Much has been made of the notion of the "Scotch Professor" and his or rather their influence on the early game in England. There are several versions of who and where was or were the first but, as with most things when there are a number of varying accounts, my reaction is, shall we say, scepticism, if only mild. And my response is to start to dig a little.

That there was a profound Scots influence in terms of actors and also style on the early game I think there can be no doubt. The stories are too numerous. But it is the reality of the how, the who, but, above all, the when and the why that really interest me and the truth is that in all cases there are various answers at various times. For example, there seems little doubt that the first two players to have learned their football in Scotland and to have in some part employed that knowledge south of the border were the Smith brothers, Robert, the younger, certainly from mid-1870, and James, from later that same year. Both had played in Glasgow for Queen's Park and were therefore strictly amateurs. Indeed James is said to have been in 1867 one of the founder members of Scotland's doyen club. But there is no evidence that either brother on joining the London club, South Norwood, in any way imparted the Scottish game to it or football in general in England's capital. And the reason is simple. A distinctive Scottish football did not exist at the time. It would have its genesis with both brothers on the field that day with the innovative approach of Queen's Park captain, Robert Gardner, at the first international ever, Scotland versus England in Glasgow, in November 1872. Only from then and there would it develop.

However, even then there would be a gap of three years before the emergence of perhaps the first that could legitimately deserve the combined titles of Scot and outwith his home country teacher, at least of football. And he would do so not in London or the hotbed of the game that over the next decade would emerge in Lancashire but in Birmingham. The carrier of that seed was John Carson, who had also been for several years a player at Queen's Park, very probably playing alongside the Smiths and again amateur. A clerk he moved south in 1875 there meeting his first and arguably more successful pupil. However, the student would not be Brummie. He would be another Scot. a fellow-clerk, John Campbell Orr.

John Carson, despite turning out for Queen's Park, was not a Glaswegian. In fact he had been born in Rhu, also known as Row, and had very probably grown up alongside the various McNeil brothers of Queen's Park and Rangers fame, Peter Campbell of Rangers, more of whom later, and perhaps even the Vallances, once they had arrived from a certain place called Renton. He clearly knew the game. Campbell Orr, however, was Glasgow-born but Cupar, Fife-raised and, whilst he was also a provan sportsman, indeed a footballer too, this time it was rugby. He had played for St. Andrews University and been about to become team captain, when circumstances, the bankruptcy of his father, had forced him to leave education and move on, to Edinburgh first and then the English Midlands. Thus it was that Carson taught Campbell Orr the Association game as together they formed the central Birmingham team, Calthorpe FC.

History seems to indicate that Calthorpe, like Queen's Park in its initial years, struggled to find opponents. But that was to change, not least with the arrival that same year, 1875, or possibly early the next, of another Scot and he being joined by two more. The first was another Glaswegian, George Ramsay, who is known to have played at a competitive level in the city for at least two seasons prior to heading south for work. The other two were brothers, Jimmy and Billy Lindsay, sons of a smith cum ironmonger, also the trade of Ramsay's father, and who could not have learned the game, where they had come from. It was Golspie in Sutherland and the reason was simple. Football did reach Golspie in 1877 but only after they had returned. It stands to reason therefore that their acquaintance with the game, one from contemporary accounts they clearly had, was picked up elsewhere with Glasgow, given the times, the only real alternative. Perhaps in the course of their education in ironmongery they had first passed through there on the journey southwards. Possibly they even knew Ramsay's from Fleischer Haugh or one of Glasgow's other early venues for games.

Thus it was in 1876 that there were in Birmingham briefly five Scots, all then presumably amateur, although it seems unlikely Ramsay remained strictly so for long, and actively practicing Association football not just at Calthorpe but also now at Aston Villa. However, in the meantime and both almost a hundred miles north-east and seventy miles north-west of Birmingham there were other developments, one interesting, the other internationally crucial.

The latter was the arrival of a Scots doctor, so once more an amateur, in Ruabon by Wrexham in North Wales. In the Principality he is known as Daniel Grey but in the Scots census he is recorded as Daniel Gray, born in Airdrie. He had qualified from Glasgow University in 1874 and presumably played the game in the city at the time. Why else would he by 1876  have become involved with and begun turning out for the Ruabon Druids, a team founded in part by David Thomson, the English-born son of a Scottish manager of a local, Welsh foundry. And this is where we have the indication of not just Scots becoming involved in the formation of clubs but now for the first time and bitten with the same enthusiasm, sons of Diasporan Scots too. Indeed, Gray cum Grey, Thomson and his younger brother, George, would in February 1876 with others become founders of the Football Association of Wales, after England and Scotland the World's third. Moreover, it seems likely that Grey/Gray was the catalyst for Wales's first international. It took place on 25th March 1876  against not England but Scotland in Glasgow, a 4-0 win for the home team with a certain James Lang scoring the second but also with David Thomson in goal and George Thomson and Daniel Grey amongst the forwards, as the latter would be two years later back in his home-country, this time alongside a Thomas Britten.   

