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:
At some point in the 1830s, then in his 20s, a Murdoch MacPherson left Scotland for St. Petersburg in Russia. He had been born in Perth, was an engineer, said to have been a part-owner of a small Clyde shipyard, have built a yacht for the Russian Imperial family and gone on to found the Russian naval shipbuilders, the Baltic Iron Works and Shipbuilding Yard.
In Russia he was to marry Julia Maxwell, a girl from a Scottish Border family also living in St. Petersburg. They were to have fifteen children, ten of whom survived, five boys, one who was called David, and five girls, and must have gone on to have goodness knows how many grandchildren. One of those grandchildren was Arthur H. MacPherson, nicknamed Arthur the Iron-Hand, son of David, and now recognised as a founding father of Russian football.
Arthur MacPherson was a timber merchant and stockbroker, born in St. Petersburg in 1870. He was a noted sportsman in his youth – a rower – who was president of the Petrograd, the St. Petersburg, Arrow Boat Club and became chairman of the Russian Rowing Association. However, he also a keen tennis player and in 1894 founded the Krestovsky Lawn Tennis Club, of which he was president for twenty-four years, in 1903 organising the first international tennis tournament in Russia. In addition from 1908 to 1917 and the Russian Revolution he was the first chairman of the All-Russian Tennis Federation, seeing its entry into the International Lawn Tennis Federation. Furthermore, he also found time to chair the St. Petersburg football league for four years in two stretches, the first from 1903, stepping up to be president of the Russian Football Federation for two years from its foundation in 1912 until the outbreak of the First World War, was in 1911 elected to the Russian Olympic Committee, honoured in 1914 for his services to sport by the Tsar with Order of St. Stanislaus (3rd Class) and have a sporting family. His sons, Arthur jnr. and Robert, were early Russian tennis champions, together as teenagers taking the national doubles title in 1914.
The first football club in Russia, the St. Petersburg F.C., had been formed in 1879 by British residents in the city, although scratch games, based around the Imperial River Yacht Club, were said to have been played from 1868. However, it is not clear in either case what code of football was played; rugby, association football or some amalgam; and games were restricted to being against the crews of visiting British ships.
It was not until 1897 that the first game of association football recognised as Russian was played, on Vasilievsky Island across the water from the city itself. It was between an English, perhaps British, perhaps European team, Ostrov, meaning island in Russian, and a team of St. Petersburg natives. Ostrov won 6:0 but it proved a spur to the formation of the Russian team, the Circle of Sports Lovers, in the same year and the St. Petersburg Circle of Sportsmen the following one. They, with teams including several English and Scots players, were in 1898 to play each other in the first Russian v. Russian game.
More teams followed in 1899, some made up of foreigners, including intriguingly The Scottish Circle of Amateur Footballers, and other teams of Russians. More still followed in 1900, by 1901 St. Petersburg had its own league, watched by crowds as large as 2,000, and made up of three teams, Nevsky, Viktoria and Nevka, all based around the foreign employees of three of the city’s large textile mills and encouraged by the mill-owners as a means of reducing heavy Vodka drinking on Sundays.
Nevsky was, it is said, a mainly "English" team from the Neva Spinning Mill. Nevka, from the Sampson Weaving Mill was said to be almost exclusively Scottish, whilst Viktoria, formed in 1894, was supposedly comprised equally of Englishmen, Germans and Russians. The first league game was played on 15th September 1901, said to be between Nevka and Viktoria. It was drawn and it is even said that the unsung teams are known. Viktoria's was,
Hellman, Laumann, Schaub, Wardropper, Grunewald, Wright, Whitman, Yarkov, Braun, Gregoriev and a second Whitman
a united nations as expected.
Nevka's was
Sewell, Gilchrist, Sharples, Crompton, Fletcher, D. Hargreaves, Gerard, Haines, F. Hargreaves, Small and Boyle
which produces a problem, one where perhaps history has been twisted.
