Atletico Madrid 1903–1939: Founding, Independence and Early Years

Thirty-six years without a trophy is an unpromising way to begin, and it is exactly how Atletico Madrid’s history starts. The first era is not about what the club won. It is about how a branch office of somebody else’s football club turned into an institution capable of winning anything at all.

A Branch, Not a Club

The founding date is 26 April 1903, and the founding name states the arrangement plainly: Athletic Club Sucursal de Madrid, the Madrid branch. Three Basque students living in the capital set it up as a youth offshoot of Athletic Bilbao, the club they had grown up with, so that Basques in Madrid had somewhere to play under a name they already answered to.

Everything about the early club followed from that. It took Bilbao’s name. It took Bilbao’s colours, the blue and white halved shirts, which is what the parent club wore in 1903. It bought its kits where Bilbao bought theirs, in England, and it had no independent identity to speak of.

1904: The Year the Character Changed

The first shift came fast and from the least likely direction. In 1904 the club was joined by dissident members of Real Madrid: players and officials who had fallen out across town and brought themselves over.

It is a detail that gets left out of most tellings of the derby, and it should not be. The two clubs exchanged people in their first years, and Atletico’s transformation from a Basque students’ society into a Madrid club with a Madrid membership began with an influx from the club it would spend the next century measuring itself against. The derby has a more tangled origin than the north–south shorthand suggests.

1911: The Shirts

At the turn of the 1910s both clubs abandoned blue and white for red and white stripes: Bilbao by 1910, Madrid in 1911, first worn competitively on 22 January.

Why remains genuinely disputed, with three surviving accounts and no way to choose between them: a botched 1909 kit-buying trip to England that returned with fifty Southampton shirts, the cheapness of red-and-white mattress ticking, and a 2023 claim for Sunderland as the source instead. The full argument sets out all three.

What is not disputed is the detail that mattered. Madrid kept their blue shorts; Bilbao moved to black. It is the first recorded instance of the branch club making a decision the parent club did not, and it is still how the two kits are told apart.

1921: Independence

Formal separation came in 1921. Eighteen years after being founded as an offshoot, Athletic Madrid became a club in its own right, and the relationship with Bilbao, traced in full on the connection page, was never re-established.

Independence did not bring silverware. The club reached the Copa del Rey final in 1920–21 and again in 1925–26 and lost both. When La Liga was established in 1929 Atletico were there for the first season, and the years that followed brought two Segunda División runner-up finishes, in 1932–33 and 1933–34, which places the club outside the top flight in that period rather than contending in it.

Reading the Era Against What Followed

It is worth being precise about how thin the record is, because the contrast with the next era is the whole point. In thirty-six years the club won no league championship, no Copa del Rey, and nothing in Europe, which did not yet exist for clubs. It reached two national cup finals, in 1920–21 and 1925–26, and lost both. When La Liga began in 1929 Atletico were among the founding participants, and within four years the club was finishing as runners-up in the Segunda División rather than contending in the first, since 1932–33 and 1933–34 both ended that way.

Set against the eleven league titles and ten cups the club now holds, an entire founding generation produced nothing that appears on the honours list at all.

What it produced instead is everything that could not be won. A name that survived three later revisions. A shirt that has not fundamentally changed since 1911 and is still the first thing anyone recognises. A city rivalry that already had a decade of shared personnel behind it. And a supporter base built, from the start, around a club that was somebody else’s idea.

The most useful way to read 1903 to 1939 is as the period in which Atletico Madrid acquired an identity it would spend the following eighty years attaching trophies to.

What the Era Left Behind

No major honours, and a set of things that would outlast every trophy: a name, a shirt, a city, and a rivalry that already had history in it. The club that would win the league in its very next era was, by 1939, thirty-six years old and had never finished a season as champion of anything.

What changed that was not a signing or a manager. It was a merger, and it is the subject of the next era.