The former was appearances that same year of the same James Lang, J. J "Reddie" Lang and Peter Andrew cum Andrews in Sheffield for club sides Wednesday and Heeley respectively. There seems little doubt that Lang was the World's first professional footballer. But in spite of initial indications to the contrary Andrews on the basis of what we know from his later life in the city likely comes  a pretty close second. And in both cases they had been recruited not on the basis of location but their ability. Lang had been spotted not only against Wales but in a match between Glasgow and Sheffield. Andrews had featured the previous year for Scotland against England, had also there scored the equaliser and then had netted both goals in February 1876 2-0 win by Glasgow over Sheffield in Sheffield. But in each situation there was probably another factor, their working-class origins.  Andrews had been a baker, who in Sheffield became a "clerk", and Lang was a ship-yard worker with for both football a means perhaps to supplement low pay with expenses or in England even to better it through shamateurism. It seemed for both the temptation proved too much but not without the game in Sheffield not just paying but presumably also learning something from what they bought, albeit not too much given the city's teams' subsequent performances. 

But by 1876 there was also a third ingredient in the developing mix in addition to enthusiasm and/or demonstration of individual ability. It was collective results. In modern terms in November 1872 the first international had been for Scotland a home-draw. The next match in March 1873 was an away-loss but then the pendulum began to swing. In 1874 there was a home-win, then the following March an away-draw. In 1876 it was a home-win once more and in 1877 for the first time an away-win. In six games it was  eleven points to five and clearly something about the Scots per se or the Scots game that was superior. Moreover, since the Scots more often than not were on appearances physically less strong the advantage had to be either technical individuality, group organisation or a blend of both. Sheffield clearly saw it as the former but it was wrong. Whilst Scots players might have been fitter, especially as working-class teams, notably Vale of Leven, full of men doing daily, hard, physical labour began to dominate north of the border, the penny that football is a team game had also dropped there in a way it had not to the south. Although Lang and Andrews were successful, staying at their Sheffield clubs for several years, neither club came to dominate the game on the English side of the border as they might have been expected. Instead the focus moved elsewhere, to said Lancashire, and not without what today might be described as "reverse engineering".

Here again in my view of events I am almost entirely grateful to Andy Mitchell's astounding work on the characters in early Scottish footballing history. In this case it is William Kirkham, an Englishman and from Darwen. Now Kirkham was and quite probably still is a common name in that region of said country. William too was ubiquitous so identifying which he was remains tricky.  However, a local source says he was a "Cotton Colourist" and, since he became a well-regarded figure in the town and there is later a cotton mill manager, who fits the bill in terms of not just name but also age, let us assume it is he until we know better. What, however, is important with Kirkham, is that, aged about twenty, his work took him in about 1875 to Scotland, to Glasgow and there he became involved in local football, specifically at the Partick club, not Partick Thistle but a predecessor. Moreover, before returning to Darwen in 1877 he remained in Glasgow for two years, a part of the evolving football wave there. In other words he was during his time inculcated with the developing game there, stylistically, technically and tactically and, given his age, knowing little more took precisely that knowledge back to his home-town and its football club. 

However, whilst thus Darwen might have remained an English club with just a touch of tartan, it was the next turn of events that was crucial. Kirkham obviously remained in contact with his Scots club and in 1878 it was invited to Darwen for a friendly match, after which two of its players, first James Love and then Fergus Suter effectively remained behind. Love had an obvious reason. He was running away from bankruptcy and the courts. Nor did he stay long. Andy Mitchell recounts his fate, death in Egypt as a Royal Marine, aged just 24. But Suter remained in the area, indeed, until his death, the pioneer there at Darwen for two seasons and Blackburn for nine more.             

But here' is the thing to note as yet another theme is that Love and Suter on arrival at Darwen were just twenty and twenty-one respectively with twenty-one then being the age of maturity, the age, at which a young man could finally make up his own mind about his own future unimpeded. He could decide whether to stay or go, stick or twist. Suter twisted.

