Accrington FC Circa 1886

Accrington FC — Th’ Owd Reds

The original Accrington Football Club, widely known as Th’ Owd Reds, were founded in 1878 and stood among the true pioneers of the association game in Lancashire. Their home ground lay at Thorneyholme Road, a site that remains in sporting use today as the home of Accrington Cricket Club, underlining the town’s deep and continuous sporting heritage.

In their early years, Accrington wore red and black tops, but by 1880 these were replaced with plain red jerseys, a change that established the colour most closely associated with the club. Contemporary reporting gives us a rare and vivid glimpse into the nature of those early kits. An item in the Athletic News dated 31 October 1883 famously remarked that Accrington’s “brand new shirts of Turkey-red hung on their manly forms like wet sails,” strongly suggesting that, at least for that season, the club adopted looser, more voluminous shirts than the tighter jerseys worn previously. Such descriptions remind us how experimental and unsettled football attire still was during the 1880s.

A decade after their formation, Accrington secured their place in history as one of the twelve founder members of the Football League in 1888, drawn primarily from Lancashire and the Midlands. Their first League fixture took place on 8 September 1888 at Anfield Road, then the home of Everton, where Accrington were narrowly defeated 2–1. Though results were often hard-fought, the club struggled to keep pace with better-resourced rivals as the League quickly became more competitive and professionalised.

By the early 1890s, Accrington’s position had become precarious. After applying for re-election in 1891 and 1892, they finished 15th in the 1892–93 season and were forced into test matches to determine relegation to the newly created Second Division. Their final appearance as a First Division club came on 22 April 1893, when they lost 1–0 to Sheffield United at neutral Trent Bridge, Nottingham. The defeat confirmed their relegation.

Rather than accept demotion, Accrington chose to withdraw from the Football League, opting instead to join the Lancashire League, where travel costs and financial pressures were significantly lower. This decision, while pragmatic, marked the beginning of the end. After two seasons, the club moved again into the Lancashire Combination, but withdrew after just five matches.

The final blow came in January 1896, when a crushing 12–0 defeat to Darwen in the Lancashire Senior Cup effectively ended the club’s existence.

The original Accrington FC thus disappeared only eighteen years after its formation — a stark illustration of how fragile early football clubs could be in an era before gate receipts, television revenue, or financial safeguards.

It is important to note that Accrington FC should not be confused with Accrington Stanley, a later and entirely separate club whose history belongs to a different chapter of the town’s football story.