THE location of the first-ever football pitch is now a college, bus depot staff car park and tool hire shop.
But without the origins of the oldest football club, we would never have heard of Pele.
The Brazilian all-time legend and three-time World Cup winner said on a visit to Yorkshire in 2007: “Without Sheffield FC, there wouldn’t be me.”
Sheffield FC were founded by Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest way back in 1857, making them the world’s maiden club.
And ‘The Club’ – as they are nicknamed – needed somewhere to play their very first match.
The location was a certain Thomas Turner’s field at East Bank beside Park House, where the original rules were drafted up.
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Park House served as the initial clubhouse and changing rooms, before the players would head out to the grass.
The historic building is no more.
But it is understood to have been on the junction of Olive Grove Road and East Bank Road to the south of the city centre.
And therefore it is generally thought that the very original football pitch was just to the south of Park House.
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That spot now, though, has been built on.
And instead of a football pitch, there is the site of MF Hire – where customers can borrow anything from cement mixers and drills to generators and scaffold towers – and the Advanced Technology Centre of Sheffield College.
Depending on the exact location of the pitch, the penalty area or centre circle may now be the area covered by the staff car park for the Olive Grove Road bus depot.
It may also have been where the railway tracks lie running into nearby Sheffield station, with direct services to and from London, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Norwich and even Plymouth.
According to records, Sheffield FC moved their home pitch literally a few metres west to another field at East Bank a few years later.
That enabled a new clubhouse on Strawberry Hall Lane – now Queens Road – and probably a higher, less boggy pitch that drained better in the winter.
Where the second pitch is thought to have been is now the B&Q car park.
By 1873, the club moved to a couple of hundred metres further west to Bramall Lane, now the home of Sheffield United.
They stayed there for 16 years then played at various grounds over the following decades before settling at Abbeydale Park after World War I for 60 years.
Further moves eventually led, in 2001, to Sheffield FC settling at their current ground behind the Coach & Horses pub in Dronfield, five miles south of the original East Bank site.
Sheffield FC played Manchester United in July 2001 in a match to officially open the new ground and the ninth-tier North Counties East Premier Division side remain there a quarter of a century later – although they did take on Inter Milan at Bramall Lane in 2007 to mark their 150th anniversary.
But after all these years away from Sheffield, plans are underway for the Club to return to Sheffield with a brand-new 5,000-capacity stadium in the city – which will be called the Home of Football.
