Meet Kwame Arthur Wharton, the First Black Professional Football Player in History.

Kwame Arthur Wharton, the first Black player to play in football history, was born in Gold Coast, for what is now called Ghana, in the year 1865.

Football, also known as soccer, is one of the best known and most followed sports in the world currently, with over 3.5 billion fans across the globe. The beginning of football can be traced back to the 19th century in England. Ebenezer Cobb Morley, who is recorded in history as the founding father of football in 1862, drafted the first 13 laws of the game for the first official game to be played in 1863 in England. This sport, soccer, has had many of the players from all continents, and in this article is the first Black professional player to play the game.

Arthur Kwame Wharton was born on the 28th of October 1865, just a few years after the first-ever football game was played. He was born in Jamestown in the Gold Coast, now Ghana, to a Grenadian Scottish father named Henry Wharton and a Ghanaian mother named Annie Florence Egyriba. In 1882, at the age of 19, Arthur Wharton moved to England to train as a Methodist missionary. He later abandoned his mission to the UK in becoming a full time  athlete.

He started by being an all-round sportsman in 1886. Had some taste of some various sporting disciplines like sprinting, cycling, and also cricket. Wharton began his professional football career playing as a goalkeeper for Darlington F.C. He later joined Preston North in the year 1886. Wharton was technically gifted in the goalkeeping position, and his clean sheet against Renton in one of his games was described by Athletic News as one of the best exhibitions of goalkeeping. Later on he moved form the goalkeeping position and played as an outfield player playing as a winger. (Source: Wiki)

Having developed a drinking problem after retirement, he got married to his wife Emma. He also joined the Volunteer Training Corps during World War I. In 1930 he died and was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. The grave was given a headstone in 1977 after a campaign by anti-racism campaigners Football Unites, Racism Divides.