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:
The Crillo Fallacy
It started as a simple question, the Crillo question. It became a quandary to be investigated, then a dilemma to be resolved. And all that was before it became clear that put most kindly it was a fallacy based on a possible misunderstanding, or more harshly perhaps a deliberate deception; even deceptions and with overtones.
Crillo is a term used in the Spanish-speaking countries of Central and South America for natives, at least of a sort. They are not the indigenous peoples, if any remain. Where they do they are separate group. It is a term applied to those who came after them or even replaced them, or at least the descendants of those who followed or replaced, for to be crillo means no more than being native-born.
However, crillo in a number of countries also seems to have a further caveat; at least superficially it is applied only to the progeny of the Spanish, who were in most of the countries the first European arrivals. Brazil is the exception where it was the Portuguese. In reality the accepted definition is in fact a little broader. It includes not just Spanish-descendants but a portion of the immigrants who followed them over subsequent years, even centuries. And that portion seems to include only immigrants speaking other Latin languages or specifically in Argentina and Uruguay Italian, or, to include Sicily, Sardinia and the difference between North and South Italy, Italian dialect. What it does not include is Northern Europeans. Northern Europeans are not seen as "crillo". The quandary is why.
The solution to the quandary is perhaps that is possible to be much more precise in the southern South American context with regard to “Northern European”. True some Germans and French found new lives there, some Swiss too but few Dutch or Scandinavians, however the largest group of non-"crillo" arrivals came from one source, the British Isles, i.e. Britain and Ireland. And therein lies the dilemma.
That non-inclusion existed, indeed exists, is without doubt. There are reasons for it, a mixture of the religious, historical and linguistic. With regard to religion the British, with the exception of the Irish, were a Protestant minority in a Catholic, Latin majority. It explains in part why the Irish have been better accepted. Secondly, although it is never mentioned in the teaching of history in Britain, it is fact that in the first decade of the 19th Century the River Plate was twice invaded by British-led forces. The River Plate then included Montevideo and Buenos Aires and what we now know as Argentina and Uruguay, which were then one. The justification was political; Spanish support for Napoleon. The real reason was economic; control of Cape Horn in the same way Britain had taken control of the Cape of Good Hope, from where one of the invasions was in fact launched. Possession of the Cape of Good Hope gave control of the route to India. Possession of Cape Horn similarly would have given the same control of the route to western North America, a hundred years before the Panama Canal. As it happened the invasions failed. Twice they were repulsed by the "crillo" populations but within months plans were made for a third and much larger attack. An army was being assembled in Ireland. Then fate intervened. Napoleon overthrew the King of Spain and Ireland's gathering forces were diverted to the Iberian Peninsula. The moment passed, forever but not forgotten, at least not on the banks of the Plate. And lastly there is linguistic confusion and division. In Spanish, as in all Latin languages, there is little distinction between "English" and "British". In Spanish all are "Ingles" and the English are seen still as not just past invaders but also as arrogant because of their previous power, political, mercantile and otherwise. In addition a Spanish-speaker understands an Italian relatively easily and vice versa. The same could not be be said of the English, who were seen as haughty.
However, the crillo view of the "Ingles" is without real comprehension of the cultural and social differences between the four parts of the United Kingdom, neither then nor even now. The rivalries between the four peoples that make up the United Kingdom are simply not perceived. Nor is it understood that there were and still are wide class differences within the UK. We are not all top-hatted Gentlemen. It meant that "crillos" were and still are unable to recognise that, after the middle-class merchants, the Britons, not least the many Scots, who then arrived were essentially working-class and there to labour, to build ports, the railways, the factories, even sewers in much of South America. And, if they stayed, they were looking for a better life for precisely the same reasons as immigrants from Spain and Italy. And those same failures of comprehension, the blind-spots that exist generally also apply at a micro level, with football no exception. There is an element of it in Brazil, in Chile also, but it is at its most obvious, indeed pernicious, in Uruguay and Argentina. In Brazil and Chile it clouds football history. In Uruguay and Argentina it goes still further, actually distorting it.
And so properly to football. All things, it included, have to come from somewhere. Current football, that is the game, which today is here seen as archetypally South American, is there seen, indeed is portrayed, as having crillo roots. Yet it seems to have no source or at least no path that can traced back to Spain and by extension in the case of Brazil to Portugal. Indeed football in Brazil seems to have taken root there some time before it did in its erstwhile mother-country, whilst in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, even Mexico it began at very much the same time as Spain and also Italy. Frankly, in all five countries it would have been virtually impossible for football to be assimilated on the Iberian Peninsula and from there transferred, seemingly instantaneously, to Latin America. And the same applies to transference from Italy.
