Lisbon and Barcelona in Paris, Boxing Day 1920

A Portuguese club against a Catalan one, in France, two days after Christmas — the game already stateless.

Work: glass plate negative, Agence Rol, 26 December 1920
Maker: Agence Rol
Date: 1920
Ground: Stade Pershing, Paris
Era: The interwar game · 1919–1930
Source: Agence Rol / Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1920 · Wikimedia Commons

Period crests or marks appear inside this historic work. They are reproduced solely as part of the historical document, under the house’s historical-document doctrine — nothing modern is used or sold.

The rules travelled faster than anything else Britain exported.

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

The 26th of December, 1920, at the Stade Pershing: a Lisbon side and a Barcelona side, playing each other in Paris. Nobody involved was at home. Within twenty years of leaving Britain the game had become the first genuinely international leisure habit of the modern world, and this plate is what that looked like before anyone had a word for it — three countries in one fixture, arranged by nothing more than the fact that everyone now played the same game by the same rules. The Agence Rol photographer treated it as ordinary news, which is the remarkable part. The rules travelled faster than anything else Britain exported.

See it on your wall

The piece, in the room it was made for

Lisbon and Barcelona in Paris, Boxing Day 1920, printed large and framed — in the den, the club bar, the supporters’ bar. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

Lisbon and Barcelona in Paris, Boxing Day 1920 framed on the wall

About this reproduction

A reproduction of glass plate negative, Agence Rol, 26 December 1920 — Agence Rol, 1920 — from the copy held by Agence Rol / Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1920 · Wikimedia Commons. The source. The work was published before 1931 and is public-domain verified.
Printed faithful to that source scan — restore honestly, disclose always. We do not re-colour it, complete it, or interpret it; the piece you receive is the image as it survives, halftone grain honored as history, not damage.
Printed to order on museum-grade cotton-rag stock with pigment inks — the pairing is rated 100+ years.
Colour-managed to the source; the tone of the paper and the ink is the period’s, not ours.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed editions ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our pieces cost more than a poster: a poster is a mass run on wood-pulp stock, colour-corrected to whatever flattered the press that day. This is one sheet, pulled for you, at a size where the maker’s hand is visible — the linework, the halftone grain, the lettering — on materials made to outlast their owner.

From the same hand