The first press release about the meetings of football teams in Mykolaіv
Authors: Martsincovskiy Igor 
Published: March 2024

Local periodicals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were studied. and local history literature from the funds of the State Archive of the Mykolaiv Region, the National Library of Ukraine named after V. I. Vernadskyi, the Odesa National Scientific Library, and the Mykolaiv Regional Universal Scientific Library to find out the history of the beginning of the game of football in Mykolaiv. In the shipbuilding city of Mykolaiv, which was previously closed to foreigners, where the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Empire was located, the possibility of commercial ships entering began in 1862, when the Commercial Port was opened with permission for the entry of foreign ships to visit and stay in the city of foreigners. Mykolaiv became one of the important ports for grain trade, where many foreign representative offices and banks were opened, commercial shipbuilding began to develop, and the cultural life of the city intensified. According to later local studies, it was established that, based on the memories of contemporaries, the first football meetings in Mykolaiv were started at the end of the 19th century. foreign sailors of merchant ships. Having adopted football traditions from foreigners, in 1901–1902 the teams of the city gymnasium and real school played football, and from 1906, the teams of the mechanical and technical school. At this time, street and district city football teams are created. Despite the fact that the first friendly meetings of football teams took place at the end of the 19th century, reports about the matches appeared in the local press only at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1908, Charles Bate, an employee of the bread office, organized the "Zebra" team, which played with foreigners and teams from educational institutions and sports clubs both in Mykolaiv and Odesa. Football matches took place on adapted sites, first near the Commercial Port, and later in different areas of the city. The referees of the matches were elected collegially from representatives of both opposing teams. Football matches were played according to English rules. The game of football at the time of its coverage in the local press was popular among the townspeople, especially among the youth of educational institutions, intelligentsia, and port workers. Newspaper articles cite examples of the presence of a significant number of spectators and fans, in connection with which the police had to be called in to maintain order. Local periodicals published not only announcements about scheduled meetings of football teams, notes with analysis of matches and their results, but also training schedules and sportsmen's runs around the city. Press publications announcing scheduled meetings, emotions from matches, the opportunity to observe and participate in joint training with popular athletes in the city contributed to the spread of football in the city. Most often, notes about football matches were printed by the "Nikolaevskaya newspaper", popular among the townspeople, with which a sports journalist probably cooperated, who did not indicate his surname or sign his authorship with the cryptonym Z-a.