In addition in any case in both the Iberian Peninsula and Italy football did not even have its beginning in the Spanish- or Italian-speaking, indigenous populations. In both countries, in Catalonia, Andalusia, Genoa, Milan and Turin, where the game made its first appearances, it was at the feet of Britons, mainly English in Italy but in Spain specifically Scots, and would remain at their feet well into the 20th Century. Which returns us to the Crillo fallacy. Just as in Spain and Italy there is one source, indeed only one source, from which there are no problems in terms of timing in the transference of Association football and the embedding of its rules, techniques and tactics in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil and Mexico. That source is the British Isles. By the time it was beginning in earnest in Latin America the game in England had already existed for three decades, in Scotland for two, in Wales for more than fifteen years and in Ireland for over a decade. Its accepted tactics, both The Pyramid/Top, i.e. 2.3.5, with its supposedly Welsh but actually Scots origins, and 2.2.6, the Scottish system that was morphing into
The Cross or 2.2.1.5, were both already two decades old. There had been plenty of time for both to cross the oceans at some leisure, which was precisely what they did, as a pastime initially, and then, as football in the British Isles became more organised, more seriously. It was as a pastime that it was first seen by Crillos but it was already a structured sport when up to a decade later it was adopted by them. And in the meantime that structure on and off the field had been seemingly supplied not by "crillos" but Britons.
Indeed one can be even more precise. In Mexico Orizaba, the winning team of the first and British-organised league included ten Scots, not least
Duncan Macomish. In Brazil the man, who brought the first football to Rio, indeed the country, was
Tommy Donohoe, a Scot, the man,
Charles Miller, to take the game to the city of Sao Paulo had a Scottish father, the man to introduce it to Sao Paulo State was
Tom Scott, a Scot, and the man to give Brazil is distinctive style, A Tablinha, was
Archie Mclean, yet another Scot. In Uruguay the man credited with bringing in the game was
William Leslie Poole, with a Scottish father. The men who founded the country's first club, Albion, were
William Maclean and Henry Lichtenberger, the grandson of Scottish and son of Irish immigrants respectively. The two first great players of perhaps its best know club, Penarol, were a
McGregor and a
Buchanan and its captain, who gave
Penarol and again his adopted country the style of play it still uses was another Glaswegian,
John Harley. There is a pattern emerging, one that would be continued in Chile and Argentina. In the former its football association was founded by a Scott, a Gemmell and a Reid, it first player of note was a
Ramsay and its greatest goalkeeper was a
Livingstone. In the latter in Buenos Aires there were two Alexes,
Watson Hutton, regarded as the Father of the Game, and
Lamont, its first organiser. Then there was its first great manager,
Arnot Leslie, the son of a Glasgow-born plumber. Two of his brothers were amongst the first internationalists for their adopted country. Its first ever captain,
Juan Anderson, was another son of a son of the Clyde and its first footballing dynasty, the
Browns, were grandchildren of The Borders. Meanwhile in Argentina's second city, Rosario, the first president of one of its two major club's today was a coach-painter from Dingwall called
Colin Bain Calder.
Which leads us to deception. In fact the Crillo Fallacy is based on two. The first is that throughout the continent in the footballing sense Ingles is not English. It is at the very least British and should more accurately in most cases be labelled Scots. And why not. In Scotland football was not a pastime, or even just a sport. It was a passion that not only took the form of technical and tactical innovation on the field but also administrative organisation and yet more innovation off it. It is not chance that a Scotsman,
Lord Kinnaird, a banker and Gentleman, was for thirty years the President of the English Football Association and it was another Scot,
William McGregor, a country-boy who became a shopkeeper, who in England created the World's first Football League. And its is Kinnaird and McGregor who epitomise the second. The former was upper-class, the latter working-class, who became through effort middle-class. In South America there were no British Gentlemen. Gentlemen would not have need to leave the homeland except in questionable circumstances. There would be middle-class from all the countries of Britain and they played a part in the very beginnings of football. And they would be followed by workers, working class-workers many escaping grinding rural and urban poverty, in the case of some economic collapse and often incipient disease. They would more often than not be Scots with every reason to seek a better life. And they would marry amongst themselves, amongst the wider British community and with other from other communities. Their children would be native-born, children like the Leslies, Anderson, the Browns and Arnold Watson Hutton, the son of Alex, in Argentina, Ramsay and Livingstone in Chile, MacLean and Lichtenberger in Uruguay and others. They would all, yes, be British by descent. But they were as "crillo" as any other. The problem is that a certain, false, if understandable prejudice, notably in Uruguay and Argentina, wrongly prevents them to this day from being recognised as just such.