January 17 – Record Breakers | On This Football Day

January 17 – Record Breakers

HAVE you ever wondered what the record attendance for an English Football League match is? No? Well we are going to tell you anyway.

Today way back in 1948, 83,260 souls crammed inside Maine Road to watch eleven players kick a ball about in black and white.

The slightly interesting factlet about this stat is that the two teams playing that day did not include Maine Road’s owners Manchester City – Hitler had seen to that. The German Chancellor and shouting enthusiast had ordered his Luftwaffe to lay waste to Britain’s war-enabling infrastructure but the duffers had shown they were about as accurate as an England penalty taker when they dropped some of their bombs on Old Trafford in 1941. With much of the ground destroyed United were forced to grovel cap in hand to their cross town rivals for somewhere to play once football started up again after the war. City were only too happy to oblige, for £5,000 per year.

So it was that Manchester United were playing at the famous old ground that record breaking day when the visitors were Arsenal. The two sides ground out a 1-1 draw and the crowd went home, most likely unaware that they had helped set a new attendance record.

The season would shake out much as it has in recent years with Arsenal winning the League, ahead of United who finished as runners-up, although they did console themselves with the FA Cup – the first trophy of Matt Busby’s managerial tenure.

It is unlikely the record set that day will ever be broken given that all major stadia are now all-seater by law. Manchester United do of course still set the biggest modern-day attendance records but they now do it back at Old Trafford which with a capacity of 76,212 beats the nearest challenger the Emirates Stadium by nearly 16,000.

The Arsenal manager who was in charge that day was long time club servant Tom Whittaker who started as a player and then went on to be Herbert Chapman’s deputy, and that of Chapman’s successor George Allison. Whittaker took over after Allison left, but have a look at a nice little clip below of a camera-shy Chapman and Whittaker introducing the Arsenal starting 11 from way back when God was a boy.

That’s it for now folks, but have a look here to find out which South American star with possibly the best nickname in football was born on this day.