[1] John Sydney Langdon was born in Gibraltar in 1854, as the son of an English soldier,[1] and in the early 1870s, the teenage Langdon and his brother William most likely participated in the football matches organized by the British colony of Gibraltar, and even in a few friendlies against neighboring local teams of La Línea and San Roque in Cádiz.
[2] At some point in the mid-1870s, the Langdon brothers left Gibraltar, but while William went to Huelva as an executive of the Río Tinto Company, John, then a young doctor, settled at number 9 calle Don Remondo in Seville with his young French wife, and the couple only had one son, Charles Gustave, known in Spain as Carlos Gustavo, born in 1887.
[1][5] Two months later, on 8 March 1890, Langdon was one of the two linesmen in the first official football match in Spain, in which Sevilla claimed a 2–0 win over Recreativo de Huelva.
[4] Langdon died in Seville in 1899, at the age of either 44 or 45,[1] and was buried at the Cementerio de San Jorge, which also housed the burials of Adam Kirkwood, Bernard Whishaw, John Morris Mandy, and Juan Cunningham, thus becoming known as the "English cemetery".
[7] Together with José Luis Gallegos, his son Carlos played a crucial role in the reactivation of Sevilla CF in 1905.