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:
With Joan Gamper and his FC Barcelona having effectively excluded Scots from competitive football in the city in 1900 it seems surprising that the player said by some to be the most important British Barcelona player ever, more important than Welshman, Mark Hughes, Gary Lineker, then an English international, and the fellow Scot, Steve Archibald, and one even on the basis of goals per game to be greater than Messi, was precisely that - a Scot.
Admittedly the Gamper ban on Scots did not last long. Even he had to recognise expertise when he saw it. Scots were already back in team by the following season, 1900-1. Then in 1905 John Hamilton and Joseph Black were in the squad that would take the and Barcelona's first Catalonian championship. However, their stays were to be brief; just one season. It would not be until 1908 that William White joined and played in attack and not until two years later that arguably the club's greatest Scot arrived. His name is often given as John Pattullo, also known in Catalonia sometimes as George or Jorge, perhaps even Jordi, but, in fact George is correct, at least if his grave-stone is to be believed.
Born in 1888 in Govan in Glasgow, George Simpson Pattullo made his debut for FC Barcelona on 24th September 1910 against Espanyol, netting in a 1:1 draw. In the season he would score 41 goals in 20 matches, the goals-per-match ratio that betters even that of Lionel Messi.
Just arrived in Barcelona for business – he was in the coal trade – the tall, skinny Pattullo was invited to play a game at the Contreria football ground in Badalona to the north of Barcelona for a British team against the University team. Football was not his game. He was, even with Barcelona, said to have missed fixtures to play his greatest love, tennis, almost a hundred years before Andy Murray made the same journey to Barcelona to pursue his own career in what Gamper in German might have called the the "White" rather than the "Beautiful" game.
As a footballer Pattullo had till then only played in goal and it was where he was put. How good a goalkeeper he was is debatable. By half-time his team was 5-1 down. Fed up he decided to come out of goal and play up front, scoring 5 goals with his team eventually winning 6-5. The University demanded a rematch, which ended 4-4 with Pattullo scoring all four. Gamper had apparently watched the games, persuaded Pattullo to join his team and the rest that year is history.
But then Pattullo was gone. Having helped his team to win the 1911 Catalonian Championship, its fourth, its third in a row, the Scot returned with his work to Britain. Only in March 1912 did he briefly reappear at the last minute to play the semi-final of the Pyrenees Cup against that year's league champions, Espanyol. Barcelona had been only joint runner-up.
There had been a rumour he was on his way. He was seen stepping off the train in Barcelona hours before the kick-off but the journey had been clearly worth it and he sorely missed. Barcelona won 3-2, with two goals from Pattullo and him also winning a penalty.
After the game John Pattullo returned to Britain, definitively, even said to have repaid Barcelona for his hotel during his brief stay. Throughout his time in the city he remained a staunch amateur, said even to have refused a professional offer from Espanyol. Without him Barcelona went on to win the Cup Final 5-3 in Toulouse in May.
And it is not clear if Pattullo ever played football again. At the outbreak of the First World War he enlisted in the Tyneside Scottish Brigade, rising to Captain, was awarded the Military Cross and also badly gassed, as was my own grandfather in the same conflict. His health suffered, remaining poor, as did my grandad's, and it was recommended that he move to Majorca, as my grandparents went to Brazil and are buried there. In Majorca he married; a marriage that did not last, and there he remained, although in April 1928 he returned to Barcelona when he was asked to kick off a league match against Oviedo. In 1930 for a short while he even managed the Club Baleares in Palma de Mallorca before a return to Britain, probably hastened by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. In Britain his respiratory condition worsened. There is even talk of alcoholism before his death in London in September, 1953 in his early sixties and burial, I have been told, in Cathcart cemetery, Glasgow, almost forgotten then and even today in a grave that I have not seen but clearly needs some TLC. In fact he remains are apparently not. It is a memorial. But either way perhaps Barcelona might oblige?