José Luis Gallegos

José Luis Gallegos
José Luis Gallegos, second president of the Sevilla FC.
Born	José Luis Gallegos Arnosa 1880 Jerez de la Frontera, Andalusia, Spain
Died	1942 (aged 61-62) Seville, Spain
Citizenship	Spanish
Occupations	sports leader businessman
Known for	Registering and presiding over Sevilla FC
President of Sevilla FC
In office 1905–1908
Preceded by	Edward F. Johnston
Succeeded by	Carlos García Martínez
President of Sevilla FC
In office 1913–1914
Preceded by	José María Miró

José Luis Gallegos Arnosa (1880 – 1942) was a Spanish shipowner and commercial agent. He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the amateur beginnings of Sevilla FC, having been the fundamental head behind the registration of the club, which had been founded in 1890, in the Civil Registry of the province of Seville in 1905, thus finally making it an official football club, the first of such in the city of Seville. He then became the first official president of legalized Sevilla FC, a position that he held for three years between 1905 and 1908; he served two more terms, a few months as interim president in 1909 and in 1913–14.

Early life and education

Gallegos was born in 1880 in Jerez de la Frontera, Andalusia, as the son of Adolfo Gallegos, a winery foreman, and Petra Arnosa. He was the second of four children, including an older brother Adolfo who died at the age of just 22, and two younger sisters, María and Petra. The work of his father as an expert in wine production and cellar caretaker was recognized in the city of Cádiz and also in Seville, from where he received an important offer, so the family moved to there around the 1890s or at the beginning of the century. Although there is no exact information about the company that hired his father, it was most likely in the wine cellars and wine storage that had been recently set up by Francisco William Merry. José Luis Gallegos might have been introduced to football by a member of the Merry family, an ancient lineage of Irish origin.

His adaptation to the city was immediate, with the young Gallegos enjoying the singing cafés and music halls, which at that time were distributed throughout the city, but especially for the so-called Alameda de Hércules, a place for meetings and love dates. He only stayed in Seville for less than a year since his parents did not like the life that the young José Luis was leading, so they decided to send him to England to complete his training away from Seville. He visited cities of the stature of Oxford and Liverpool, one to train as a commercial expert, a career that he would ultimately not pursue.

During his stay in Great Britain, Gallegos became a polyglot due to his ease in the study of languages, so much so that he managed to learn English, French, and German in just four years there. In addition to languages, he also quickly learned how to play football, a sport that was booming in Great Britain at the time, becoming deeply interested in the regulations of this sport. He played several matches there because football was then considered a mandatory subject.

Life in Seville

In 1903, the 23-year-old Gallegos returned to Seville, where he established himself as a ship consignee and customs agent, which gave him a close relationship with the British who arrived at the port of Seville, where he befriended, among others Englishmen, Adam Wood, the captain of the Steamer Cordova, a ship that made the Seville-London route transporting bitter oranges for the making of jam.

Gallegos returned to Seville with great knowledge of this sport, being perhaps the Spanish who knew the most about football in Seville, and thus he began organizing numerous meetings between kids, even giving classes on theories and rules to develop that game in Seville. Most of these matches were played in a closed corral at the La Trinidad glass factory, which was owned by Luis Rodríguez Caso and led by his brother-in-law Rafael Giménez de Aragónguada, who would later be part of the group of Sevillistas who registered the club in 1905. These matches were held almost clandestinely since this sport was persecuted by the municipal authorities not only because it was considered an unseemly activity in the traditional Sevillian society, but also because they were considered indecorous due to their clothing and noise.

At the end of 1904, however, Gallegos championed this sport, more specifically in October 1904, when he, together with a group of young people, his friends Manuel Jiménez de León, Ángel Leániz, Tiburcio Alba, and Luis Ibarra among others, decided to begin the process of registering the Sevilla football club for three fundamental reasons: To give it a public character and put an end to clandestinity; to comply with the Royal Circular Order of 1902, which obliged associations to register in the Registry of Associations (previously it was not necessary); and to enable Sevilla FC to participate in the competitions that were beginning to be organized at the national level, such as the Copa del Rey, which had started in 1903. Gallegos was at the one at the helm of this group of young enthusiasts because he was probably the only one who had reached the age of majority in Spain, which at the time was 25 years of age.

Founding the Sevilla Football Club

Statutes of Sevilla Football Club.

