As well as in the wider game the Scots seam ran deep in the emergent representation of the United States in international football. Of the first four World Cups, in which an American team participated in three, in 1930, 1934 and 1950, the head-coaches were Scottish-born, Robert Millar from Paisley in the first, Galston's David Gould in the second and Bill Jeffery from Edinburgh in the third. And even in the first involvement, in the 1924 Olympics Games, there was input with a twist. The coach was English-born George Burford but team manager was George Collins.

In fact Collins was the son of English parents, his father a seaman. But the family had settled in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute and it was there the young George was born in 1888, living in the same house on Russel St. until emigration. The US Soccer Hall of Fame has that in 1907. In fact his arrival was in November 1908 and, on the point of turning twenty-one, the only game he had learned and for which he clearly had a deep passion was very much the Scottish one.     

George's point of US arrival was New York. He came as a Warehouseman to join elder brother William near Boston. And that is more or less where he stayed for the rest of his life. It was where in 1916 he married a girl, Agnes Macbey, originally from Aberdeenshire, where they had their three children, a girl and twin boys, and where he seems to have worked as a manager for a cotton converter and, on the side, as the long-term Soccer Correspondent for the Boston Globe. And before that he had continued to play the game and did so after marriage. There is even a story that after a broken leg he went back to it under his middle name so his wife would not know.     

Agnes would die in 1974 in Wellesley, west of Boston, and where she had lived for fifty years and they for thirty. George had passed away in 1950 at sixty-two with his obituary-notice telling the story of just how substantial his contribution on- and off-the-field had been to local as well as the national game then and therefore now.

"Services for George M. Collins, 62, of 11, Torrey St., Globe soccer expert for 33 years, will be held at 2 tomorrow at Wellesley Congregational Church. He died yesterday at the Baker Memorial Hospital after a long illness.  

A nationally-known figure in soccer, he managed the first United States soccer team to compete in the Olympic Games at Paris in 1924 and captained the first all-Scots team in Boston. He formally played with the Boston Rovers.

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He leaves a wife, Agnes; a daughter, June M. Price of Brookline, and two sons, George M. Jnr, of the Globe sports staff, and Gordon M. of Huntsville, Texas."