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:
George Lambie
New paragraph
For all that football talk is about players there can, as many a park team knows only too well, be no game without a referee. Someone can always be found to run the line, a reserve in the days before substitutes, with each team supplying one. But the referee is and was from early doors different. As the song says " good one is hard to find" and as football in America, soccer, increased in profile and popularity through the 1910s and into the 1920s one name kept re-occurring. In 1915 he had, aged thirty three, already amidst a myriad of club games the whistle for the final of the National Challenge Cup, with the American Cup one of two major trophies played for at the time in the American game, and he would be in the centre again in 1919. Both games were won by Bethlehem Steel, taking the Dewar Cup on both occasions. Indeed, in 1915 the town of Bethlehem's local paper, The Globe, had described the game's referee as one of the three greatest in American soccer.
Nor would the praise from Bethlehem be the only example or the 1919 final be a swan-song. He would officiated the 1916, 1918 and 1920 American Cup finals and also referee the National Challenge Cup final for a last time in 1926, by when he was in his mid-forties and probably had other concerns. He had married and by 1924 had two young daughters. Yet still in 1927 when the major team local to him, the Boston Wonder Workers, played visiting Olympic gold-medallists, Uruguay, he was once more in charge,. Indeed the local team won 3-2 and he had to make a decision that today is still described in Boston as the best one in a local game of the 20th Century. However, Lambie was a referee on expenses only. In real life back home in Massachusetts he had a plumbing business, which he ran successfully for fifty years until shortly before his death in 1965 at the age of 83.
Bu then when I say home, of course, I do not mean his first one. In fact between his first major football final and the second, having just married, he had returned there to try to enlist to fight in the Great War. His wife must have been very understanding but then she was also Scots, for George Lambie had arrived in America in 1908 but had been born in Ardrossan twenty-six years earlier and did not become naturalised, an American citizen, until 1917. In 1915 and 1916 after a meteoric rise through the ranks of officials he was refereeing still as a British subject, one who had clearly been brought up in the raw passion for football that existed in Scotland and notably with the great Scottish national teams of the turn of the century. He might not have been a player at the highest level but he was one of the small and unsung number, the Northern Irishman, Charles Creighton, Dunfermline-born, Alex McKenzie from Chicago, J.B. Stark from Detroit probably via Uddingston, amongst others, who across the pond implanted in the USA not just themselves but the standards necessary for the game to function then as now as one for all, no matter physical stature, unlike other sports, as increasing numbers of Americans are ever more aware, in a sporting culture dominated by size, on the one hand by weight and the other by height.