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:
Argentina
Argentina is perhaps the World's greatest footballing enigma. It has produced some of the World's great players, Buenos-Aires-born Di Stefano in the 1950s, Rosario-born Messi today and many others in between. Yet as an international team it has consistently failed to live up to the promise of its individual parts. In World Cups with two wins it is only the third best of the South Americans, behind
Brazil and
Uruguay. In South American Championships, the Copa America, it is ahead of Brazil but still behind Uruguay. It is notorious for its footballing internal conflict, in part shaped by political history. On the one hand is a dislike of the "Ingles", hence indulgence in the
Crillo Fallacy and a professed adherence to the Continental European, yet on the other it still desires to be in footballing terms the England of the South Atlantic, the titular head of the South American game.
Such a dual-position is, of course, an impossibility. And it shows on the field. On the one hand there can be "English" muscularity rather than skill and on the other skill, but not necessarily with the organisation that Scottish football had brought to the game. It is a bizarre footballing schizophrenia in a country, which fails to understand the difference between English and British yet has the World's largest non-English-speaking Scottish Diaspora and to where the game was brought almost entirely by Scots. The man regarded as the father of the game there was a Scot, the man, who first organised it also. The man who managed the most successful team in the first decade of the game was the son of a Scot. The first captain of the Argentine national team was also, as were several of his fellow players. The great early playing dynasty were grandchildren of Scots as was the donor of perhaps the most important of the early trophies, the one that expressly included only Argentine-born players. Yet Argentina has never played the Scottish way, instead looking to England and Italy for inspiration, and as a result has generated, certainly in Buenos Aires and to a lesser extent in Rosario and elsewhere, mainly confusion.
Philosophy