New Zealand
Today the New Zealand Football Championship, the country's top league consists of ten teams, three from Auckland, seven from North Island, three from South. But all bar one of the teams has only seen existence in this century and the exception is only just over eighty years old. Yet in the Land of the Long, White Cloud football, association football has a far longer history than that. It is just that, after half century of slow but healthy, initial development, for fifty more or so in the face of rugby it lay not dormant but, shall we say, resting. And although the doyen of today's Kiwi clubs, North Shore, from Davenport across the water from Auckland on North Island, was formed in 1886, it was South Island with its considerable Scots input that was until modern times the more important cradle of the game both before and after Devonport's foundation. It is just that records of the game from that era are frankly sketchy but here is what we now know.........