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:
Anfield 1903-06
The Liverpool
Caledonianss,
Goodison Park, 1905
Come the end of this season - 2024-5 - there will be with the closure of Goodison Park one original stadium left in Liverpool when once there were not just two - Anfield and Hawthorne Road, both opened in 1884 - nor with Goodison itself from 1892 even three but actually four.
That Everton was and is the oldest major club on Merseyside there is not a doubt. It was founded in 1878, followed year later by Bootle. Tranmere Rovers across the water would be formed in 1884 as Belmont, adopting the current name the next year. But the next to appear was not Liverpool. It drew first breath in June 1892, the story of the schism that had developed between the Anfield ground owners and Everton club one, which is now almost a thing of myth. Indeed, as Liverpool emerged so a fourth team, formed specifically by the city's large and prospering Scottish population, had in the South not North of the city and with its own impressive ground flared and failed in a single season. The stadium was the recently re-identified Woodcroft Park, the club Liverpool Caledonians.
The club was set up as amateur, possibly somewhat shamateur. Its first match was hoped to be against its Southern or Scottish equivalents, Corinthians or Queen's Park. But neither made it. Instead on 21st September 1891 the opposition was Everton with the club President, Robert Kirkland, who had built up a large, local baking and confectionary business, kicking off. He was thirty-seven so born in about 1854, and then living in Toxteth, at that time a well-to-do suburb, married to Janet, with four Liverpool-born children. He had arrived in the city at least a decade earlier. He would die in the city in 1924 to be buried in Toxteth Park Cemetery, survived by his wife for a decade but he had been born in Airdrie, himself the son of a Pastry Baker. Indeed Janet had been born there too and he had returned home to marry her, a shop-assistant, in 1881.
Moreover, we have details of the match itself. Four thousand spectators came along to the ground, the pitch, level and well-drained, inside a running track within a stone's throw of the then Wavertree railway station, the main stand with a capacity of 1,200. The elevens themselves were scratch with a heavy peppering of Scots on both sides. Everton scored early on but otherwise the teams were well matched and that was how it ended.
It was an auspicious start but one which within a year was to end, despite the efforts of backers and its Sports Secretary, Alex Turnbull, Liverpool-born but the son of a Scot, in dissolution the closure of the ground for development, the same fate as now awaits Goodison.
