ABSTRACT
International soccer has a widespread reputation as a predominantly working-class sport, and in general this identity is well earned and deserved. However, in most countries football was introduced in the early 1900s to the local elite, who aspired to British power and prestige and emulated the educators and merchants of Great Britain. From there, the sport went through a transition period as it spread gradually into the general population, spurring professionalization and turning football into a mass activity within that nation. Almost every country in the world went through some form of this transition, usually establishing local styles in the barrios of Buenos Aires, the colonial battlegrounds of southwest Africa, and hundreds of other locations. Many writers have discussed this transition through the lens of professionalization itself or with a focus on working-class identity, but what is often lost in such discussions is that a transformation into a mass activity fundamentally requires the creation of fans. For the first time people must be drawn to the field and be willing to hand over money to watch with no possibility of participating themselves – instead they come to enjoy a spectacle. This essay focuses on some of the ways that Spanish football began to make the transition from a middle-class activity to a mass sport over the course of the 1910s. It was not until the 1920s that football truly gained a mass audience in Spain, but the 1910s were in many ways an even more critical period when clubs and organizational bodies established the institutions and identities that later allowed for rapid growth.
