Bradford (Park Avenue) Association Football Club is an English
football club based in
Bradford,
West Yorkshire, England. Its name derived from the club's old stadium on
Horton Park Avenue in Bradford (designed by
Archibald Leitch), and was used to avoid confusion with
Bradford City. However the club is traditionally known simply as
Bradford, with the letters
BFC adorning Leitch's fine grandstand.
The present club is a reincarnation of the club which graced the Football League from 1908 to 1970 before dropping to the
Northern Premier League and going into liquidation in 1974. The new entity, established in 1987, is part of the
National League North for the 2015–16 season and plays its home matches at the 3,500-capacity
Horsfall Athletics Stadium. Bradford Park Avenue is one of 35 clubs to compete in all four top
tiers of English football. Indeed, the new club started life at what was then the thirteenth tier: Division Three of the West Riding County Amateur League.
The original club was formed in 1863 as the Bradford Football Club, playing
rugby football, and achieved its first major success by winning the
Yorkshire Cup in 1884. A member of the
Rugby Football Union (RFU), Bradford FC became a founding member of the breakaway
Northern Rugby Football Union (after an
internal RFU disputeover
broken-time payments) in 1895. Bradford won the
championship in
1903–04 and the
Challenge Cup in
1905–06.
In 1907, what is known as "The Great Betrayal" occurred when a narrow majority of members decided to abandon the Northern Union game (later known as
rugby league) in favour of Association football, still based at the
Park Avenue ground. The faction left the original club and formed a new Northern Union club,
Bradford Northern. Bradford Northern applied for membership of the Northern Union, replacing Bradford FC. On 23 August 2012, Bradford Park Avenue was one of the parties interested in purchasing the
Bradford Bulls (who had entered administration in June).
maybe
@JamesBT can tell us more ?
and post some pics of that fine filly.
