At the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens, an unofficial football event was held on 12 April between two representative teams of Greece and Denmark at the Podilatodromio.

[2] The reason why this match was more or less ignored was because of a recommendation from Crown Prince Constantine, the chairman of the 1896 Olympic Organizing Committee, who publicly said that the sports which were not part of the official Olympic programme should not be mentioned, and thus, due to its unofficial classification, the football match was forbidden to be reported anywhere, neither by the local or the national press.

[1][2][3] As a result, the final score of the game remains uncertain with various sources agreeing it was either a 9–0 or a 15–0 victory for the Danish, who were later awarded bronze medals by the local organizing committee.

[1] Football was thus (like boxing, cricket, horse racing, rowing and sailing) only unofficially part of the Olympic programme in Athens in 1896.

Københavns Roklub (KR) had a good football team in the 1890s, so they received an invitation from the founder of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin, to participate in the 1896 Olympics, but apparently, they sent just two players to represent them, Eugen Schmidt and Holger Nielsen,[2] who filled the rest of team with Danes who lived in Athens or who just happened to be there at the time for work reasons, such as sailors and businessmen, along with some members of Østerbro Boldklub (ØB).

[1] The ØB players who were sent to Athens were replaced by the ones who had left Boldklubben Frem, apparently for economic reasons.

They cite a book (published in 1998) about the 1896 Olympic Games written by Bill Mallon himself and Ture Widlund.