As it happened 1878 proved to be a an important year in terms of footballing migration not just to Darwen but also threefold elsewhere. Love and Suter were clearly good players but with none of the recognition outwith their clubs that Lang and Andrews enjoyed. The Darwen pair were developing journeymen not stars, at least not yet in Suter's case, yet the next of the latter was already on his way. He was Hugh McIntyre, one of two siblings, who would play for Scotland this time via Rangers, Hugh in 1880 and James in 1884. In fact Hugh would be part of the Rangers side alongside Tom Vallance, Alex, his brother, Moses McNeil and Peter Campbell that in 1879 had by default lost the Scottish Cup Final to Vale of Leven. It would seem to indicate that the older sibling would only have moved south after that but there are pointers it was earlier. Before Rangers he had played aged nineteen for first Glasgow Northern, formed in 1874, and then again not Partick but Partick Thistle, formed in 1876.  He was clearly a man prepared to move club for advantage and the suggestion is that already by 1878 he may have been surreptitiously free-lancing south of the border with a club just three years old and five miles north of Darwen, Blackburn Rovers. 

Meantime, back in Birmingham changes were afoot. Calthorpe with Carson and Orr continued to play as an amateur club but at Aston Villa, with the Lindsays back in Scotland, Ramsay was captain, a certain William McGregor was already involved administratively and there was an, albeit perhaps gradual, changing attitude to the game's relationship to money. Case in point was the arrival in the city of Archie Hunter. It is said he came to Birmingham for work and as an amateur. He certainly came with a reputation initially via Ayr Thistle but more importantly as a member, alongside one brother, John, and none other than J.J. Lang, of the Third Lanark team that had just lost the 1878 Scottish Cup Final. It is also said he came looking for Calthorpe, which might seem to tie in, but failed to locate it yet did find Villa, which raises a question. Players talk. Third Lanark was clearly a team where pay-for-play was not a taboo subject. Calthorpe was a strictly amateur team. Because of the terms of rental of its ground it cold not charge entrance money. Villa could. In fact it was Ramsay and one of the Lindsay brothers, who had found the very Perry Barr ground they were using, allowed them to do so and indicated a different and already prevalent attitude to money by player and club alike. Standing back it is therefore hardly surprising at all that Hunter ended up signing for Aston Villa and for more more than the next decade was clearly paid by the club in one way or another, dependent on the changing rules, and thus  was professional. Moreover, that he was joined presumably by invitation and no other visible means-of-support a year later by another, older brother, Andy, who also said to have played for Third Lanark and supposedly, if briefly, Vale of Leven too with at Villa seemingly less impact on the field yet recognised for his tactical input only reinforces the point.   

And there is, still in 1878/9,  one final strand to follow, or rather two strands of similar nature, that of other English or English/Welsh amateurs having played in Scotland returning south. The first is a name we already know. It is Thomas Britten, who had partnered Dr. Daniel Grey up front in that first Scotland-Wales international. Then aged just eighteen he would become an engineer to trade, had been born just in England with his birth registered in Wales with the suggestion that by his 1876 selection he might already have been in Scotland, indeed in Glasgow, at the time and playing very much the Scottish game at almost its inception. Certainly he was in a Glasgow select team and certainly too in early 1878 he is recorded as a member of the eclectic Parkgrove club before he seems to have left Scotland for Grantham, its team playing in the FA Cup that year and for just the second time. Then in 1879 and now very much in the southern thick-of-it he was a reserve with, amongst others, James McLeod Princep, for England and in 1880 once more he played for Wales at Hampden in defeat but alongside John Price, the man said to be so quick he would make 2-3-5 possible. As to the second he was James Waghorn. Although born in Stratford in East London he was from a young child raised in Glasgow. It was there he learned all his football, as did his brother George, also a player. And whilst neither would seem to have continued the game on moving south, in fact James turned to rugby, before emigrating to Canada, they and their club, the Scottish Alexandra Athletic, were already in 1876 playing cross-border games and noticeably in Sheffield against another of its local clubs, Albion. 

Now, by the time of the above migrations organised football in Scotland was both only and already six years old. Internationally there had been another Scottish home-win, this time an emphatic 7-2, and, as outlined, in England there were or had been by then a dozen Scots, regarded by some, a first group of football historians, of which incidentally I am not one, already as the first of what have become known as the "Scotch Professors", and three Scots-trained Englishmen active in football south of the border. Yet here the Scottish game seemed to have had its first setback. Having been 1-4 up at half-time in the 1879 international in London, the Scots fashioned a 5-4 defeat by the end. No satisfactory explanation has ever been given. It may have been that a latish goal disallowed contentiously for off-side threw the Scots out of their stride but then it is said that 20-year-old Billy Mosforth, once of Sheffield Wednesday alongside Lang, now of Sheffield Albion and England's first working-class player, had a second-half blinder. Whatever the truth the result seemed to cast doubt elsewhere. That year two players only came south. One the already-mentioned Andy Hunter to Villa. The other was none other than Peter Campbell, about whom I make two observations. Firstly and obviously he came from Rangers to Blackburn Rovers once more with the McIntyre-link un-ignorable. They had played alongside each other. Secondly Campbell must surely have been paid to play. He was the son of an ex-merchant seaman and a seaman himself. In 1883 he would die, drowned as his ship went down in the Bay of Biscay but for that 1879-80 season high up in a land-locked, Lancastrian valley there must have been other means of support than the siren call of the ocean. 

