Guilherme Pinto Basto

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.

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. On 25 October 1893, António Nicolau de Almeida, the founder and president of FC Porto, wrote a letter to the president of Club Lisbonense, Guilherme Pinto Basto, to invite them to a football match, scheduled for 2 November of the same year. Pinto Basto accepted the invitation, but not on the scheduled day, because it would not have been possible "to gather, choose the group and arrange the departure in such a short space of time". In the meantime, however, Pinto Basto made the same invitation to Hugh Ponsonby, the then secretary of the Oporto Cricket and Lawn Tennis Club, who at the time also had his own football team due to its rapid growth in England, the homeland of the company's workers. Pinto Basto did this because, unlike FC Porto, the Oporto Cricket owned a football field, Campo Alegre. Ponsonby accepted Pinto Basto's invitation, and together they organized this meeting, which was held a few months later, on 2 March 1894, between Club Lisbonense and Oporto Cricket. The patronage and sponsorship of the King was pivotal to attract a significant number of spectators, as football was practically an unknown sport in Portugal at the time. The match was thus the first major football event in Portugal, and on that day, he played as Lisbon's goalkeeper, keeping a clean sheet in a 1–0 win, thus contributing decisively to help Lisbonense become the very first Portuguese club to win an official title. CIF also briefly functioned as an association, organising the first leagues in the country.

Witness to Assassination of the King On 1 February 1908, Pinto Basto, a friend of the King and a convinced Royalist, went to the banks of the River Tagus in Lisbon to welcome the King and his family home after a long trip outside of Lisbon. He followed the Royal Carriage on foot and was one of the closest people to the King when he and his elder son, Luís Filipe, were assassinated. Pinto Basto later wrote an account of the shooting and of subsequent events. He recorded that in the confusion he, himself, came close to being shot by the police.

Honours Pinto Basto died on 26 July 1957 in Lisbon.