Guilherme Ferreira Pinto Basto (1 February 1864 – 26 July 1957) was a Portuguese all-round sportsman and entrepreneur. He is considered to have been the pioneer of both football and tennis in Portugal, playing in the first recorded football match and winning the national tennis championships on nine occasions.
Early life
Guilherme Ferreira Pinto Basto was born in Santa Catarina, a district of the Portuguese capital Lisbon, to a wealthy and aristocratic family. His father was Eduardo Ferreira Pinto Basto and his mother Lucy Custance. After schooling in Portugal until he was 14, he attended various schools abroad, including the Catholic Downside School in southwestern England, as well as other schools in Paris and Germany. Showing great sporting ability from an early age, Pinto Basto became involved in various sports after his return to Portugal, both as a sportsman and as a promoter of sporting organizations. While he is particularly known for having popularized both football and tennis in Portugal, he also took part in hockey, cycling, horse racing, bullfighting, sailing, rowing, car racing and golf. He worked for E. Pinto Basto & Cª Lda., the trading company of his father Eduardo Pinto Basto, and also became a partner in the Vista Alegre porcelain factory that had been set up by his great grandfather, as well as the Anglo-Portuguese Kaolin Company. Pinto Basto married twice: first to Maria Luísa de Portugal de Sousa Coutinho, who died in 1894 and then to a distant cousin, Branca Jervis Atouguia Ferreira Pinto Basto, in 1895.
Early football in Portugal
From around 1870, the Portuguese Royal family began to spend part of the summer in the coastal town of Cascais. Aristocrats, and others who hoped to be close to the King, soon followed, including the Pinto Basto family. The Sporting Club of Cascais was founded in 1879 and counted the Royal Family and the Pinto Basto family amongst its members. In October 1888, an exhibition football match, considered to be the first match on mainland Portugal, was organised on the Parada, the former Parade grounds of the Cascais Citadel, situated next to the Sporting Club (now the Museum of the Sea). A leather ball had been brought back from England by Guilherme's two younger brothers, Eduardo and Frederico, who had also been studying in England. Players included a count, viscounts, other prominent members of Lisbon's high society, and four members of the Pinto Basto family. They reportedly spent the morning of the game removing stones from the field. The 50th anniversary of this match was marked by a game in Lisbon attended by Guilherme Pinto Basto and some other players from the original game.
A more competitive match, between “Portugal” and a group of Englishmen living in Portugal was organised by Pinto Basto in January 1889. This was held at the spot in Lisbon where the Campo Pequeno Bullring is now located, being won 2–1 by Portugal, with Pinto Basto apparently playing in goal. This can be considered to have been the first proper match in Portuguese history, in that the pitch had markings and goalposts, and the match followed the rules and lasted 90 minutes.