However, the 1879 international Scotland defeat and its possible immediate consequence proved to be blips. In 1880, as international balance was restored with a home win for Scotland, the hesitancy in movement of a year earlier dissipated, not least because of the entry into the market of another English city/region outwith Birmingham, Sheffield and North Lancashire. It was Liverpool in the shape of both its major teams of the era, Everton and Bootle. Together they brought in a total of six new faces, five from Scotland and one via it. The non-Scot was Godfrey Turner, born in Slough in 1854, playing initially for several teams in the area and a stalwart of Southern English amateur game. But in 1877 he had moved north to study science at Edinburgh University, where he captained its team in 1878 in its first official game, against the University of Glasgow. And his stay lasted until 1880, when on graduation at the almost ancient age of twenty-six he moved to Liverpool joining Bootle, it has to be assumed still as an amateur, and where he was teamed amongst others with Robert Sloan, a twenty-three year old probably originally from Dumbarton but living locally. Meanwhile, Everton seemingly turned to a still  younger, Scots influx again already resident in the city. There was Alex Provan, a nineteen year-old clerk born in Glasgow and having acquired his footballing knowledge there, another nineteen year-old, Charlie Lindsay, John Douglas, about whom little else but possible nationality is known, although even that may be incorrect, and most importantly Jack McGill. Glasgow-born in 1859 he arrived in the city of Liverpool as a twenty-year old engineer with no known football background. Yet he clearly knew how and was seen to play the Scottish short-passing game, was soon in the team, made captain and would stay with the club until 1885-6. 

Nor was that at all. In two more locations there were also new arrivals, one amateur and one possibly less so. The former was Sunderland, where a Scottish teacher, James Allan, born in Ayr, newly-arrived via Glasgow and also its university, in 1879 founded a team originally of teachers that we know today as Sunderland Athletic. And the latter was Preston, where another near-Glaswegian, a Renfrew-man, James McDade, arrived by early 1881 as a tinsmith to trade with again clearly  some football practice and knowledge. He would end up working for the Leyland Steam Motor Company that would become Leyland Motors but in the meantime he would first be taken up by the town's North End club as a player and then turn to coaching it in the way he knew, the Scots way. Indeed Preston's path and rise from formation in 1877 could be said to be the combination of his instruction with the organisational ability of a local mill-owner, William Sudell, whilst there and more generally in Lancashire there was the football proselytising of yet another Englishman returned from the North. His name was James Gledhill. Lancashire-born but with a Scots mother, he trained as a doctor in London, where he played for the Pilgrims club, returned to turn out for Darwen before further studies in Glasgow until 1883 when, having been born on 1854, so at twenty-eight or twenty-nine and by the standards of the day his playing days seemingly already largely behind him, he returned. It was then that he devoted his energies to lectures on football and how it should be played with no doubt foremost what he had most recently learned in Scotland of the game specifically there. Indeed the what, how and where, i.e. Lancashire, that Gledhill expounded almost certainly influenced and may even have caused what happened next.

By 1883-4 there were in England some forty young Scots footballers who had and were plying their sport and in some cases trade in England. Add to that the others, English and Welsh, who had passed through Scottish football and the number is forty-five, of whom a little over half were active. They were numbers that as described had grown by a few each year since 1872 until for the three seasons from 1880 remaining steady with twenty or so, four-fifths in the Red Rose county alone. Indeed, where there was an increase was in equally young Welsh lads, "Professors" too, recruited from clubs in and around Wrexham and permanently dropping their different and equally distinctive take on the game into a now wider-Celtic/Lancastrian melting-pot.  However, in the following season, 1884-5, the mix was to change. The Scots count simply exploded, to fifty-seven, according at the time to the Scottish Football Association, and by my count to seventy-five. In a year it had almost tripled with seventy in Lancashire alone, a three and half fold increase, thirty in the Calder Valley, i.e. from Burnley to Blackburn, fourteen more in Preston, five so far on Merseyside and twenty-one in the Bolton area. It must have seemed at the time like the Great Footballer Flood and has prompted a second group of football historians to proclaim that actually it marked the real arrival of those same "Scotch Professors". Again I defer for reasons I will now attempt to explain.   

