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:
Long,White Cloud
It is more or less universally recognised that the doyen of New Zealand football clubs is North Shore from Devonport across the sound from Auckland. It was founded in 1886 and now plays in the Northern League Division One, the country's second level. Today the first level, the Premiership, consists of ten teams, of which three are in or around Auckland and seven are on North Island, with two in Wellington. But it was not always so. In fact football in the Land of the Long White Cloud began on South Island, where games were already being played in the early 1880s if not, on an ad hoc basis, earlier. Rugby had arrived in 1870, introduced to Nelson College on the northern tip of South Island by Charles Munro, the son of a politician, David Munro. He was the Speaker of the country's parliament and had been born in Edinburgh. However, the rules of Association Football, as being formulated by the FA in London were already being reported in New Zealand as early as 1867 and arguments about the relative qualities of rugby or soccer by the following decade.
Formal football came to New Zealand with the founding, still on South Island, of the The Canterbury Association Football Club in Christchurch in April 1882. As such it is probably the first senior club in the Southern Hemisphere with a first committee a mixture of English and Scots names. The President was a Mr C. Corfe, probably Charles Corfe, actually a Channel Islander, Treasurer, K. Hamilton and L. Harper, Vice-President. A first intra-club game was played a fortnight later, Hamilton choosing one of the teams and there was clearly no external opposition as a series of internal games were organised until July when an external fixture was finally arranged against Christ College. The following year the same fixture was arranged for mid-April, with the College winning 2-1, then the match was repeated the following week with the result reversed. However, none of these game can be recognised as official because for the first it was 15 not 11-a-side and there is no indication that games that followed were any different.
By 1886 further clubs were being formed in Christchurch and now Wellington and Auckland but there was still no report of an 11 v 11 game. By 1887 Auckland had thirteen clubs, North Shore amongst them. The new Auckland Association Football Club reported its first game in May 1887 against United Warehousemen with Goudie, Massey and Urquhart playing for the latter but still there is no confirmation of strict 11 a-side.
By then the urge to form clubs had also reached Dunedin. And it is from there more than a decade earlier that the most detailed reports of early New Zealand football and Scots influence in it emerge. Such influence is unsurprising since few places outside Scotland can be more obviously Scots in their origins, Dunedin, of course, being the Gaelic for Edinburgh. However, just how early the reports begin is remarkable. Newspapers as early as 1875-6 record football as having already been played in the Otago capital for two years or so, which means the game had arrived in the city perhaps by 1873. It is astounding as football in Scotland had only begun to be noticed the previous year, the first clubs were being formed, the Scottish Cup only being played for for the first time late that year and the game had not even arrived in Wales and Ireland. Yet matches were even held weekly alternating the football and rugby codes and furthermore there were games of one half of each.
And so it seems to have continued, on an ad hoc basis until 1887 when in the May of that year Dunedin AFC was founded. Mr. McDonald was in the chair for the initial meeting. J. Moncrieff chosen as captain. He was possibly John Moncrieff, born in Dunedin in 1856 so not a Scot but a Diasporan, a New Zealander enthused, it must be assumed, second-hand from home. And it is from a Dunedin intra-club game in September that finally an 11-a-side game can be confirmed. Indeed both teams are known and it should be noted too that both played Scottish style, 2-2-6. The one team consisted of Allen in goal, W. Pollock and Findlay the backs, Strange and Wilson at half-back and the forwards, Bowdler, Armour, McGregor, probably William McGregor, son of two Scots, Webb, P.D. Leslie and G. Pollock, and the second, Moncrieff himself, Howlison, Stewart, Lees, Crawford, H. and D. LeCren, Holmes, Gibson, Thom and Moore. All are names that can be seen on the records. Moreover, the game was followed at the end of that same month by a first inter-club game, against Caversham, a Dunedin suburb. The Dunedin AFC team was comprised of players that had featured in the earlier game. Caversham was a Bremner, two Langs, a Clarke, a Geddes, a Stronach, two Briggs, a Christie and a Gillies. The Scottish representation in both matches is there to be seen, each an almost unknown heroe in the spread of the game.
