Chasing the Argonauts: The Club That Never Played a Match

Just Six More Votes

Eleven votes. That was the margin. Had just six members of the Football League switched their ballot from Merthyr Town to the new boys, the history of English football might have been very different. In 1928, a club that had never played a single match, had no settled squad and was little more than an idea on paper, came astonishingly close to being elected into the Third Division South. The club was Argonauts FC, the ghost ship of English football.

This was the brainchild of RW ‘Dick’ Stoley, a man steeped in the old amateur traditions of the game. A former Cambridge University and England player, Stoley was a relic from an era when gentlemen ran football, before professionalism was deemed anything other than vulgar. He looked at the professional game with a degree of disdain and looked north of the border with envy. In Scotland, Queen’s Park maintained their amateur status within the Scottish Football League, playing at Hampden Park and enjoying a protected status that shielded them from relegation until 1922. Stoley believed English amateurism deserved a similar champion.

His plan was audacious. He would create a club to represent the entire English amateur game, a sort of national team playing week-in, week-out in the Football League. He named them Argonauts FC, a nod to the classical education of the public school system that had codified the sport, following the tradition of clubs like Corinthians and leagues such as the Isthmian and Athenian. This club of heroes would embark on its own quest for a Golden Fleece: a place among the professionals.

A Stadium Fit for Heroes

Stoley was not thinking small. The initial plan was for Argonauts to be based at the White City Stadium, the vast venue built for the 1908 Olympic Games. He wrote to every Football League club to inform them of his intentions, immediately provoking the ire of the clubs whose territory he was threatening. Queens Park Rangers and Brentford, both struggling for support in west London, raised the loudest objections. They feared a high-profile amateur club could siphon off their already meagre crowds and jeopardise their existence.

Stoley, keen to appease his potential new neighbours, amended the plan. Argonauts would instead play their home games at Wembley Stadium.

The idea gained a powerful ally in ‘Athletic News’. The Manchester-based sporting paper, which once boasted a circulation of 170,000, championed the cause. It argued that a successful amateur club in the league could generate new interest in the amateur code and perhaps halt the drift of public schools towards rugby union. With this tailwind of support, the Argonauts committee went to the 1928 Football League elections with confidence. They polled strongly, but while Torquay United and Merthyr Town were re-elected, Argonauts fell just short. Eleven votes short.

The Dream Dissipates

That was to be the high-water mark. The club’s moment had passed as quickly as it arrived. They re-applied the following year, but this time faced stronger incumbents in Exeter City and Gillingham, established clubs having an off-season. Support for the Argonauts collapsed and they received just six votes. A final, almost inexplicable, application was made in 1930. The club still had not played a match. On this occasion, Merthyr Town were finally voted out, but their place was taken by Thames Association, not the Argonauts, who received zero votes.

The story of Thames Association serves as a cautionary tale for what might have been. Playing at the 120,000-capacity West Ham Stadium, they entered the league just as the Great Depression began to bite. Their entire existence was a disaster, notable only for holding the record for the lowest attendance in Football League history, when a mere 469 people watched them play Luton Town in December 1930. After two seasons of finishing at or near the bottom of the table, Thames resigned their place.

Dick Stoley did, however, get to see his dream of club football at Wembley realised, after a fashion. Ealing AFC, his own club, played eight matches there during the 1930-31 season. But Argonauts FC, the club he founded to teach the professionals a lesson, never did. The fact they came so close suggests the professional clubs were not entirely hostile to the idea of an amateur presence in their league. The old civil war between the codes had cooled since the formation of the Amateur Football Alliance in 1907. The dispute with QPR and Brentford seems to have been a minor hurdle, one Stoley was willing to clear by moving his proposed club. The fatal flaw was likely the most obvious one: Argonauts had no record, no team, no proof of concept. They were a phantom, asking for a place at the table based on an idea alone. Had they played even a season of friendlies, demonstrating their quality on the pitch, perhaps those six votes could have been swayed.

Would hiring Wembley have ever been financially viable? Could they have attracted the best amateur players from across the country, and how would that team have fared against hardened professionals? We will never know. Their failure to convince the League’s power brokers means the quest of Argonauts FC remains one of football’s great unanswered questions.