The football was brought to Buenos Aires by the British immigrants, along with rugby, polo and other sports, in the 19th century.
In the latter half the 19th Century, the Argentine capital Buenos Aires had a large expatriate British community of some 40,000 people. As in many other parts of the world, football was introduced to Argentina by the British. On 20th. June 1867 was organized the first recorded football match in Argentina, by the Buenos Aires Cricket Club in Palermo, a neigborhood of Buenos Aires. It was played between two teams of British merchants, the White Caps and the Red Caps. The First team: Thomas Hogg, James Hogg, William Forrester, T.B. Smith, J.W. Bond, E.S. Smith, J. Rabsbottom y N.H. Smith.The other team:William Heald, T.R. Best, U. Smith, H.J. Barge, H. Willmont, R.M. Ramsay, J. Simpson y W. Boschetti. Hogg's team won by 4 goals to none. It was common in the early days of football for teams to be distinguished by caps rather than jerseys.
The so-called "Padre del Football argentino" (father of Argentine football) was a Glaswegian schoolteacher, Alexander Watson Hutton, who first taught football at the St Andrew's School in Buenos Aires in the early 1880s. On 4 February 1884 he founded the Buenos Aires English High School where he continued to instruct the pupils in the game. In 1891 Hutton established the Association Argentine Football League, the first football league outside of the British Isles. Five clubs competed but only one season of games were played. A new league, the The Argentine Association Football League was formed on February 21st, 1893 and this eventually became the "Asociación Argentina de Football" (Argentine Football Association). In these early days of football in Argentina nearly all of the players and officials were expatriate Britons or of British extraction and the oldest football clubs in Argentina like Rosario Central, Newell's Old Boys and Quilmes Athletic Club and were all founded by British expatriates. The most successful and admired team was "Alumni" founded by teachers graduates and students of Hutton's English High School. Like all of the early clubs it was mostly made up of British players, but Italian immigrants soon overtook the British as the surnames of players like Tesorieri, Ratto and Orsi reveal.
Most major clubs were created around the turn of the 20th century; they played on the national amateur tournament or in local championships. By then, matches had a considerable attendance.
In the 1930 FIFA World Cup, the world turned to South America for the first Football World Cup, held in Uruguay, and Argentina had an important role, losing to the host country in the final match. A year later, football was professionalized, and was already the most popular sport.
Since then, football just kept gaining popularity, and Argentina became a synonym of Football around the world. Many great players abandon Argentina to go to more important and better paid leagues such as the Spanish, the Italian and the English. Raimundo Orsi, Alfredo Di Stéfano, Omar Sivori, Mario Kempes, Diego Maradona, Gabriel Batistuta, and Juan Román Riquelme are just a few examples of the many Argentine footballers who have left the country to become famous in Europe.
Late in the 20th century women started practicing the sport in an amateur way, leading to the creation of the Argentina women's national football team, which participats of the "Sudamericano Femenino" since its creating in 1991, being runner-ups in 3 occasions. It also qualifyed for and participated at the FIFA Women's World Cup 2003.
