Learn about the incredible origin story of the Spanish club colors, which was heavily influenced by Scotland
Betis wears green and white for Celtic of Glasgow, where Manuel Ramos Asensio came to study at the beginning of the 20th century, at a school founded in 1875 by Brother Walfrid, also founder in 1887 of the club with which the Betic group began its in the Europa League on Thursday at Benito Villamarín.
Betis and Celtic are linked by this umbilical cord that leaves from Glasgow, according to the Betis historian Alfonso del Castillo, who points out in the club’s media that in November 1887 the Celtic Football Club was founded in the working-class neighborhood of East End. to alleviate the poverty of its inhabitants, mostly Irish emigrants.
The exploitation they suffered in Ireland and the potato famine that devastated the most disadvantaged classes led to massive emigration to the United States and also to England, where much of this Irish community concentrated in Liverpool and Glasgow, where today today the song ‘You´ll never walk alone’ is still being sung.
It was an Irish Marist religious named Andrew Kerins, Brother Walfrid, who founded the club, which from its origins wears green and white with vertical stripes until 1903, the year in which it changes them for the horizontal ones that it has seen until today.
In this Scotland of the early twentieth century he comes to study Manuel Ramos Asensio to the St. Josephs Marist College in Dumfries, founded by the same religious as the Celtic and where he already sees the green and white colors that he will take for him Sevilla Football, germ of Real Betis who wore a blue shirt and white shorts.
In November 1910, Sevilla Balompié wears the Verdiblanca shirt for the first time in the friendly with which the 1910-1911 season begins against Betis Football Club and it is Ramos Asensio who manages the arrival of these shirts from Scotland.
Are years of an intense commercial relationship of the port of Seville with the Scots from Ayr, Leith, Kirkaly or Ardrosam, from where steamboats such as Glenmore, Farraline, Carslile, Adamton, Cordova, Reading, Redruth, Rapid, Campeador, Lady Kirk, etc., arrived at the Guadalquivir every month to load iron ore and unloading coal as the main transportation.
Ramos Asensio, thanks to his command of the English language, arranges matches with the crews of these boats and jerseys and balls arrive in them for the initial steps of Sevillian football.
Sevilla Balompié will wear green and white in the following years and that color will also be that of Real Betis Balompié from the end of 1914, says Castillo, who adds that the outbreak of the First World War will cut off maritime and commercial relations between the port of Seville and Scottish ports.
The campaigns of the German submarines against the ships that supplied Great Britain will make maritime circulation very difficult, so the importation of sports equipment from the Islands will be suspended and the Betis returns in 1916 to the original blue t-shirts.
It was again in 1919, after the warfare ended, when the Verdiblancas shirts were recovered, of which there is graphic evidence in the tour of the Canary Islands in November of that year.
Manuel Ramos Asensio played with Real Betis Balompié until the 1917-18 season, later he moved to Cazalla de la Sierra, where he contributed to the formation in 1921 of the local club, Cazalla Sporting, which also wears green and white.
Celtic FC from its beginnings also had a following in Ireland, which led to the founding of a club in Belfast in 1891, which wore the same green and white colors and in which a young footballer named Patrick O’Connell, Don Patricio, would stand out. would take Betis to its historical peak with the conquest of the League in 1935.
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