Story · Footballopedia
Nottingham Forest in 1865: From Shinney Players to Football Pioneers
Nottingham Forest began in 1865 when members of a shinney group chose football, later helping spread red club colours and the early FA Cup game.
A different sport at the Clinton Arms
Nottingham Forest's official history traces its creation to a meeting at the Clinton Arms on Shakespeare Street in 1865. The men involved had played shinney, a stick-and-ball sport related to hockey. According to the club's account, J. S. Scrimshaw proposed taking up football instead, and the group agreed. That is an unusually revealing origin story: Victorian clubs did not necessarily emerge because association football was already a fixed national institution. They grew from a broader culture of organised recreation in which people tried different sports and developed social networks through local clubs.
The choice to organise football mattered because competitions still required a web of opponents willing to accept comparable rules. England had founded its Football Association only two years earlier, and the reach of its code was not universal. Establishing a club in Nottingham was one small step in creating the interconnected sporting communities from which a wider football calendar could later be built.
The first fixture and a nearby rival
Forest's official history dates its first football match to 22 March 1866 against Notts County, a club founded in 1862. A nearby opponent was invaluable: teams could arrange meetings without the travel difficulties that limited early national competition. The Nottingham fixture also reminds us that two clubs in the same city can have quite different founding stories and institutional identities.
It would be misleading to project a modern professional derby directly onto an 1866 match. These were newly organised local clubs playing in an unsettled sporting landscape. Facilities, kit conventions and competition formats were still developing. What the fixture shows is more basic and more important: regular opponents enabled football to move from internal club recreation to a sustained public sporting tradition. As that network broadened, the same clubs could enter cup tournaments and eventually leagues.
Garibaldi red and an international symbol
At its founding meeting, Forest agreed to purchase tasselled caps in a red associated with Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Italian volunteers. The name Garibaldi red remained closely tied to the club. It is a striking example of the way nineteenth-century football identities drew on contemporary politics, fashion and civic culture rather than the later marketing logic of professional sports brands.
Red became a durable visual shorthand for Forest. Stories also connect its colours to Arsenal, whose early members included men with links to Nottingham football. That relationship requires care: Arsenal itself has published a historical investigation questioning the familiar tale that Forest simply donated an entire set of shirts. The broad influence of sporting colours and migrants is real, but the exact transactions should not be treated as certain merely because the anecdote has been repeated many times.
Cups, organisation and league football
Forest developed across the decades in which the FA Cup expanded beyond the clubs of London and the public-school tradition. Cup football could bring recognition to provincial clubs, although eligibility, travel and fixture arrangements all demanded effort. The club was also part of the changes that followed professionalisation and the rise of regular league football. Its journey did not move in one straight line; English football's competitions grew in stages and were shaped by regional rivalries.
In 1892 the Football League added a Second Division, showing how quickly organised competition had outgrown the twelve-club experiment of 1888. Forest belongs to that wider picture of clubs adjusting to a changing national structure. A club founded before football's institutions were mature had to adapt to new assumptions about fixtures, professional players, commercial grounds and the meaning of a successful season.
Why Forest's early history belongs in the bigger story
The most important lesson of Nottingham Forest's founding is its ordinary Victorian setting. Men who already knew one another through sport decided to play another game, selected colours and arranged matches. From that small organisational act grew a club with an enduring identity. No single detail proves the invention of football; together, the details show how the sport spread through local networks.
The proximity of Notts County provides a particularly useful comparison. Different early clubs could be established under different circumstances yet become part of the same competitions. Nottingham's football history also helps explain how rules and styles travelled between towns and how colours, fixtures and civic loyalty gave organised football its distinctive public culture. Looking beyond famous cup finals makes the nineteenth century easier to understand: clubs were institutions first, not merely teams on a scoresheet.