Between October 1904 and January 1905, he created the club's new statutes, which were presented for approval by the civil governor José Contreras Carmona, and after the acceptance of the statutes and election of the board of directors on 23 September 1905, in which Gallegos was appointed president in a meeting of about forty members held at Tiburcio Alba's house on Génova Street, the club was finally registered in the Registry of Associations on 14 October 1905. Gallegos thus becomes the official founder of legalized Sevilla and the first inspirer of the entity's statutes. The founding speech that Gallego gave during the dinner held at the Pasaje de Oriente the day after the club was founded became very famous, with the club officially establishing its headquarters on Sierpes Street.

All men of any social level, religious or political ideas will have a place here.

José Luis Gallegos in his speech after the founding of the club, on 15 October 1905.

In this way, Gallegos reactivated Sevilla FC, since there is evidence that a football team with that name had already played in Seville between 1890 and 1893, which won the very first official football match in Spain against Recreativo de Huelva. He was accompanied in his initial management by young enthusiasts from wealthy families who had also played football in England and other foreign countries, and who had recently arrived from abroad, including from Great Britain, such as the Alba brothers (Tiburcio and Paco) and Mackenzie, others from Switzerland, such as the Zapata brothers (Manuel and Fermín) and Pepe Lafita, and even someone who came from France, Bezard, and Carlos Langdon, the son of John Sidney Langdon, a founding member and doctor of the Sevilla FC of the 1890s. A further connection between these two sides was that figures of both eras appeared in 1913 to found the Club Náutico de Sevilla, such as Gallegos, Paco Alba, and Laffita from the 1905 side, and Enrique Welton and Isaías White from the 1890 side, with the latter having served as the club's first secretary. Likewise, it is likely that this group led by Gallegos took its inspiration for Sevilla FC from the 1890 model.

President of the Sevilla Football Club

The club was also known as Sociedad de Football until the beginning of the 1910s because at the time it was the only society dedicated to football in the city, and thus, they only resumed its name as Sevilla FC with the appearance of another football club in the city called Sevilla Balompié, a team founded by the sons of senior Sevillian soldiers of the time.

In the autumn of 1905, the board of directors of Sevilla FC requested from the City Council a land known as the Huerto de la Mariana, which was located between the gardens of San Telmo and the Venta de Eritaña, in the place now occupied by the Plaza de América, for the practice of the club's sporting activities. It is said that the field was not bad, but it had a large tree that sometimes hindered the game, but at other times served to create wonderful walls between the players. Sevilla FC played on this field until the autumn of 1908, when the land was occupied by the Real Tennis Club, with football moving to other spaces closer to the Prado in San Sebastián.

Although the activity of the club decreased between 1906 and 1908 due to a lack of other clubs to play against, Sevilla's activity did not cease since Gallegos kept organizing football matches between the club's members; however, due to not being of interest to the press, the details and frequency of these matches is unknown. At the end of 1908 they already had more than 80 young people divided into different teams, and the first Sevillian derbies were then played in the beginning of 1909 between teams made up of players from Sevilla FC. In a Sevilla photo from 1907, the Sevilla president Gallegos and Benito Romero, manager and player can be seen in their own fair booth, displaying some photos, plaques, and paintings, probably referring to the team, as well as the club trophies, which have not yet been identified by modern historians, since the oldest trophy that the entity preserves is the 1912 Seville Cup.

Once he left the presidency in 1908, Gallegos continued to be closely linked to the club and even became interim president of the entity for a few months in 1909. Gallegos then had a second term between 11 October 1913 and January 1914, motivated by the departure of José María Miró. Years later, in 1914, in an interview with the local magazine El figaro, Gallegos stated that "the beginnings of 10 years ago were very difficult", being a very important contribution to the annals of Sevilla History.

Other sports

In addition to football, Gallegos became a patron of sports and promoted all the initiatives that arose in the city with the practice of some form of sport as the main argument. An example of this is the aforementioned Nautical Club, in whose foundation he actively participates, or in the Círculo Mercantil, whose board of directors he was a part of. This connection was later decisive for Sevilla FC to play on the commercial field, located in the Prado of San Sebastián.

Personal life

Gallegos married Soledad Bellido Caro (1889–1980), with whom he had three daughters: María Luisa, Josefina, and María del Carmen. His home was located in the famous Tiro de Línea neighborhood, specifically, on Avenida de los Teatinos, number 40.

A religious man, Gallegos was linked to the Brotherhood of the Great Power of Seville and also to the Brotherhood of the Lord of Seville, where his first-born grandson was baptized (1937–2012), who was named after him and who inherited and developed all of his attitudes in the town of Paradas in Seville.

Death

Gallegos died in Seville in 1942, at the age of either 61 or 62.