Why so many Scots arrived at once has one obvious basis. In the five years since the problematic England-Scotland game in London in 1879 Scotland, home and away, had not lost a match be it against England, Wales and most recently, Ireland. The record stood at eleven wins out of eleven, forty seven goals scored and just eleven conceded. It included in 1881 a 1-6 victory in London against England, the largest away margin to this day, and a 5-1 home win the next year. It was abundantly clear, which nation was best at this still new sport and those watching thought they could see why; a distinctively short-passing, combination game with a basis on a defined formation and in tactics of the team not the individual that seemed to employed by Scots players no matter from what part of the country. And the observation was largely correct. It did hide a tactical difference between the game as played in the West of Scotland based on the 2-2-6 formation and in East Scotland increasingly on 2-3-5, as associated a decade earlier with John Price of Wrexham and Wales, but since the national teams had included without exception players from the West it mattered not, superficially at least.     

What those players were is more contentious and therefore more interesting. Looking at them in terms of clubs of origin reveals that a third of those officially noted by the Scottish Football Association's Committee on Professionalism as playing for a club outwith the SFA's jurisdiction and therefore requiring its permission to return came from just four clubs. Hearts had supplied nine in all, fellow Edinburgh club, St. Bernard's, four. Six arrived from Kilmarnock Athletic and five from or via Vale of Leven. In the case of the last two it is more understandable. The Vale had been Scottish Cup finalist, albeit losing, in the two previous seasons. Kilmarnock Athletic too had been semi-finalists in 1882 and 1883. But the Edinburgh clubs had got no further than the 5th round and Hearts only to the 3rd. No players were recruited directly from the two best clubs of the previous half-decade, Queen's Park and Dumbarton. In fact two thirds were from clubs with little aspiration to anything more than friendlies and distinctly average Cup-runs.

Nevertheless the impact on the four main source-clubs can be clearly seen. Hearts, St. Bernard's and Vale of Leven wobbled. The first two took a decade to recover. The Vale, the only really top club on the list, was able to bounce back quicker but weakened before eventual implosion again a decade later albeit mainly for other reasons. Kilmarnock Athletic was less fortunate. Essentially pillaged it hung on for one more season but simply disappeared the next.

Then there were the clubs that recruited where and what. Burnley F.C. clearly had a policy and presumably the funds for it. All the Vale of Leven players went there and nowhere else as the club also had its contacts in and topped up from Renfrewshire. It was a "West of Scotland", a 2-2-6 club. With a degree of contrast, however, Bolton Wanderers seems to had eclectic fingers everywhere, as did Accrington. Darwen had the Gledhill connections in Glasgow, Padiham its to Renfrewshire once more, Church looked to Mauchline exclusively and the other Bolton teams, Halliwell and Gt. Lever, recruited almost entirely in Ayrshire, particularly in the case of the latter in Kilmarnock. And then there was Preston, where of the fifteen, yes fifteen, new arrivals to its two clubs ten came from Scotland's capital. It was an "East of Scotland", 2-3-5, Pyramid club. Moreover, we know how recruitment was done. For some it was personal links, for others. by placing adverts locally in Scotland inviting trialists to travel south to show what they could do, whilst Preston, it is said, had one half of what might be described as the World's first football agents in the form of two Scottish brothers, the McNeil. Both were print compositors, with Tom, the elder, the one in Lancashire, probably working for Preston's local paper, The Herald. He is known to have died in the town in 1895. The other was Jock, presumably John, who was equally still living back in their hometown, Auld Reekie. However, there is a problem with the story long-term. Whilst the Scots players continued to arrive at Deepdale in numbers initially and for the next decade and a half, by 1885 John was already living permanently in London. Perhaps, therefore, it was one of the other brothers, Elijah and Peter, who remained in Scotland and were also in the print business, who actually provided the link. Certainly they, at twenty-four and twenty respectively, were of an age where they could even have been playing football alongside and against the players, who would make the move south. 

And finally there are the players themselves, the most notable feature of whom is just how young they were. In fact of the seventy there were only four older than twenty-five. One was none other than Fergus Suter, still only twenty-six but already a six-year veteran of the North English game. The oldest at thirty was Alex McLintock, ex. Vale of Leven and Scotland, at Burnley for a season that ended in injury. The youngest was Jimmy Ross at seventeen but then he had been recruited because he had come to watch his recently-signed twenty-one year-old, elder brother, Nick,  turn out for Preston and stayed. In fact it is noticeable that a good proportion of arrivals, eleven of the forty with identifiable birth-dates had once more just reached the age of maturity and thirty-six were twenty-four or under. In other words the vast bulk of the "Scotch" incomers, far from were being experienced "Professors", were participants in the Scottish game for sure but little more. They had few representative honours between them. They were not experienced. They came in general from less good clubs, so were cheap and certainly replaceable. In other words they were disposable journeymen, not even shamateurs like Lang, Andrews and by then Suter but little more than paid amateurs. If they failed to make the grade or were injured, as many did and were, no doubt the owners/administrators of the clubs involved recognised that there were plenty more replacements on the "Scotch", working-class footballing conveyor-belt that now was expanding to as far north as Aberdeen. And even if they stayed they could for the most part only do what they knew, others could observe and try to copy but their ability go beyond demonstration by example to organised, direct instruction must have been limited, if by seniority, if nothing else.

