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:

Scottish Sport History   




Cathcart -
Scots footballing heart
If there are four places in this country that epitomise the origins of Scots football they are not Glasgow, Edinburgh or any of the big cities or even larger towns but the Leven Vale, specifically its townships of Alexandria, Jamestown, Bonhill and Renton, following them Paisley and Cathcart and in more modern times Hill of Beith in Fife and Bellshill in Lanarkshire. Renton was the birthplace, in essence, of modern football and of two the most talented footballers of their times, James Kelly in the 1880s and Alex Jackson forty years later. The wider Leven Vale was also the birthplace of three of the most pivotal, John Ferguson, Jake Madden, James Cowan and one of the unluckiest, Ian McColl. But there are many others, Tom Vallance, Andrew Hannah and Archie McCall, Paisley would be the home-town in part of the first football tactician, Robert Gardner, of the man who took Brazilian football to Brazil, Archie MacLean, and Bob Millar, the man who was a leg-break from from a half-Scots World Cup Final. Move on four decades and more and Hill of Beith also holds a similar place. Scott Brown was born there and Jim Baxter was brought up there. However, Cathcart's claim to similar fame might at first seem to be a little more obscure but in the end be even more far-reaching.

The Cathcart football story is one of three Hampden Park's, at least four graves, perhaps more, three pioneers, two of them might-have-beens but ultimate successes, a tragedy and one one-off . Once a rural Renfrewshire village, now a quiet Glasgow suburb, a hundred a twenty-five years ago Cathcart was a place of burgeoning industry along the upper White Cart river. From 1873 too it had its football connections. All three Hampden Parks were and still are just to its north on and around Mount Florida, which lies in the parish. A railway and Cathcart Road cut through the first. The stands of the second, the renamed Cathkin Park, are still there, crumbling. The present one sits on the hill overlooking both.    

And hopefully entirely unconnected with Hampden, although today there are similarities, from 1878 Cathcart also had its cemetery. A stunning, quiet space today, worth a walk around not just for history carved in stone but its glorious trees, it was there across the river from the village that in 1888 Joseph Taylor was laid to rest. He was just thirty-seven, born in Dunoon, a clerk, married, a victim of bronchitis and pleurisy, who had quietly been living on Mount Florida. But he was much also more than that. In the first, official football international ever Joseph Taylor had been left full-back. He would be there the next years too, for three more caps against England, captaining in 1875 and 1876, and for the first international played against Wales that same year. In the meantime he had also been part of the team that had won the Scottish Cup in 1874, 1875 and 1876 and then, on retirement from playing in 1877, had been elected President of his only club, Queen's Park, of course. 

And there in that same cemetery is another player, also from Queen's Park, and of, if anything, greater importance certainly to the Scottish and arguably to the World games. He had been born in Govan and died in Cathcart itself at the age of seventy in 1931, had been a Scotland full-back for a decade, the best full-back in the World. Yet he was not without controversy, both personal and tactical. His name was Walter Arnott. How many club games he played is impossible to know but he was part of Queen's Park teams that won the Scottish Cup in 1884, 1886 and 1890 and were runners-up in the FA Cup in 1884 and 1885. In addition he represented Scotland fourteen times, a real defender, renown for his toughness, clearing his lines with his screw-kick, never scoring. And throughout he playing career, with club and country, he formed a number of full-back partnerships, through which would not just be consolidated the Scottish convention of full-backs marking wingers, an integral part of even the modern game, rather than full-backs on half-backs, and an equally integral contribution to almost a decade of Scottish international dominance. 

