When John Cameron joined Spurs from Everton for the understandable reason that he would be paid better It is unlikely that he could imagine what he would soon be instigating, that is the role of the player-manager. Cameron was some player but one with a great ability also for organisation and both deep and, most importantly, insightful analysis. The latter would be demonstrated ten years later with the publication of "Association Football and How to Play It" and the former not just half a decade after in the Ruhleben prisoner-of-war camp in Germany for the duration of The Great War but within three seasons at White Hart Lane. The precise date was 27th April 1901, the venue was Burnden Park, Bolton and it was the day in a replay that the English FA Cup was won for the first and only time thus far by a club outwith the country's League. Cameron himself was at inside-right, scored Tottenham's opening goal of three to just one in reply and directed the match on-field as essentially play-maker as he had the club  off-field as coach and administrative factotum.

But John Cameron was, of course, not a Londoner, nor even English. He was an Ayrshire-, indeed, Ayr-man, born in the town in 1872, a bright man with an education, who was drawn into football by ability not necessity. Having played in his his hometown for Ayr Parkhouse, one half of what would become Ayr United, when he went to Glasgow for work as a clerk, eventually for Cunard, he would briefly turn out Queen's Park. That is before again work took him to Liverpool, where he joined Everton, still initially as an amateur.  Cameron had begun as a centre- but would convert to inside-forward, a position that in 1896 would win him a single cap on the left against Ireland, a 3-3 draw, albeit in Belfast, that would be the trigger for Scotland finally to allow Anglos, Scots playing outwith Scotland, into the national team. It probably also triggered Cameron to turn professional. 

In three seasons John Cameron would make forty-two starts at Goodison, fifteen in 1896-7, fourteen in 1897-8. He would also become heavily involved in 1898  in the nascent Association Footballers' Union (AFU), becoming it first Secretary. The rapid result would be soured relations with the club, which also in any case imposed the Football League wage-cap at a time when the Southern League with none was expanding. And, whilst Cameron might have been considered militant, he was no fool. The AFU would flounder but by then the player had moved on, his services hired by specifically non-playing Secretary, Frank Brettell, at Tottenham Hotspur.   

However, Brettell would in 1899 be away for better money and Cameron at the age of just twenty-seven was persuaded to step up and with almost immediate effect. Spurs had finished third in league, would fall to sixth in his first season, Cameron a team ever-present, take the title the next, he playing virtually every match, and in the campaign after that the Cup, again he missing on just a handful of occasions. And he did it with not one but two innovations, one, in the role of both player and administrator, the novel player-manager, two, not just with the Welshman, Ted Hughes, at centre-half but Cameron himself in the role of fetch-and-carry inside-forward. As such he would be the tutor of a certain Herbert Chapman, who would join Spurs in 1905 at inside-right and leave with Cameron in 1907, and the instigating precursor, albeit on the right, of amongst others Alex James.   

Meantime, Portsmouth F.C. had again in 1898 been founded, playing its first game in 1899. And already in that first season, again in the Southern League, it had finished as runner-up, to Spurs, then third the following one, at which point its Secretary, once more a certain Frank Brettell, moved on. Moreover, the decision was then also taken by the club not to reappoint from outside but promote not just from within but to follow, probably, the Spurs example. Brettell's replacement would be half-back, Bob Blyth, top-player in his own right but perhaps best known as from Gllenbuck, again in Ayrshire, born in 1869 and maternal uncle of the Shankly brother, including Bob Jnr. and, of course, Bill.

Bob Blyth would remain player-manager of Portsmouth until 1904, going on to be a club director, vice-Chairman and in the 1930s, Chairman. In the shorter term, however, his team would in his first managerial season, he himself playing on, take the Southern League title and in the subsequent ones be third and fourth.   

Yet so far the new phenomenon had been confined to non-League. But that would soon change. As Blyth stepped back and Cameron ran out of legs, a northern club would take the plunge and do it with another Ayr-born Scottish international. He was Andy Aitken, born in 1877, so five years John Cameron's junior, and a stalwart for a decade of Newcastle with well over three hundred appearances and the League title as captain in 1905. That is before Middlesbrough persuaded him away for three seasons on- and off-field and he was then to take on much of the same roles at Leicester Fosse two more.

He was in reality at the latter to make little impact.  When he arrived the club had just been relegated to the Second Division. He perhaps stabilised it with a fifth-place finish in 1909-10 but that deteriorated to fifteenth the following season and he was on his way. Yet, that may have been in part due to his age. He was by then into his thirties and perhaps the legs were not what they had been. And Middlesbrough had been different. There in his first season he had taken what had just remained a First Division team from one place above the drop first to eleventh, then to sixth before it dipping a little to ninth. Moreover, after his departure 'Boro with no manager just a Secretary for sixteen months and then financial scandal immediately slid to seventeenth and sixteenth of twenty. Only with the arrival of Thomas McIntosh in 1911 were matters stabilised to and through the War years, after which, just to prove what a job the player-manager must actually have been doing, results went from poor to worse until the arrival as manager only in 1927, almost two decades after the departure of Aitken, of a certain Peter McWilliam. But then that is a whole another story.