And so it proved. Only three Scots seem to have been shown to "train", all briefly, McDade at Preston itself, Andy Hunter at Aston Villa and in the 1890s, David Waugh. He had arrived in Bolton in 1884, joined Great Lever, moved to Padiham by Burnley, then to Burnley itself and in 1888 to Everton, where at the end of the season he retired through injury. But he continued as trainer, taking the club to second place to Preston in 1889-90 and to the top of the league the following year before, for reasons unknown, leaving and by 1894 at the latest returning for good to Glasgow and footballing obscurity.

With in 1884-5 such a rapid expansion of Scottish player-numbers it is hardly surprising the 1885-6 season did not see a repetition. The total seems to have increased by just four to seventy-nine as the number in Lancashire dropped one but Merseyside doubled its interest, other existing clubs adjusted and newly-founded Bury invested straight away in four. But there were pressures, financial ones, which would show in 1886-7. As in the South Arsenal was formed by Fifer, David Danskin, in Woolwich initially as an amateur team with him, two other Scots and the son of a Diasporan in its first season, simultaneously other clubs trimmed. In Lancashire Great Lever off-loaded all its contingent. Some seem to have been unwanted by the game, others moved on with the effect that the all-England total dropped by five. Moreover, it remained at about that number in 1887-8 even as Great Lever actually folded, other clubs, for example Aston Villa, faced severe, financial problems too and it became obvious that the existing system of friendlies and Cup-games was simply not enough to sustain even a leaner game.

It was then that one man, yet another Scot, William McGregor and again of Aston Villa, decided reform was needed. He did so with his club having at the time just one countryman, Archie Hunter, in its squad but now with ex-player, ex-captain, Scottish George Ramsay, brought back into the fold as Secretary, proto-manager.  The result of the reform was the creation and rapid introduction of the Football League, now the model for sporting leagues everywhere but then something of a shot-in-the-dark. But it would literally be the game-changer not just in football finances but also in the arrival of what, I believe, have to be seen rather than Scotch but as the real Scottish professors, top-flight players with from that same year play based not just on the existing, "scientific" Scottish-style but its emergent, next development, which might best be called the Renton Revolution.

But first a little contextualisation. The rapidly growth of influx of Scots players from 1884-5 had produced results but not necessarily those expected by current interpretations of football history. The then sole, national competition, the FA Cup, was that year won by Blackburn Rovers. But then it had also won it the previous year, both times defeating Scotland's Queen's Park, when for a short number of seasons "national" meant British, and it would again be victorious the following year, on that occasion defeating West Bromwich. Yet for Rovers there is an argument that the influx made no difference and evidence perhaps to back it up. In its three winning teams it had just four, three and four Scots respectively, so hardly a full-house, influential yes but overwhelming no. Furthermore, in 1882-3 Rovers town rivals, Olympic, had lifted the same trophy with no Scots players, only then recruiting a couple for the following season but to no repeat. In other words Scots might produce success but more Scots might not, therefore there was another explanation, which, I suggest, might be as follows.

Rovers had begun the addition of Scots early, possibly in 1877-8 with perhaps the arrival of  Hugh McIntyre on an ad hoc basis. He was after-all as previously suggested also playing for Rangers at the time. It had then certainly added Peter Campbell and Fergus Suter the following year with a then a small number of further additions, in fact two, in the early eighties so five newbies in all but by 1883 took the field with just four. Meanwhile Bolton had already gone further with five and Preston was creeping up on the rails. In 1881-2 it had one, McDade, then two and in 1883-4 six. Yet firstly Bolton was not conspicuously successful. It was knocked out in the 4th Round by the then staunchly amateur Notts County, although it did include the India-born Highlander, Stuart MacCrae, who was about to create a world first, whilst playing for England. But then that is a another story. And secondly Preston's record was to that same 4th Round but no further, albeit it read bye, two wins then disqualification and must have impressed to a point. Its wins were 4-1 and 9-1 respectively, the first being over Gt. Lever, which then had but one Scot in its squad, a very young John Goodall, yet would find some nine more for the following season. And the disqualification had been for "professionalism" on the basis without doubt of its Scots contingent but leaving no possibility of knowing how much further the club might have gone otherwise, Scots or not.  Thus Blackburn's success on the basis of lack of evidence to the contrary might be assigned to what was a largely settled team with a Scots core of quality and therefore an established part-Scots style of play, one known to have been based at least to 1884 on the provan Scottish 2-2-6 formation, as much as to sheer Scots numbers.

