Club Sparta
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| Founded | 16 June 1899 (124 years ago) | |||
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| Stadium | Estadio Sparta | |||
| Stadium capacity | 55000 | |||
| Owner | Lutz Group | |||
| President | Leticia Lutz | |||
| League | The Premiership | |||
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Club Sparta is a multi-sports club in the city of Sirenia, Lisander. Founded in 1899 by doctor Juliano Lutz, it is the largest sports club in Lisander in terms of membership — 78,000 (almost a third of Sirenia population), according to its own records. Sparta is also the only team to have won every national team championship disputed in one season, a feat it achieved in 1949. Today, Sparta's teams compete in the national top division in many sports, including Football, Rugby, Field Hockey, Ice Hockey and Basketball.
History
Juliano Lutz was a 25-year-old doctor who had just graduated and was the sole heir of Herminio Lutz, a textile industrialist. When his father died in 1896, he was forced to take charge of the company's operations, which were going through a somewhat troubled phase.
As a way of increasing the productivity of his employees (120, an exorbitant number for the time), Lutz bought a farm on the outskirts of Sirenia to serve as the headquarters of a club he wanted to found. During the week, the place was private for Lutz, his family and close friends. At weekends, it was also open to factory employees and their families. The community around Juliano Lutz, however, soon grew. One friend brought another, and soon Sparta went beyond the social classes of Sirenia in the name of sport.
A cultured man, dedicated to health and physical activity, Lutz worshipped the classical standards of the Greek human beauty. At a meeting to suggest the name of the club, they suggested the name Olympia, which was the favourite, until they came up with “Sparta”, which seemed a more “imposing” name for the club. And so, on 16 June 1899, Club Sparta was born, with swimming, cricket and, of course, the most popular sport of the time, rugby.
Football started in Sparta around 1906, and was played by young people, children of the first workers, who used the Lutz farm field to improvise matches when their parents weren't playing rugby or cricket. The club's football team started in the summer of 1907, and the initiative was led by Tomás Witte, son of a worker, as Juliano Lutz himself says in his biography:
"Football was Tom Witte's idea. Tom was the son of Arthur Witte, one of the most efficient production managers who ever worked at Lutz, and he attended the club together with his parents, who usually came on Sundays. One day he, a 18 year-old arrived to me and asked me: 'Mr Lutz, wouldn't you be interested in starting a football team for this club? Almost all clubs already have one'. I replied: It's a case to be considered, Witte...' And I really got to thinking about that. I consulted some friends about it, and they welcomed the idea. In a few weeks, we had 11 young people set to play football, wearing Sparta's colours, with vertical stripes."
The Blue Ribbon
In 1949, Sparta athletes achieved a feat that has never been repeated since, which was to be national champions in ALL team sports competitions, which at the time were: Football (National Championship), Basketball (Open Cup), field hockey (Metropolitan Championship), golf (Club Golf Challenge), cricket (Inter-Clubs Test Tournament), rugby (URSA Championship) and tennis (Mixed Tournament). No less than ten trophies in a single year. For this feat, considered a great achievement to this day (the closest anyone has come was Racing Club de Soria which won three national championships in 1995), Sparta received the ‘blue ribbon’ and adopted it as a diagonal stripe on its red and black striped crest. For a few years, the stripe was also placed on the shirt, but this was eventually discarded. The stripe was then transferred to the reserve shirt, which today features the three colours of the team.