Panionios Greek Football Pioneers Part 1

Panionios Greek Football Pioneers - Part 1

By Stephen Kountourou.

Every country's football heritage has a beginning. Football began in England with Sheffield FC, the first ever football club and slowly began to spread across the globe. Other pioneers like Genoa in Italy, Recreativo de Huelva in Spain, BFC Germania 1888 in Germany and Havre AC in France followed suit as the first football clubs of their respective countries. 

Since 2013, the world wide network known as the Club of Pioneers was founded with its aim to connect with the oldest existing football clubs. By building this global network by promoting the importance of football history, the oldest existing clubs of their country and professional and amateur game. They do this by holding the Pioneers Cup, which was competed for, inconsistently over the 2010s, all for the values of integrity, respect and community in football. But while there are official members of the Pioneers from all over the globe, one club has evaded the majority of the footballing world. 

Panionios, the oldest football club in Greece.

The ancient Greeks were known to have played different varieties of ball games some of which resembled a combination of rugby and football as mentioned by Greek playwright Antiphanes. But what we describe as modern football officially arrived on the shores of Greece, along with the British community and military expats who brought the beautiful game with them, in the early 1900s. 

From their, already well established athletics and gymnastics clubs in the ports of major cities such as Athens and Thessaloniki, as well as Greek communities in Constantinople and Smyrna, adopted football and it fast become the most popular sport in Greece, where it is still has a massive following to this day. 

The league system in Greece was formulated in 1927 as the Panhellenic Championship and would see multiple changes over the years with the league changing to the Alpha Ethniki in 1959 and again in 2006 with Super League Greece. 

A few years after the domestic leagues inception, the Greek Cup was formed in 1931, with entry originally optional for teams to compete in but eventually becoming mandatory. With the success of the Greek games for domestic giants, Olympiakos, Panathinaikos, AEK Athens and PAOK; Panionios, this Greek pioneer, who started it all for this football crazy country, are relevantly unknown outside of Greece as the oldest club in the nations history; until now.

In this five part series, I will be talking about the humble beginnings of a small sports and music club and how they helped bring football to the country of Greece. Like their community, the club was uprooted from its home in Symrna, now known as Ismir, after the Greco Turkish war and settled in their current and current home of Athens in Nea Smyrna, along with their age old rivals Apollon Smyrni. 

From there came memorable cup wins, close title misses, relegation, rebirth and returning financial trouble. 130 years in the making of Panionios, Greek football pioneers.

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