And still in Dunedin early in the following year, 1888, from a further meeting of twenty or so players including from Dunedin AFC two more clubs would amicably emerge, Northern and Southern, clearly reflecting their origins within what was still a town, but a growing one, with a population of about 50,000. They played each other for the first time in April that year, a match won by the latter 3-1. William McGregor was Treasurer of Southern, John Moncrieff of Northern. James Hunter, born in Girvan in Ayr was the latter's Secretary, the other committee members, Neave, Murray, Dagger, Buchanan and Walker. And the game seems to have been a catalyst. Seven more teams were soon added including Thistle, Queens Park Rangers and Roslyn from the town of the same name and called after the Midlothian village of Roslin. It had begun in 1888 as Wakari AFC. Its first president was Robert Stout, New Zealand's Prime Minister from 1884-87 and a Shetlander, born in Lerwick. In 1890 it adopted the name Roslyn, until in 1895 there was a temporary schism, from which both Roslyn and Wakari emerged as separate entities only to re-merge in 1904.
In the meantime almost five hundred miles to the north and across the Cook Strait on North Island there had also been stirrings. Football too in Wellington was beginning to organise itself. In late March 1889 a scratch game between the Diamond club and a team of a mixture of Albion and Petone players took place. The first inter-club match was played that same year. The home-team was Wellington Rovers, the away- and victorious team was Petone Wanderers, Petone being ten miles from Wellington on the north side of the harbour. Both clubs had been formed within days of each other just weeks earlier. Then the following year, 1890, the Wellington Football Association was formed and the inaugural championship was won by again Petone. Yet at that point football in Petone, indeed football in New Zealand, seems to have had something of a wobble, which was only overcome after a few seasons. In 1892 Petone Wanderers had combined with the Wellington Rowing Club to form Petone United but it folded in 1895. And it was not until 1898 that Petone AFC emerged, playing in the local league until it, the league, was temporary suspended in 1916 due to the Great War and presumably the loss of players, who had enlisted.
And it was also in 1889 the first recorded, provincial match was played between Canterbury and Otago, so Christchurch and Dunedin nd an all-South Island clash. The New Zealand Football Association followed a year later with Canterbury and Otago as members and a year later still the two south island provinces were supplemented by Wellington and Auckland, North Island joined South. The first international foray, however, would take a little longer and in two stages. In 1904 a New Zealand representative eleven faced a New South Wales XI in Dunedin. The venue was the Caledonian Ground, opened in 1876, the sport's field of the the city's Caledonian Society. And the first full international, a win against Australia, did not take place until 1922.
In the meantime football in New Zealand would quickly find itself as second fiddle to Rugby Union. With few names of players emerging there appears to have been no prominent figurehead for an essentially working-class game in the face of the middle-class and establishment fifteen-a-side alternative. Soccer even appeared to stutter and almost to fall in the way it would in the USA in the face of depression and the Spanish-American War. Even in Dunedin, a Peter Young recalls from the 1893-4 period that an Andrew Sharp was instrumental in getting together a group of 16 year-olds to form or rather to re-form the Northern Club. And they were beaten every week until about 1898 when the "Rangers" disbanded, presumably Queens Park Rangers, its players joined Northern and in 1899 it was able to defeat Roslyn for the first time.
However, the stutter in Dunedin and elsewhere would prove temporary. Competitive football quietly continued in the background with rugby to the fore until as in Wellington it was also suspended in 1916 because of the Great War. And after the War recovery seems swift. By the mid 1920s the country had 460 or so clubs, second only to rugby, and 6,000 players. Yet once more by the middle of the 20th Century, in spite of the New Zealand FA joining FIFA in 1948 and being a founder member of the Oceania Conference in 1966 the oval ball game came again to dominate and almost to overwhelm A reversal of sorts was only achieved with the arrival in the 1970s of fresh British migrants and their involvement on and off the field. It led to New Zealand's qualification for the World Cup for the first time in 1982, in the same group as Scotland, defeated by our national team but with several Scots, Sam Malcolmson, Adrian Elrick, Allan Boath and Diasporans in its squad, Keith Mackay, Kenny Cresswell and Bobby Almond. It also led to the formation eventually in 2004 of the Premiership with in 2010 a second World Cup Qualification, Scotland sadly not there and not a single Scot in its squad, except for Michael McGlinchey, born in Wellington but brought up in Scotland from one-year-old and even with Scottish under-20 and under-21 caps!