But even before Arnott came to prominence in the Auld Country the first seeds of Scots involvement in football abroad had been planted, if unknowingly, and in one case both reaped and rejected. It is a tragedy, which begins in Canada and ends fatally in Australia. It is the story of Malcolm Eadie Fraser, whose father was a minister in the Gorbals, whilst he and his family stayed in Cathcart. As a result of the latter Eadie Fraser became a stalwart of his local team, Queen's Park. He also was a rising star of the Scottish national team. That is before it was decided he was not eligible. The reason was that he had been born in Canada. The possible result was that he left for Africa, became ill, managed to get to Australia but aged just twenty-five died within a week of arrival. However, the second far more positive one, is set in Argentina. In 1875 Arthur Hughes arrive in Cordoba, Argentina. He was just four years old, Cathcart-born, the son of a physicist, coming to work at the astronomical observatory that had been opened there. He would never go back. He would die in the city in 1922, his working life had been spent with the British-owned Cordoba Central Railway that from 1891 connected Cordoba with Rosario and from 1909 with Buenos Aires. But his personal life was heavily involved with not just the British community but the development of Cordoba itself and its social infrastructure including football. The club, Talleres de Cordoba, Cordoba Workshops, today is in Argentina's First Division. It was founded in 1913 by employees of the Cordoba Central Railway, notably Thomas Lawson. He was born in Liverpool, brought up between Burnley and Accrington. In 1901 aged 17 he is said to have arrived in Argentina. At nineteen he was in Cordoba. At twenty-nine, a railway employee, he was playing the game he had learned in his youth now in his new home, where a local league was formed in 1906, and where he was instrumental in getting support for a works team, of which he became its first President. And the man who gave him that support was Arthur Hughes, the railway company's local money-man, one of Lawson's bosses. He had already been heavily involved in the development of housing for the British community, in large part the railway community, in an area that became known as Barrio Ingles, and it was there that Talleres had its first ground.

By the time of the formation of Talleres Willie Maley had already been Celtic Secretary for fifteen years. It had been a quarter of a century since Brother Walfrid and John Glass had visited the Maley home in Argyle Place in Cathcart in December 1887. They had come to recruit Willie's elder brother, Tom, to their proposed new club but he was out, courting his future wife. However, nineteen year-old Willie was in and both were eventually persuaded. Tom would stay three years as a Celtic player and be a director for five years between 1897 and 1902, when he left to become manager of Manchester City. With them he would win the FA Cup the following season, the club's first ever trophy. Willie would be a player with the club for a decade, become Secretary, in essence manager, in 1897 and remain so for forty-two years, winning thirty Scottish Leagues and Cups, including from 1905 to 1910 six in a row. He also played twice for Scotland before it was realised or perhaps whilst the fact was ignored that he had been born in Ireland and was therefore ineligible. And then there was younger brother, Alex. Born in Scotland but never a player at the highest level he would also enjoy a twenty year career in football management, work as a journalist and later also be a club director, not at Celtic but Hibernian. All three of the Maley brothers were buried in Glasgow. Tom had died in 1935, Alex in 1949 and Willie passed away at the age of 89 in 1958. And he in death did the full circle. Having spent his youth in Cathcart he was buried there too, like Taylor and Arnott in the village cemetery, beside his wife, Helen , and his mother and father in a grave that has now been fully restored by fans. 

And Cathcart Cemetery would also be the last resting place of at least one more of several more Scottish football pioneers of note, even if his impact was not in Scotland itself. His name is Hugh McColl or MacColl and he was certainly one of the captains of the teams that played the first official game ever in Spain and may have been the first known football trainer in South America, in Chile.  McColl was born in 1861 in Laurieston in Glasgow. In 1881 he at nineteen was an apprentice marine engineer growing up as the football contagion took hold in Scotland but at some point in the late 1880s he took a job as Technical Manager at a foundry owned by Isaiah White in Seville in Andalusia in Spain. And it was the foundry owner's son, also Isaiah, who in very early 1890 on behalf of the city's British community sent a letter, part invitation, part challenge to Huelva, a port city also in Andalusia, and its Recreativo club founded by Scot, William Alexander Mackay. The challenge was accepted. The game was played on 8th March close to Seville.  Seville won 2-0 with McColl its captain not just that day but for games over the next two years. 

Then in 1895 McColl would with Gilbert Reid Pollock, another Scot, another footballer in Seville, said to be the scorer of the first ever away goal in Spain, set up a ship repair business in Sunderland. It was very successful. When Hugh McColl died, suddenly in the Central Hotel in Glasgow on a visit home, he was worth the equivalent today of about £1.5m. However, between the last known football game in Seville and setting up on Wearside there was a small gap and a curious coincidence. In 1894 a football game took place in Santiago in Chile.  It was between representative teams from the port of Valparaiso, where the first club had been founded in 1891, and a scratch team from the capital, where football was also just taking off, and from that scratch team came the city's first club, Santiago Athletic. A number of its players are known, as is its player/trainer, Hugh McColl. And by chance too there are photographs of the Spanish and the Chilean McColl's. They are remarkably similar, not least because both are very prematurely bald.

