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:
By 1879 football was being played in both Denmark and Switzerland, in each country as a middle-class game. By 1883 the game had spread to Holland. In 1887 it is said to have arrived in Belgium and in 1891 in Sweden. In Denmark the Dundonian, James Young Smart, the son of a linen loom manager and then jute manufacturer in his own right, moved to Copenhagen in early 1885, taking the football contagion with him. Born in 1862, at sixteen in 1878 he was Secretary and Treasurer of Strathmore F.C., founded in 1874, becoming President still only twenty in 1882 and working as a clerk. Meanwhile he played regularly for the club until his departure.
Smart returned to Scotland probably in 1896. Certainly he was a member of the Dundee match committee in 1898 Strathmore having amalgamated with Dundee Wanderers to become Dundonians and then Dundee Wanderers in 1894. Dundee had been formed the previous year. And in 1901 he was living with two of his sisters in Forgan by Wormit, Fife, one stop across the Tay Bridge, and working as a Jute Factory manager. However, between the two periods in Scotland in 1889-90 he had finished as top-scorer with twelve goals in the inaugural Copenhagen league, the first in the country, playing for the KB club, Kjobenhavns Boldclub as it was runner-up. Boldclub had played football of some sort since 1878 in theory and in practice from 1879, the year of introducing the Association game, making it, although St. Gallen was formed in the same year, the oldest soccer club in Continental Europe. St. Gallen to begin with did not play to Association rules.
Smart may well have also played the 1890-91 season, when KB won the league, and possibly 1891-92 also. That year he is recorded as a reserve. But at the end of that season he was on the move once more. In the third week of April 1892, recorded as James Youngs Smarth, a clerk/accountant, aged thirty he sailed from Copenhagen landing in New York two weeks later. And there he seems to have stayed for four years until in April 1896 a James Smart, a Scots clerk, aged thirty-five, can be seen travelling back from New York to Liverpool presumably before travelling north and settling back into Dundee life.
Yet on return to Scotland, involvement with Dundee football and after 1901 James Smart seemed simply to have disappeared. Ten years later his two sisters were still in Wormit but he was not there. He may well still have been in Scotland but it is not clear where. However, in 1921 there was once more a record of him aged 58, unmarried, working as a Sheriff's Clerk. It was his death not in Fife but Glasgow, unrecognised then and since as a European football pioneer until now. Through the work of Danish football writer, Morten Bisgaard, the story not just of Smart but of even greater Scots involvement in the development of the Danish, specifically the Copenhagen game, is being uncovered. In 1898 the first ever international tour by a major club took place and to there. The club was Queen's Park and it, with a party of players, led by non-playing Charles Campbell, took part in two games. However, they took place not by chance. In 1888 Alex Hamilton, a Queen's Park player and Scottish international, winning four caps, the last in March of that same year, was by the June in Copenhagen and turning out also for KB. And it was he who would facilitate the Glasgow team's tour a decade later, refereeing both matches. It was a visit of significance not least because a new term in Danish was coined. It is "Den skotske trekant", "the Scottish Triangle", short-passing between the half-back, the "Scottish" centre-half, the inside-forwards and the wingers, the advanced half of The Cross, first employed by KB in Copenhagen but in time spreading through the country.
Nor did connections and influence end there. Shortly before Queen's Park's 1903 trip, after 1900 its third, former Rangers captain and also ex. Scottish international, David Mitchell, arrived in April to coach again KB, taking them to the championship that year and against Queen's Park itself. In fact the involvement of Smart, Hamilton and Mitchell plus Queen's Park's visits have to be seen not just as vital to football becoming implanted in Denmark but also integral to the country's or rather Copenhagen's specific invitation to take part in the unofficial 1906 Olympics in Greece and Danish involvement in FIFA from its very beginnings in 1904. Moreover, in the 1920s and 1930s a team, Vejen SF, from the small town of the same name in the middle of Denmark's mainland, Continental region with then just 3,000 inhabitants made it through to the country's top league and there was known, again because of style of play, as "De jyske skotter", "the Jutland Scots".