Aston Villa is founded by members of a Wesleyan chapel cricket team.

A football club born not from ambition, but from a cricket team's reluctance to go indoors for winter.
On 21 November 1874, members of the Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel in Handsworth, Birmingham, formed Aston Villa Football Club. They needed something to keep the cricket team together through winter. Five years later, in 1879, a group of schoolteachers in the north-east founded Sunderland and District Teachers Association Football Club. Two clubs born from modest beginnings, neither with any notion of what lay ahead.












