Global Fútbol

It was 1922 when CD Tenerife came into being. At the Centro de Dependientes de Santa Cruz, specifically on 08 August of that year, Mario Garcia Cames (president), Juan Labory (secretary) and Julio Fernandez del Castillo (treasurer) started the ball rolling on a sporting project which is now about to celebrate 100 years.

In order to mark its centenary, the club has created a website which allows all football fans to get to know the legends, players, coaches and presidents who have passed through the island club though news stories and audiovisual content.

The creation of this digital collection, available to all fans, is the result of the reflection by the club's board of directors, headed by Miguel Concepcion, its senior management and the technical team working on the programme to celebrate CD Tenerife's centenary. In turn, they received the support of the 'History Projects' team within the club's foundation, the Fundacion Canaria del CD Tenerife.

Using digital media to ensure greater dissemination

The task of recovering and restoring the club's history has been a difficult one because "there was a lack of an archive or a place to learn about and enjoy its 100-year lifetime," Milagros Luis Brito, the assistant vice president and centenary events coordinator, begins by noting.

"In 1945, at the club headquarters on the centrally located Calle del Castilla, a horrific fire broke out and destroyed all of the material which had been accumulated from its creation to the mid-forties," he explains. "Minutes, reports, documents, clothing and trophies were lost forever. The records of its history were lost. The following years involved repeated changes of the headquarters, which did little to help protect the documentary heritage."

In order to undertake this initiative to recover it, or almost reconstitute it, it was decided that the most appropriate thing to do was to "approach the club's fanbase, the public on the island, as well as outside the Canaries, through a (digital) medium which would allow us to share information and details that help to better and more fully understand the evolution of CD Tenerife."

"Without giving up on a physical historical archive, we wanted to begin to share all of the historical information we have been amassing, and to do it using a digital medium to guarantee the greatest possible reach," he goes on to say.

The complex task of compiling historical archives and documents

The compilation work, "the most complex part of which has been obtaining information from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, has been performed along three lines". On the one hand, we searched for all references, including to matches played and members of the teams and club directors, in the main newspaper and periodicals libraries. Furthermore, references have also been found to cultural and financial elements, of great importance not just for the club, but also for the society of the Canary Islands as a whole.

On the other hand, the documentary and photographic side has been largely nourished "through donations made by important families in the club's history and from many fans, collaborating companies and supporters' groups, who have provided us with a range of objects and documents whose existence was unknown, and many of them of great value."

Finally, the audiovisual side has been vitally important, with the club having made contact with a range of television broadcasters which, particularly in the early '60s, followed CD Tenerife very closely and have an archive of important images. "Furthermore, the Foundation has worked intensely on locating and recording verbal sources. At this time, we have the recollections of people in their eighties and nineties who were directly involved and who can provide us with sporting, social and financial information of unquestionable value," adds the centenary events coordinator.

The moments which the fans are most curious about

To coincide with the celebration of its centenary, CD Tenerife has proposed to "recover and restore its past". "We want our history to be known, for it to be disseminated; we want knowledge to be the main factor in evaluating who we were and how we have come to form part of and to remain part of Spanish professional football in the 21st century."

Despite the brief time which the website has been online and the results not yet being conclusive, the club believes that it is being well-received by the fans. "This digital collection, expressed through very specific metrics, is showing, although it is still too early to say, that fans are especially interested in the period spanning from its creation (1922) to the beginning of the Civil War, promotion in 1989 and the subsequent qualification for the UEFA Cup, and the period with Jorge Valdano as manager. The Joan Gamper Trophy of 1993 is also generating a lot of curiosity," he ends by explaining.