In Nevka, a supposedly Scottish team there is perhaps only two names, Boyle and Gilchrist, which could be Scots. The names are otherwise English. Then there are the mills themselves. Weaving is wool, spinning is cotton and in 1890 the Nevsky Thread Manufacturing Company was created in St. Petersburg by Coats of Paisley and, if patterns were repeated there as elsewhere in the world, Paisley Scots would have been sent out to man it. It would be far more likely that Nevsky was the Scottish team and Nevka the English. Which is a pity given Nevsky is also said to have recorded one draw that entire year in finishing third and bottom of a first league won emphatically by Nevka without losing a game. The Scots team was last and the English first.
But all is not lost. Thanks to this piece in its original form being read by a descendent there is one more in the Nevka team that can be identified as a Scot, or at least a Diasporan one. He is "Small", Victor Small and with him comes a life that can be read of by clicking on his name, but in short is that he was the son of a Dundonian father and a Fife mother and an in Russia a pioneering inside-left.
So on with the story. In 1902 the first Russian team, Sport, the Circle of Sportsmen by another name, entered the league and finished third. In 1903 there was tension between the British and Russian teams, which MacPherson seems to have been able to diffuse for the moment. A Russian player was banned for a year, when the British player, Nevka's full-back Sharples, said to be the real culprit in the on-field incident, was given just a caution in spite of being accused of almost strangling his opponent. In 1904 the league had three Russian teams but resentment clearly continued to bubble under. Sport was to win the league in 1908 and in 1909 the three foreign clubs, the three founder members promptly left to form their own, exclusively non-Russian competition.
In Moscow the development of football took place a little later than in St. Petersburg. An English mill owner, Clem Charnock, a supporter of Blackburn Rovers, then the best team in England, introduced the first ball to the city in 1887. Two more Charnock brothers, James and Harry, were instrumental in the foundation of the Morozovtsi team, named after the mill, Vicoul Morozov, and other teams followed. The first reported match took place in 1895. The Moscow Football League was formed in 1909 and thrived. Crowds could be large – up to 12,000, with women both watching in numbers and also playing.
Morozovtsi became OKS Moskva in 1906 and Dynamo Moscow in 1923. It would win the Moscow league from 1910 to 1914 with a team of mixed nationalities. In 1912 six were British and five Russian with, amongst the British, the Scot, Robert Bruce-Lockart, diplomat and spy. A year earlier one had been a certain Capt. Archibald Percival Wavell, seconded to Moscow to learn Russian, who would be better-known during the Second World War as Field Marshal Earl Wavell.
Back in St. Petersburg in 1911 the Russian and foreign teams were reconciled, presumably again influenced by the presence of Arthur MacPherson, with his dual Russian and British credentials. New teams were formed including Murzinka, a forerunner of Zenit St. Petersburg. However, the teams of foreigners were once again to drop out at the outbreak of the First World War, with many of their players, like their Moscow counterparts, returning to their home-countries to join the armed forces. The MacPherson brothers, Arthur MacPherson’s sons, even though they were 3rd generation Russians, were no exceptions. Both returned to Scotland and came north to enlist in the Cameron Highlanders. Arthur Jnr. survived the war and continued to play tennis. In 1917, whilst posted to America, he became the first Russian player at the US Championship. In 1920 he was also the first Russian at Wimbledon and was eventually to move permanently to America, to marry and there become a well-known figure on the tennis scene. Robert was not so fortunate. As a member of staff setting out with Lord Kitchener on a visit to the country of his birth, Russia, he lost his life in June 1916, aged 19, as HMS Hampshire, the warship, on which they were sailing, was sunk off Orkney by a German mine. Perhaps as many as 737 were on-board. Just 12 would survive.
Arthur MacPherson Snr’s war was to be equally tragic. He had remained in Russia, where in St. Petersburg he was arrested in 1917 following the Revolution, released, rearrested in 1918 and was to die, not quite 50 years old, from typhoid in a Moscow prison hospital the following year. His body was brought back to St. Petersburg, where he is buried at the Smolensk Lutheran Cemetery fittingly on the same island, Vasilievsky, where just 20 years earlier the first recognised football match in Russia is said to have been played.