However, that appears not have been as others saw it, aided by England by 1885, indeed by 1887, still having not defeated Scotland either home or away and Scotland not having lost a match to any opponent. It meant that initially, whilst for a couple of seasons, 1886-7 and 1887-8 the overall number of Scots in the English game levelled off, more teams began to recruit. Everton even pre-Waugh came into the market, going from three to eleven in the space of three years, as would professionalising Sunderland, professional football, existing and future, having been legitimised in England in 1885. Newton Heath, the team that would become Manchester United, signed its first as did Grimsby and one of the two two teams, East End and West End, that would become Newcastle United. Yet this was as elsewhere there had been considerable shuffling, not least in the previous two seasons, and not without cost. In the interim the almost hyper-active, localised Calder Valley and Bolton football hotbeds had effectively collapsed. In the latter Gt. Lever, the same Scots-heavy Gt. Lever, now had gone, whilst eight-Scot, financially over-extended Halliwell was about to go. In the former Padiham, Church, Preston Zingari and even Blackburn Olympic had effectively gone too with Rossendale on the brink. Indeed even with the arrival of the League Darwen and then Accrington would also decline, whilst in Liverpool the casualty, especially affected by the initial League-ruling of one club per town, would within four seasons be Bootle despite six Scots, Everton with its now ten somewhat contentiously getting the nod.

Yet for all the failures it was at the other end of the footballing spectrum, the apparently successful one, that most attention stayed focused with the prevailing view remaining that Scots won trophies. By the kick-off of the Football League on 8th September 1888 the number of them in the English game had increased season-to-season by the best part of a third to almost a hundred. Even teams for the moment outwith the League had joined in. Arsenal, for example, went from three to now eight plus a Diasporan. Lincoln City had three, Millwall and Bristol City one each. And when over the next months to April 1889 as Preston galloped away with the title, undefeated, eighteen wins and four draws, with forty points, eleven ahead of second, and also took the Cup with eleven of its squad drawn from north of the border the evidence must have seemed irrefutable. Scots won trophies.

But once more it has to be asked was it really the case? Preston, perhaps largely due to Tom McNeil, not only had eleven Scots that season but also nine or ten for the previous four, seven as an unchanging core. It meant, despite them coming from different parts of the country and therefore potentially employing different playing-formations, there had been time to develop and slot them into a "Preston-style". They had been blended, a repetition of Blackburn five years earlier, not disabused by Burnley, with its Vale of Leven bar one all gone, which finished ninth of twelve and had to stand for re-election also with eleven Scots but newer ones, and Everton one place above, firmly mid-table until the arrival of David Waugh, and with a doubling of the same in three seasons to ten and thus no time to meld? 

Be that is may, with Preston taking the title for the second time the following season, 1889-90, albeit now with just eight Scots, but still a core, success seemed to have been firmly associated with Scottish numbers and continued to be so not just in the Football League but across the wider English game. The overall count of Scots in it increased once more and by another 30%. Notts County now went from two to seven, Stoke bottom of the pile the previous season from four to nine, Bolton from six to eleven, Aston Villa under Ramsay from two to six, Derby from two to five. Newly-founded Sheffield United went straight in at four as did, outwith the League, Port Vale and this time the top three places in the League's second season were all filled by teams that were Scots-heavy, Preston North End, Everton and Blackburn Rovers, with Blackburn also taking the Cup, and over the four clubs a total of twenty-one "Jocks".

Yet once more the analysis is now and appears to have been contemporaneously simplistic. In that same 1889-90 season Stoke again finished in last League place and this time was not re-elected. Moreover, now Bolton was ninth of the twelve and Burnley eleventh with Notts County between them, thirty-eight Scots players over the four least successful clubs. Or put another way on the face of it successful clubs averaged seven each, unsuccessful ones nine and half, numbers alone could not be the answer, whereas a settled team and resultant teamwork had shown they could be.

QED its seemed. But there was still a problem. This teamwork thing was nothing new. Had it not been the Scottish way for the best part of twenty years and by then an open secret? Moreover, had it not also been demonstrated intensively for the previous five years at least and and a decade in total, as the numbers of Scots players must infer, and required just imitation and implementation, as the notion of the "Scotch Professor" would imply? Furthermore, by then should the position in England not have been of English graduates of Scottish, professorial tutelage being able to pass on what they knew to English players without the need of Scots? Yet, it did not happen. The teams to follow Preston to success in the new League until the second half of the decade were Everton, coached by Waugh, a Scot, a basically all-Scots Sunderland three times and Villa thrice too, also with a Scot in charge.