From Seville Hugh McColl must have had both enough knowledge of Spanish to take with him to Chile and sufficient footballing kudos once there to have been seized upon by the British community as both player and coach. It and his shipping interests might even have been enough to take him back. At the end of July 1896 a Scottish Hugh McColl, a “traveller”, took the long journey from Liverpool to Valparaiso, a Hugh McCall, described as a manager and also Scottish, did it again in 1898 and an H. McColl in 1902. If they were the same person then remarkably he would have had a major, if unsung, hand in the development of football first in Spain for three years, playing in the first ever official match there, and then also for a year at least and perhaps with an enduring interest for almost a decade, in Chile.

But if Hugh McColl was as important to World football as seems possible, he is as nothing in comparison to Cathcart's greatest footballing pioneer. In fact it is hard to find anyone more important than he in the history of World football, not just in terms of play itself, but style, indeed tactics, and also ethics on and off the field. His name is John Harley. He was born in 1886 in Braehead just across the wee bridge that was Cathcart's road to the south, a road he himself would take in time. He is buried in the British Cemetery in Montevideo in Uruguay, the country he would come to call his home, play international football for and to which he would part pass on, part gift a unique style . It would be the one that formed the base, on and from which his adopted nation would build and in the forty years after his arrival take all four of the World tournaments it entered, two Olympic titles in 1924 and 1928 and the World Cups of 1930, the first, and 1950.  

John Harley, El Yoni and he is known in Uruguay, was a railway worker. He first travelled to South America, to Argentina in 1906, briefly returned home in 1907 and went back to Buenos Aires, where in 1908 he was spotted in a friendly between railway companies. He was playing in a friendly for the Argentine Western against Uruguay's CURCC and, clearly on the back of what they saw, CURCC made Harley an offer and in 1909 he crossed the River Plate to Montevideo and there he stayed, travelling home perhaps only once, in 1929 on the death of his father. He would die in Montevideo in 1960 and in between in 1950 he would be honoured with a game in the country's Centenario Stadium, built for the first World Cup, that drew a crowd of over 40,000. The reason was simple. In Uruguay John Harley is regarded as the man who gave the country its unique style of play translated as "short to foot". It is the Scottish short-passing game, which proved perfect for the harder ground conditions in Uruguay and much of South America. Within half-a-dozen years at both club and international level with Harley at attacking centre-half it would completely replace the previously-used English long-ball.

But there would be much more to Harley's contribution than simply a style. There was also an ethic. On the field he was known to shoot penalties wide if he felt they had been unjustified. At his club he would be instrumental in the grooming of local players so that his style was passed on and became ubiquitous. And at club and international he would be insistent that the best players were brought through no matter their background. His eventual successor at Penarol, as CURCC become known in 1913, was black player, Juan Delgado. Penarol's and Uruguay's great early forward, Isabelino Gradin, brought into his club and the international teams by Harley was also. In the South American Championship of 1916, where Harley did not play, but Gradin and Delgado did, Uruguay was even accused of fielding Africans but persisted. Gradin was that tournament's top scorer, paving the way for Jose Leandro Andrade, whose father was said to have been a freed, Brazilian slave, to become a star of Uruguay's Olympic wins in the 1920s and again at the first World Cup in 1930. 

And two last points. Firstly, almost all of the pioneering figures in Uruguayan football were British, indeed, Scots. David Rennie, himself a Scots-born Uruguayan, has been at the forefront of recording their names, indeed, the names of all those buried in Montevideo's British Cemetery. It is immaculate and football tours around it are regularly organised. Might Cathcart not be minded to tidy up just a little and do the same? And secondly, there is the Scottish Football Hall of Fame. Brian Laudrup and Hendrik Larsson, neither Scots, are there and who would argue about their merits. Players that made their reputations almost entirely in England are legion. Yet it appears that there is no place for Scots who were integral to the game elsewhere, Geo Davidson and Johnny Moscardini in Italy, John Pattullo and Hugh McColl in Spain, Archie McLean, Tom Scott and Tommy Donohoe in Brazil, Alex Watson Hutton and Colin Bain Calder in Argentina to name but a few in South America alone. And, of course, El Yoni, for whom an argument could be made as not the World's best football ever but stylistically and ethically its most important.  
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