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:
In 1920 he was already forty-three, too old to play football perhaps but not to have an interest. A dozen or so years earlier he might still have been a player. As a boy born in 1877, he could not just have grown up with the game but with the name McMurray have had a passion for the game rooted in a Scottish childhood and youth that had translated into him being the founding President of what would today be the Iranian Football Association. The problem was that James McMurray was very much a mystery, the layers of which have only now been peeled away, one by one. It is a story of how a Scots farm-boy and banking took soccer to Tehran.
Bank records say James McMurray joined the London staff of the Imperial Bank of Persia in 1897. He was twenty years old. At the age of twenty-three in 1900 he was transferred to its Overseas staff and sent to Persia itself, first to northern Persia, then the south of the country before in 1906 Nusratabad in what is now Pakistan, back to Tehran Bazaar in Iran's capital itself in 1908 and finally in 1909 to Hamadan, where he opened the branch. And there he seems to have stayed at least until 1912, when he returned to London and the The Great War, during which he became the head of the Commission of Control and Expenditure, which paid the Russian forces fighting in Persia in 1917 and 1918. For that in 1918 he seems to have been awarded the OBE. Then in 1919 as life post-War resumed he was appointed Chief Manager of the bank and, based in Tehran, in December 1920 Head of the bank in all Persia, for which in 1921 he received the CBE.
He was clearly an important figure in running The Imperial Bank of Persia in place. He was on intimate terms with Ali Reza, the first of the Pahlavi Shahs and the last Shah of Persia's father. The bank was effectively the country's and the Reza national bank. He was also vital in restricting American influence in the country, with repercussions to this day. But he had to return home in 1925, aged forty-eight, on health grounds but nevertheless remained with the bank in London, was appointed to the Board in 1928 and was a Director from then until his death in September 1950. On his death he was living in Wadhurst on the Sussex/Kent border and left almost £17,000 to his widow, Kathleen Mary.
But that was it. A James McMurray had died in Sussex that same year. However, that had been in Uckfield, almost twenty miles away with no way to see whether they had been one and the same. Moreover, there seemed to be no mean of telling whether either McMurray had been born in England, in Ireland, Scotland or even elsewhere. That was until a single line in hand-written notes of James McMurray's career with the Imperial Bank of Persia. It read he had been recruited after six months in a lawyer's office and four years with the Clydesdale Bank in Wigtown.
Now there is only one Wigtown in Britain, then in Wigton-shire, now in Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland. In addition in 1877 although a number of McMurrays had been born north of the border there was only one James, in Glasserton, Wigton-shire. He was there still in 1881 but not in 1891. However, there was a James McMurray staying just a short distance away as a visitor and a little more digging showed the rest of the family, father, James also, mother Margaret, both born near Glasserton, and James's siblings no longer there but in Wigtown itself. James had been a farmer of 180 acres. Now he was the keeper of the "County Buildings".
In 1901 James senior was still keeper of the County Buildings. Margaret was there too. Indeed James senior would die in Wigtown and be buried there in 1905. But it was the siblings, particularly the sisters, who would provide the final confirmations. One of the McMurray brothers, John, would be killed in Flanders in 1917, having risen to Captain. The other brothers would emigrate. But two sisters, Janet and Agnes, would remain unmarried and become career civil servants. Agnes was James's younger sister and she moved to London to Hampstead. Janet was James's older sister and in the summer 1923 she sailed from Britain to Abadan in Iran and back. Abadan is the seaport nearest to Tehran. She went to see his wee brother, giving her return address as one in Hampstead, London. Agnes was a younger sister and in 1927 she sailed to Marseille and back from Genoa, with a lady-friend and giving an address in the same Hampstead street as her sister had. And Agnes was still in Hampstead in 1939. Moreover, when Janet McMurray died in 1947 she did so not in London but again in Sussex. In fact, like her brother, it was in Uckfield.
So it seems wee Jimmy McMurray, originally the fourth son of a Wigton-shire farmer, not only went on from lawyer's clerk to become James McMurray OBE, CBE and director of a major bank in London and Persia, a friend and maker of Shahs but might well have had a passion for football formed in his Scots childhood and adolescence that led him to found and be the first titular head of Iran's Football Association. Furthermore he may have been amongst the first to play the game in Tehran. Although he was not there in 1907 and therefore not in the Imperial Bank of Persia team as one of three in the capital city literally to have started the ball rolling, he was there is 1908, aged thirty-one, perhaps to take part in matches played on and near Mashq Square as local interest was aroused, local players began to join in and the footballing contagion began fully to take hold.