FC Barcelona set its founding date on November 29, 1899, which is when Hans Gamper called a group of football fans together at the Solé Gymnasium, near La Rambla in Barcelona, and they agreed to form a club to practice their sport. Favorite sporting activity. The known references about this meeting do not quite coincide in the list of attendees or in the role they played in that historical moment, but the version that Barcelona has maintained as an official since its 25th anniversary, in 1924, grants twelve young people, the so-called twelve apostles of Barcelona fans, the consideration of founders of the Blaugrana club.
These are three Swiss: Gamper, first captain of the new entity (he could not be president because he was not of age); Walter Wild, first president, and Otto Künzli. Two Englishmen: brothers John and William Parsons, vice-president and second captain, respectively. A German, Otto Maier. And six Catalans or those living in Catalonia: Pere Cabot, Lluís d’Ossó (first secretary), Enric Ducay, Carles Pujol, Josep Llobet and Bartomeu Terrades (first treasurer).
Otto Antonio Künzli was born in Turin to Swiss parents and knew Gamper from FC Zurich
There is numerous bibliography on Gamper, but much less consolidated information on the eleven pioneers who responded to the call of the Blaugrana founder. Not even the exact date of birth and death of all of them is known. And of one, Künzli, not even a photograph has been found. Detailed and reasoned studies have been published on the Masonic origins of Barça. Regarding the intervention of religion, due to the Protestantism of several of the apostles in the creation of the club. Also about the existence of a pre-Barcelona before Gamper. But the club, at the moment of its 125 years of life, maintains the traditional version and the decisive intervention of these twelve founders.
Researchers of the history of FC Barcelona, such as Josep Bobé and Fernando Arrechea, have delved into the biography of the majority of these eleven companions of Gamper and have provided numerous data, but they have agreed to point out that there are few known details about Künzli, the mysterious faceless founder who, to make matters worse, only played one game for Barça, the first in history (December 8, 1899).
We can now contribute to this search for biographical details that Künzli, of Swiss family and nationality, was also Italian, since he came into the world on January 23, 1878… in Turin! His parents were Josef Künzli, a merchant by profession and 27 years old at the time of registering the birth of the future Blaugrana founder, and Cecilia Haab, 29. They lived at Via Lagrange 22 in the Piedmontese capital.
The inscription of Otto Künzli in Turin
Brothers Anton and Josef Künzli were art dealers from Zurich who expanded their business at the end of the 19th century by printing and selling lithographs and postcards. The company was enormously successful and even today it is not difficult to find its reproductions in second-hand markets. The Künzli business expanded throughout Europe and established distribution centers in Barcelona, where they operated as Hermanos Künzli, Paris (Fréres Künzli)… and Turin (Fratelli Künzli). For this reason, it was in Turin where Otto Antonio Künzli, the Blaugrana, was born. And three years later, in 1881, so did his sister, Laura. At that time the two brothers on the postcards lived in Piedmont, and Anton, who was married to Cecilia Haab’s sister, Carolina, also had Turin descendants: Eugenio Künzli, born in 1878.
Once in Barcelona, the Künzlis settled on Xuclà Street and later on 5 Elisabets Street. Some of the images of the Catalan capital that they incorporated into their postcards are authentic gems due to their historical value. Gamper and Künzli had met at FC Zurich, where the latter played as a defender, the position he played in his only game for the Blaugrana club.
Thus, in the same way that the two Parsons brothers were born in Barcelona, but of English ancestry and nationality, the list of the 12 apostles Barcelona now discovers an Italian-Swiss: Otto Künzli. Perhaps this new avenue of research will one day allow us to locate an image of Barça’s most mysterious founder.
Read also
#unknown #founder #Barça
