Jacob Levin

The English have always claimed that their soccer — err, football — was better than the rest of the world's. Hell, they invented the game! (The fact that they only won the World Cup once and the Euro exactly zero times is somehow glossed over. It's the referee's fault. Or those darn penalty kicks!)

It took a long time for the English to "allow" foreigners to play in their league. It wasn't until the creation of the Premier League in 1992 that internationals flooded to England. (As you can tell from the picture, we're a long time before 1992 here.) In the years that preceded World War I? You can count the foreigners on one hand.

There's Max Seeburg, German-born but English-raised, so he was sort of acceptable. There's Danish Olympian Nils Middelboe, who played over 100 games for Chelsea... but only home games, as he wasn't "mad about football". Even though he could make more money as a professional footballer, Middelboe decided to keep on being a full-time banker. (Imagine that today!)

And then there is Jacob Levin, a footnote in English footballing history. His parents, Baruch and Olga, emigrated from Ukraine to Sweden, changed their names to Maurice and Hulda, and raised their six children. The youngest, Jacob, proved to be quite a soccer player, making his way to the Swedish Olympic team in 1912! (They lost their only game.)

After the Olympics, Jacob sailed to England, where he caught the eye of the club Everton. He was given a three-game trial and...

This is why you won't see Levin on any of these early foreigner lists. He played in trial games, but never in one that counted. Nobody knows why, so we can blame the English dislike of football-playing foreigners? (And antisemitism? Let's also blame antisemitism.)

So rather a tiny footnote... But boy, do we love such a footnote!