And when you are done looking at this site for the Scots input on football world-wide, here are two more.
For those who literally want to trace on the ground the local development of Scots and Scottish football in our own and other countries there is the newly available and ever-expanding site of:
The Scots Football Historians' Group
And on Scottish sports history in general but inevitably including fitba', see Andy Mitchell's inestimable:
Al-Ahly
Al-Ahly, Cairo's National Sporting Club, has simply been the best football team in Egypt for as long as is recorded and beyond. It topped the Egyptian Premier League last season and on thirty nine more occasions in the fifty-nine years of the competition there have been since inauguration in 1948.
By then Al-Ahly was already in middle-aged. It was founded in 1907 by the nine men in the photograph above. Eight are fez-wearing, clearly Egyptian but the man sixth from the left is not. He is identified as Mr. Mitchell, and said to have been the club's first Chairman. But Mitchell is not his name or at least not all of it. Elsewhere he is identified as Mitchell Aines and A. Aines. Those variations too are only part of the story. Mitchell is right, Aines is not. And he is also said to be an Englishman. That he was definitely not.
The confusion about "Mr. Mitchell" continues to this day. Now he is given a double-barrelled name. He wasn't born with it, although he did arrive with a silver spoon in his mouth. He also seems to have been born twice, or at least registered as being born in two places. Given his social position perhaps that was allowable.
So who is the man in the picture? In 1907 we was forty-two so unlikely to have been playing the game himself. Perhaps he had played it as younger man, possibly even in Egypt, where he had arrived for a second time aged thirty-five in 1899. Having been the financial advisor to the King of Siam, he had been appointed Under-Secretary of State for Finance in Cairo. In 1908, just a year after Al Alhy had come into being, he would again be on the move to be Councellor at the British Embassy in Washington D.C. and from there he was until 1919 and retirement in and from Uruguay respectively. His surname was Innes, perhaps easily confused with Aines. His first name did indeed begin with "A". It was Alfred. His full name in Scottish style, for he was a Scot not English, was Alfred Mitchell Innes, without a hyphen.
Alfred Innes was the son of Alexander Mitchell Innes of Ayton and Churnside by Duns, both in Berwickshire. His birth in 1864 was recorded both in Edinburgh and Ayton. The family lived at Ayton Castle. They were gentry. He had been educated at home and in 1890 had joined the Diplomatic Service, appointed for the first time to Cairo the following year at the age of 26 or 27 and definitely at an age when he might have been playing the Al-Alhy game, football. It is said to have first been played on the banks of Nile as early as 1882, when as a result of the Anglo-Egyptian War Egypt was occupied by Britain. British soldiers and officials were the first players and a decade later for the duration of his first, five-year stay Mitchell Innes may well have been amongst them, with by then more of the local population involved. Certainly he must have established something of a reputation as a sportsman amongst the Egyptians, which combined with the kudos of his high-level administrative position would have led during his second stay to his important, if brief, but, as the only non-native, unique role in the National Sporting Club's foundation and therefore the establishment of football as the most popular sport in Cairo and in time the entire Land of the Pharoahs.