On the 12th of September 1885, Scottish club Arbroath FC achieved the biggest winning margin in a professional football by annihilating the hapless Bon Accord FC 36-0! The famous victory, an all time world record to this day, occurred in a Scottish Cup match that year. The story of this particular fixture is one of the most astounding in the entire history of British football. It all began when Bon Accord, a newly formed football club, received an invitation from the Scottish FA to participate in the 1885 Scottish Cup. The rules at the time stipulated that teams could take part in the tournament without any previous experience, so despite lacking an ounce of professionalism or even any footballing acumen, they excitedly accepted the invitation and were very pleased to draw Arbroath FC as their opponents, a club founded just a few years earlier in 1878.

 

Arbroath were a member of the 18 team Forfarshire Football Association and had established a name for themselves as cup specialists, helped along by defeating Dundee Harp 2-1 in the 1883 Forfarshire Cup in front a 5,000 crowd (not unsubstantial for those days). In 1884, Arbroath even defeated the mighty Glasgow Rangers 4-3, however after the Glasgow club complained that the pitch was too small, the match was controversially replayed and Arborath were subsequently beaten, trounced in fact, with an 8-1 scoreline. Poor Arbroath were disheartened and just didn’t have the spirit for the replay. Disappointed by this result, Arborath were determined to show their opponents absolutely no mercy in the following years Scottish Cup. The day soon arrived, and it’s said that Bon Accord rocked up to the match without anything resembling a standard kit or the necessary footwear – a precursor of what was to come. Their goalkeeper forgot that the match was even on, so he didn’t turn up at all. As a result, Bon Accord’s centre forward Andrew Lornie had to stand in goal – the very definition of a lamb to the slaughter. Bon Accord essentially lacked any footballing prowess whatsoever, and a total of zero players of theirs could possibly hope to compare to Arbroaths professionals.

 

In a match affected by heavy rain and lashing wind, Bon Accord conceded no less than 36 goals. They were lucky to get off that “lightly” in fact – the referee disallowed seven perfectly good goals as “offside” simply because he felt sorry for Bon Accord, but also because the weather conditions affected the game’s visibility. If these goals stood, it wood have been a 43-0 Arbroath victory. Every two and a half minutes, the ball was smashed past Bon Accords clueless stand-in goalkeeper, whose desperate dives were utterly futile. By half time, Arbroath were in the lead to the tune of 15-0.

 

As the score increased at an alarming rate and Arborath forwards John Petrie, David Crawford and Jim Buick terrorized and tormented the Bon Accord back line, the latter club, in desperation, needed to come up with a damage control strategy. They began cheating and time wasting. The match was played in the days before goal nets, so every time Bon Accord conceded a goal, they also needed to retrieve the ball. They showed a complete lack of interest or urgency in doing so. This unenviable task befell Lornie, who was more used to scoring goals than trying to stop them. At the other end of the pitch, Arbroath’s goalkeeper was extremely bored. He didn’t touch the ball for the whole game and spent its entirety sheltering from the rain under an umbrella provided to him by a spectator. John Petrie scored no less than 13 of the goals in this match, an all time record in football history, equalled by Australia’s Archie Thompson who scored 13 times against American Samoa in a single match in 2001 (a 31-0 victory).

 

As if the result of this match wasn’t enough (although it definitely was), on that same day less than 20 kilometeres away, Dundee Harps were busy destroying Aberdeen Rovers 35-0 following a much more subdued half-time score of only 16-0. The referee at this match eventually lost count of the score, and after some discussion with the Harps secretary, a 35-0 scoreline was decided upon. Had the ref’s original goal count of 37 stood, it would have been Dundee Harps holding the all-time record for goals scored in a single match. Harps player Tom O’Kane realised the significance of the victory and sent a telegram to his former Arbroath team mates proclaiming that he had taken part in the highest scoring match in football history, only to receive a telegram back stating that Arbroath had outdone him by winning 36-0. Initially believing that his old friends at Arbroath were playing a joke on him, O’Kane was mortified to learn on his return to the town that the result was in fact genuine. He realised that he was about to be written out of history, especially as the referee from his game had recorded a 37-0 score. Instead of going to bed that night, O’Kane ran the entire 18 miles from Arbroath to Dundee to try and get the result changed – but it was to no avail. Still, O’Kane wasn’t completely written out of history – he still received a mention on this site!

 

One legend surrounding the story of Arbroath vs Bon Accord is that, due to an administration error, the Scottish FA accidentally sent their invitation to Orion Cricket Club, who accepted and turned up for the game under the guise of Bon Accord FC, while the real Bon Accord were none the wiser. Might explain why they turned up without football kits. It’s generally considered, however, that this part of the story is made up by the Bon Accord players as a way to recover part of their tattered reputations, gradually being accepted as the truth with the passing of the years. If it’s any constellation to Bon Accord, even though Arborath scored 55 goals in the 1885 Scottish Cup, they didn’t win it – they were eliminated in the 4th round by Hibernian.

 

Arbroaths win has gone down in the annals of football history as the greatest winning margin of all time, although this has come under threat several times in the 135 years since. In the highly reknowned Madagascar league in 2002, AS Adema defeated SO L’emyrne 149-0 – however, this was because the latter club scored 149 own goals in protest of a contentious refereeing decision in the previous match that resulted in them being unable to compete for the title. Estonia’s FC Infronet Tallin recently equalled Arboarths record by smashing Virtsu Jalgpalliklubi 36-0. In Ecuador, before a “crowd” of 300, Pelileo Sporting Club demoralised Indi Native 44-1, however Guiness World Records ruled that the match was not of a high enough standing to replace Arbroaths achievement. 

Achievements: World Record holder – Biggest win in a professional football match, 36-0 vs Bon Accord, 1885

Star player: John Petrie dob 1867, pob Aberdeen, Scotland, nickname: Jockie

The history books don’t tell us a whole lot about this player. He is most famous though, for helping himself to 13 goals as an 18 year old in Arbroath’s famous 36-0 win over Bon Accord. In 2017, Arbroath FC put a call in an effort to track down Petrie’s descendants, but thus far none have come forward.