The history of Barça and Portugal, however, dates back much earlier. An investigation by Fernando Arrechea and Eugen Scheinherr for the Football Notebooks of the Center for Research in the History and Statistics of Spanish Football (CIHEFE) revealed in 2017 that long before Figo and Mendonça a Portuguese had already defended Barça: Virgilo Da Costa, born in Porto on September 23, 1881. Things of life, Da Costa unites the destiny of Barça with that of Porto, a club of which he was a member, further distancing Barça from their rival this week, Benfica. Porto have always faced the teams of Lisbon, especially Benfica.
An engineer from Porto
The Portuguese, historically, have preferred not to look much at Spain, that neighbor of whom they joke saying, “We are always sad because we mourn the lost empire, but the Spaniards seem happy because they have not realized that they have also lost the his”. The pioneers of Portuguese football were young people from a good family who studied in England, the country with which they have always had the best trade relations, or Germany. Da Costa, an industrial technical engineer, studied from 1900 to 1905 at the Hochschule University of Applied Sciences in the city of Mittweida (Saxony), where he befriended a young German who years later would move to Barcelona for work: Udo Steinberg, one of the key figures in Catalan sport at the turn of the century, as he took part in the creation of the Real Club de Tennis Barcelona and was Barça’s manager and player in the club’s early years, where launched the first school for children: a seed that would eventually become the Masia, more or less. Steinberg, an industrial technical engineer like Da Costa, had arrived in Barcelona in 1899, where he ran the company La Maquinista Hispania in Barcelona. The German, in fact, was the author of the first goal in the history of the matches between Barça and Real Madrid, in 1902. Steinberg was also a good athlete and was one of the first editors of the sports newspaper The sports world. A versatile man.
He was the one who recruited Da Costa, who would play for Barça as a right winger from 1903 to 1906. He almost did not match Alfonso Albéniz, the son of the composer Isaac Albéniz, who would play for Barça from 1900 to 1902 before leaving for Madrid. Interestingly, Albéniz died in the 1940s in Portugal, in Estoril, where he moved. The Portuguese came from Hispania, another club in the city now gone, and for many years it was a mystery who he was, as his last name appeared misspelled. Sometimes, Acosta or D’acosta, which created doubts about their nationality. It was Fernando Arrechea and Eugen Scheinherr who were able to certify that, in fact, he was neither Catalan nor Italian. He was Portuguese. One of the clues followed was the satirical magazine Shot! of the 20s, where a joke appears, years after the player passed, which says: “They had a Portuguese named D´Acosta [sic], a close friend of an Englishman named Harris… “Da Costa would have discovered football in Germany, playing at the Mittweidaer Ballspiel-Club, before starting to be seen in Barcelona by Steinberg, playing both with the Hispania as with Barça, with the Barça club making their debut in the Catalan Championship against a club called Joventut on November 29, 1903. They won 3-0, but Barça finished fourth in that first edition of the Catalan Championship. In the midst of the 1903/1904 season, the Portuguese played seven games and scored a goal. On the other hand, he did not play a single game, which is why he is suspected of coming and going in Barcelona. in the few photographs of those years.
Da Costa would play his last Barça game in a friendly in 1906 and apparently did not remain linked with Barça, unlike Mittweidaer. In fact, he came to form a section of former German club players who roamed the Iberian Peninsula. His track is lost once he returns to Porto to work safely as an engineer. “We have his name on the list of founding members of Porto, but not much is known about his life. In all the specialized works on the history of the club he does not appear beyond that list,” explains Diogo Faria, historian and member of the communication department of this club.
Da Costa was a forgotten pioneer, a young man who devoted himself passionately to football at the turn of the century, before disappearing. For decades, Barça ignored its existence, thinking that the relationship with Portugal was born in the 60s when Mendonça arrived and also in the first official duel against a Portuguese rival, Benfica, in the sad final of the Berne sticks of the 1961. Barça have played 31 official matches against the Portuguese, especially Benfica and Porto (8 times), but also Belenenses (7 times), Sporting de Portugal (6 times) and Vitória de Guimarães (2) . Before that, however, he had played against the Portuguese in tournaments such as the Latin Cup – he won the 1949 final against Sporting – or in some friendlies.
.
