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:
1906 saw the formation of Costa Rica's first football club, Club Sport Cartaginés Deportiva S.A.. It still exists, still playing in the country's first division. It was founded, it is said, by,
"a group of Costa Ricans of English descent and English immigrants that lived in Cartago"
the original capital of the country before today's, San Jose. But of course, this is Latin America and "English" doesn't mean "English". And sometimes it doesn't even mean British but English-speaking. And this is just such a case.
The first President of Club Sport Cartaginés was Willy Pirie, William Henry Pirie. He had come to Costa Rica four years earlier to work in the pharmacy that was part of medical practice of his uncle, Dr. Alexander Fraser Pirie and had followed in the footsteps of another uncle, Alfred Mitchell Pirie, also a pharmacist, and and a further uncle, another doctor, Dr. Henry Hampton Pirie. And all four were born not in England or even, as their names might suggest, in Scotland but in Ontario in Canada. But they were Diasporans, all the sons and grandson of George Mitchell Pirie, born in Aberdeen, and Margaret Booth from the Shetlands.
Alexander Pirie had been the first to arrive. As a newly qualified doctor in 1887 he had been on his way down the west coast of the Americas to Chile in a boat that had called in to Costa Rica, where he had taken the chance to explore the country including the Spanish-colonial gem that was Cartago and not only stayed three months but then he did not continue on to southwards. Instead he returned to Canada, to marry there in 1889 before in 1892 being drawn back to the small Central American country between Nicaragua and now Panama, then the northernmost province of Colombia, to set up practice. And there he stayed, at least until retirement, his settled presence attracting Henry, Alfred and Willy with the last two, once installed, never permanently returning to Canada but dying in their new homeland.
Alexander Pirie himself was something of a sportsman. He is credited with being the first to take tennis to Costa Rica. We know too that he played football in the streets with his nephew, Willy, after he had arrived, that their antics attracted the attention of the locals, who joined in, that Willy brought footballs and kit on return trips to Canada and that as result several teams formed in their barrio. But theirs were not the first games in Cartago, either informally or formally, the suggestion being that both types of game had started perhaps five years earlier still in 1899 and with yet more Pirie involvement.
At the beginning of July that year, 1899, local newspapers for the first time reported a number of youths, English-speakers amongst them, practising, perhaps playing, football on La Sabana, even today a park in San Jose, which in 1823 had become the country's capital, replacing Cartago and lying about twenty-five kilometres west of the older city. There were even on the one hand complaints from some in the same papers about the activities of the young men but on the other also people came to watch. Then on 15th September, to celebrate Costa Rica's Independence Day, it is also reported that two teams had met, a team called Costa Ricans against another called Foreigners, made up mainly of "English" workers. We know the teams. We even know the referee. It was Dr.H. Pirie, Dr. Henry Hampton Pirie.
The Costa Rican team was captained by Alberto Brenes. Two of his brothers also played, as did three Montealegres and two Pintos. A Costa Rican, or at least a player with a Spanish name, also played on the Foreigners' team, whilst of the others on it several were probably just passing through, perhaps two of them Americans and one, David White, possibly a Jamaican and black, perhaps the first known Black player in Central America, if not in all the Americas. However, the team also included three there in the country for the long term and all were Scots, Robert Johnston, Charles White and Robert Baird. Charles White was a clerk, born in Irvine and brought up in Glasgow. Robert Craig Baird was an accountant, Glasgow-born and raised. And Johnston, Robert Howie Johnston, the captain, was also an accountant, who, although actually born in Peckham in London, was the son of two Scots and clearly also thinking of himself as such since he is recorded as "Scotch" as he, as did the other two, travelled to and from the Americas and Britain over the next two decades. It was they, who were the mainstays of the team that day and who is not to say that in San Jose they were not only the city's but, as the game took off in the country as a whole, Costa Rica's football's founders on the field just as, with his arrival shortly afterwards and the formal foundation of the Cartago club, Willy Pirie was to be off it.
However, as significant as Costa Rica first recognised football match might be there was also an additional something not just about the day itself but specifically also about Pirie involvement. The family were not just football enthusiasts but they, and none more so than Dr. Henry Pirie, had footballing pedigree that made his officiating not simply matter-of-fact. A decade or so earlier in 1886 Henry Pirie, known more simply as Harry Pirie
and then twenty-two, had been part of a Canadian international team, one also including
David Forsyth, the organiser, and
Walter Thomson, which had travelled to Newark in New Jersey and on
Clark Field
had played and lost by the odd goal in five to a US XI. It was Canada's second, if unofficial, "international". A year earlier Forsyth and Thomson had both been members of an again unofficial team, organised once more by the former, that had made the same journey and lost by a single goal in what had been the first ever "international" outwith the United Kingdom. Moreover in 1888 Harry Pirie had also been part of the Canadian squad that had, toured the UK, again not just for the first time but the first foreign tour of football's homeland. Once more organised by Forsyth it had included four games in Ireland, five in Scotland against Rangers, a draw, Queens Park, Ayr, Hearts and a Scotland XI played at Hampden Park and lost 4-0, and fourteen games in England including Sunderland, a 3-0 win, and Aston Villa. Harry Pirie, having already played at Hampden and Roker, even scored against Villa at Villa Park in a 4-2 defeat, which makes him, Dr. Henry Hampton Pirie, M.D., on the field pioneering not just in Canadian and Diasporan Scots footballing terms, and therefore also World terms, but in wielding the whistle in the heat of Costa Rica at the very least doubly so.
Johnston, White and Baird