. 

Expansion was agreed by everyone – but no one quite knew was how the first division would be expanded because each expansion had been handled differently.  For example, when at the end of the 1891/2 season division two was created, instead of a whole new division being built out of clubs not previously playing the League a far more extraordinary solution was evolved, with three teams (Man U, Nottm F and Sheffield W) coming straight into division 1 without having played in the League before, and one club –  Darwin – being relegated from division 1 to division 2 (how could they possibly know that Manchester United was a team more deserving of a place in division 1 than Darwin who had been playing there?)   The rest of division 2 was made up newly elected teams.

In 1894 they tried a different approach which involved Middlesbrough I (who finished 11 out of 15) being thrown out of the league while other teams were allowed in.

Through this early period in the league’s history clubs ending at the bottom of the first division were not automatically relegated – but instead played a series of Test Matches against the clubs ending top of the 2^nd division.   Also clubs ending up at or near the bottom of the second division could be thrown out all together in favour of newcomers.  Sometimes as in 1899 a team ending in the lower reaches could be kicked out while other clubs further down the league could stay put.

In 1898 when the leagues were each extended from 16 to 18 the bottom two in division 1 were not relegated, while the top two from division 2 went up – the first time a logical approach was tried.

Although the system did settle down a bit after the turn of the century there were still odd goings on – in 1905 for example the second division was expanded to 20 with 5 new clubs, but one team (Doncaster) was thrown out even though they very much wanted to stay.

Arsenal came bottom of the first division in 1913 and were relegated.  The following season- (the season affected by the match fixing scandal) they missed promotion on goal difference.  In the final pre-war season they came 5th.

At the end of the 1915 season the positions were

First division…

18^th  Manchester United – proven to have been involved in match fixing, and to have got two extra points through this

19^th  Chelsea – expecting relegation at the end of the season but only because of the match fixing

20^th  Tottenham – expecting relegation at the end of the season

Second division

Winners: Derby County – expecting promotion

Runners up: Preston North End – expecting promotion

3^rd – Barnsley

4^th – Wolverhampton Wanderers

5^th – Birmingham City

6^th – Arsenal

What made the AGM of the Football League want Arsenal?

Reports show that Norris was a board room bully who got his own way almost all of the time.    He undoubtedly was, but he was also something of a tactician, and the way he handled the June 1919 meeting of the League was masterful, reflecting his remarkable abilities which also had earned him his knighthood and a safe Conservative seat in Parliament.

Norris knew that he could blow his whole case for an Arsenal election to the first division if he pushed for this too quickly.  He recognised that if he were to get Arsenal into the top league it would only be as the final club added to the mix – there were many others with bigger claims than the Gunners.

He therefore went about the task of supporting other clubs in their demand for first division status.   First, he argued Chelsea’s case.  A match proven to have been fixed had cost Chelsea their place in the league.  That needed to be put right.  If it wasn’t, he argued, Chelsea could well disrupt the whole process of getting the league going again, by asking for a judicial review of the procedures of the league.   Chelsea it must be, said Norris, and Chelsea it was.

Next Norris supported the applications of Derby and Preston.   They had played in a league in which the prize for their positions was clearly promotion – to change that rule now would be contrary to all natural justice he said.   It was agreed – and with Chelsea’s place secured it now remained to decide exactly which club would be the final member of the enlarged league.

Two teams had an obvious claim.   Tottenham Hotspur, who could argue that as Chelsea had survived relegation so should they, and Barnsley who came third in the old second division.  

At this point Norris pulled his masterstroke.  Having led the meetings and gained agreement on three issues he suddenly took a back seat and let the Liverpool delegation suggest that the final member should be…. Norris’ Arsenal.

Norris clearly had the emotion of the meeting with him.    But the fact that Liverpool had sponsored Arsenal took delegates by surprise.   It shouldn’t have done.   The obvious fact is that Liverpool were involved in the match fixing row, and it is not impossible to imagine a scenario in which clubs banded together to have Liverpool thrown out of the league for conniving with Manchester United to have Chelsea relegated.   Norris was recognised throughout the league as the man who could pull strings, and Liverpool had every reason to be frightened of the havoc an angry Norris could bring down.   It is not hard to see how Norris’ argument went.   “I could call for a vote to have Manchester United and Liverpool expelled from the league,” Norris argued.   “In fact, anyone hoping to get promotion to the first division could call for a vote to have the clubs expelled – or at least demoted to the second division.    Now I can give you my word that I won’t do this – but that won’t help if one of the other top teams in the second division has a go.   

“No what you need is the meeting led in another direction – and I am the man to do this.”  And as we have seen Norris did just this, tackling the issues in turn, supporting Chelsea, 

Derby and Preston, effectively outmanoeuvring anyone who wanted to return to the match fixing debate.

Then in return Liverpool presented the Arsenal case.   On the face of it there was no case – there was no reason at all why Arsenal should be presented.  It was all waffle.  Except that Norris had once again prepared the ground.   Norris had reminded the key players at the meeting of some simple facts:

Chelsea Preston and Derby had already been primed of the fact that Norris would speak in their favour.  As Norris was no friend of any of these clubs (Fulham of which Norris was still a director, were the main rivals of Chelsea, and Norris had endlessly fought the case of London against the north) it might be expected that he would get little out of this.   But all three knew that there were no precedents for expansion procedure.   There was nothing to say Chelsea had to stay up, and indeed nothing to stop other teams being parachuted straight into the first division as had happened before.

This gave Norris three votes, along with that of Liverpool.  Manchester United were also supportive again being primed in advance of Norris tactics which included the promise of no retribution over the match fixing if Arsenal were elected.   That made five votes, plus obviously Arsenal’s own vote for themselves.

Norris now bought in other votes from the delegates still in the League from the time Woolwich Arsenal effectively introduced the League to London.  (Incidentally it is sometimes argued that this is a curious anomaly – that there was no reason for the clubs from Lancashire and Yorkshire to support any attempt to take the League to London.   The fact was however that from its very start the League had national aspirations, and until Woolwich Arsenal went professional it retained worries that the southern teams would form their own separate professional league.    By entering the Football League and refusing to curtail to the demands of the London FA Woolwich Arsenal had fulfilled the Leagues wishes.

Having done the rounds of those involved in taking professional football to London, Norris played his trump – the move to Highbury.  

Norris’ hand was irresistible.   Having gone professional he had asked the League for a favour in return, not once (the amalgamation with Fulham) but twice (the ground sharing scheme).  Both times the League had said no.  But then, showing their absolute loyalty to the League, Arsenal had still done the League’s bidding with the move to Tottenham’s doorstep, rather than go to a part of London that had no league team at the time.    This time, Norris said, he really did need his favours returned.  If not, how many more times would the League expect Arsenal to do its dirty work 

The argument was overwhelming.   The dislike of Tottenham was still there, and there in abundance.    Indeed the League had already relegated Tottenham to the second division without even a second glance.   The two factors that had made the League request Arsenal to move to within 3 miles of Tottenham were still in place – their association with the despised Southern League, their supposed association with the Jewish community – were still there.  

With six votes already in place, the arguments about professionalism, and about the move brought in the remaining votes and Arsenal were home and dry.  Against all the odds Arsenal were back in the First Division.

And Arsenal did not let the League down for the club has never been relegated since – a record of top division longevity far in excess of any rival. 

Of course it isn’t like this any more – everything is now totally correct and above board, with the F.A., the League, UEFA and FIFA acting honourably and in perfect harmony, and not a suggestion of anything underhand in sight.