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:
Colombia
There are few countries in South America where the Scots footballing contagion seems to have little effect. Two, Paraguay and Bolivia, are landlocked so not easily accessible by sea-faring Britons. Two others, Peru and Ecuador, even with their coastlines are perhaps also unsurprising. Tucked away on the Pacific coast of South America, before the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, they were by boat about as far from the British Isles as was then possible. They were also hot and inhospitable countries with for Britons, Scots in particular, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and even Brazil being much more attractive. But there is also one more where football is today played at the highest level that was also perhaps climatically less attractive but was and is as easily accessible as, for example, the West Indies, or even Venezuela. That country is Columbia.
Unlike Peru and Ecuador Columbia has both Pacific and Caribbean coast-lines and along the latter the Spanish colonial city of Cartagena, the port of Barranquilla and the banana town of Santa Marta were founded early. Yet football came late, two decades and more after countries further south, and the reason seems simple. Unlike even neighbouring Venezuela there were no Scots, at least not at the right time and when they came it was not for long enough. Although the Fergusons were a prominent merchant family in Barranquilla they had arrived in the 1850s and from Jamaica not directly from the Auld country. And railways came to Columbia early too but were never extensive. The Magdalena River that reaches the sea at Barranquilla was the highway into the interior. The first, short railway line from Barranquilla to Puerto Colombia, a distance of little more than 15 kilometres was finished by the 1880s before football had taken hold even in Britain.
There is mention of football being played on the beach in Santa Marta, then more formally again in and around Barranquilla in about 1903-4 and by Britons working on the railway. There are names, Henry L. H. Hutton, William Mathews, Joseph Clark, J. L. Jamesmith, R. W. Hutton, Harry L. Tyror, Arthur Snowden, George Pycross, Leo Hothersoll, Ed Stapleton and Geo Hughes, a mixture of Scots, English and Welsh. And some would remain in the country, Snowden a Mill Manager in Santa Marta. Hethers(h)all and engineer also from Santa Marta, Harry Tyrer, who was perhaps sixteen at the time,.
However for most their stay may have been short-lived, a matter of a few repairs after the end of the Thousand Day War, a civil war in theory but one which seems largely to have been engineered by the United States. Panama was the northernmost province of Columbia. An independent Panama made the building of the canal through it a good deal easier, for America at least. The war end in November. Panama gained its independence in 1903. It was all very neat.
And as for football. In 1908 it arrived in the north of the country once more in Barranquilla, brought by Colombians, notably Arturo de Castro returning from an education in Europe, de Castro in England, and with the foundation of Barranquilla F.C.. And in the south in Pasto in 1909 it was introduced by Leslie Oswald Spain, a London-born importer of Panama hats, who set up a factory in the city, imported kit from Britain and literally got the ball rolling.