TIL: there was an professional football team in Preston known as Preston Zingari F.C.

After watching Route None’s video on the rebellion that forced football to turn professional, I spotted an unfamiliar name amongst the teams that formed the breakaway “British F.A.”: Preston Zingari F.C. According to Wikipedia, the club was “active in the 1880s and 1890s”. They wore plain ruby shirts, white shorts, and ruby socks and played at Pleasure Gardens which was part of the wider Farringdon Park which closed in 1932. But the thing that naturally caught my eye was the “Zingari” part of the name. A little digging lead me to an amateur cricket teams from Australian and England, both called I Zingari. The name comes from a regional Italian word meaning “the Gypsies” and denoted the teams’ nomadic nature. That didn’t necessarily fit for Preston Zingari F.C. since they did have a home but that’s etymology anyway! They were a professional club, a rarity at the time when amateur football teams dominated. It was banned from entering the FA Cup after one appearance in the 1884–85 season…