However, all the above is not to say that, if  the notion of  the "Scotch Professorship" of the 1880s is, in my opinion, a myth, not "Scotch" but "Scottish Professors"  have not existed. In fact now in the 1890s would be when they arrived and in very quick time. It was as Preston continued to be a successful club for almost the next decade with up to twelve Scots in its squad and Everton became successful too, remaining reasonably so until the outbreak of the First World War with in five seasons in the interim having sixteen or more and maxing at twenty-one. Sunderland, Burnley still, Derby and the team that would emerge to rival Everton, Liverpool, would also have their moments with up to eighteen recruits from the north in a season and no fewer than nine. But it would the two teams that would dominate either side of the turn of the century, which, I believe, justify the thesis. The teams were in the 1900s Newcastle and first Aston Villa and , both notably with Scots managers, the former with up to sixteen Scots on its books in a season and the latter, the pivotal one, although with never more than nine or ten, sourcing wisely and in doing so best embracing the new football that in 1888 had emerged so comprehensively from North of the Border once more, remarkably and more precisely again from the Leven Vale.

In the case of Villa success with the new football was based on George Ramsay proving not necessarily the most rapid but more astute than any other in its recognition and transference. In fact, whilst it might be argued initially the new club on the Scottish scene, Glasgow Celtic, and then in terms of numbers Everton reacted soonest, it would be Ramsay at Villa, who would, first, in terms of time-line match the transfer of the innovation into the game elsewhere north of the border and, second, within a decade see to that same transfer south of the same. Moreover, in doing so he would even outpace Scotland's international team, which for several seasons from 1888 struggled with results, one factor being indecision over adoption. But there would also be negative consequences. He would also through success be a major cause of the almost complete collapse of serious, Leven Vale football in exactly the same time-frame. Indeed it is precisely that contention that my piece, Vale tae Villa and the Toffees, attempts to cover in more detail but a synopsis here not going amiss.

Just as in 1884-5 when Burnley had raided Vale of Leven F.C. so from 1889-90 would Ramsay. The connection with the club might have begun as early as 1883-84. Andrew Hunter had played for it prior to his arrival in Birmingham. But, as by then Ramsay was not active at Villa and when he returned five years later Hunter had already died and in Australia, it might be just a red herring. Be that as it may for the second season of the Football League and after a less than successful first Ramsay is said to have signed four Vale of Leven players. One had considerable experience, Robert Paton, the goalkeeper, in his mid-thirties already, and perhaps more or less a chaperone. He stayed one season. One was very young, John Baird, a nineteen year-old full back, who seems to have been more or less gone out on loan to nearby Kidderminster, returning after a season to four more years at the Birmingham club. Then there was the one most often overlooked, another Paton, James, no relation, a twenty-four year old forward, who gave four seasons of mainly reserve service. And finally there was James Cowan, twenty-one, a reserve half-back first with neighbouring Renton and then the Alexandria club, who after a couple of seasons would become the mainstay of Ramsay and Villa's new team for fourteen years and in 1896 Scotland's centre-half.

But at this point Ramsay proved doubly astute. First he corrected a mistake. The footballing winds were changing direction, their source this time was not Vale of Leven but its neighbour, Renton. Here was a small village club that was beginning the revolution of Scottish and, I would argue in time the World game. It had from 1885 produced a conventional team, which in 1886 and 1887 had won the Glasgow Charity Cup defeating Vale of Leven on both occasions, winning it again in 1888 and once more in 1889. Meantime it had won the Scottish Cup Final in 1885 with victory once more over Vale of Leven, lost it in 1886 to Queen's Park and just won it once more defeating Cambuslang. Yet it had done all this with a change of formation and therefore tactics in the middle, both chronologically and on the field. Its first successes had been with the Scottish, conventional 2-2-6 formation. Its latter ones employed 2-3-5 but not as known. Rather than the three half-backs of the Pyramid in front of the previously standard two was now a dropped-back forward, what would become known as the Scottish, attacking centre-half. And it seems Ramsay, whilst he probably did not see it coming, nobody did, and seems to have made an initial error as to source, then reacted quickly and clearly more effectively.

Whilst the creation of Glasgow Celtic, religion and money would in 1888 tempt away from Renton the lynch-pin of the new system, James Kelly, and his teammate, Neil McCallum, and of that year's Cup-winning team Andrew Hannah, Bob Kelso, Harry and John Campbell and John Lindsay would all move south in 1888 and 1889, none would ever cross footballing paths again except as opposition. And it was much the same case even for some of the players, who filled their shoes, Alex Barbour, John McNee, John Harvey and replacement centre-half, Harry Gardiner, with the exceptions being McNee and Barbour briefly plus Gardiner at Bolton and Harvey and John Campbell at Sunderland. Yet Ramsay still stepped in and in 1890 signed three others, a reserve, Connor, and first-teamers, George Campbell, then twenty-six, and James Brown, aged just twenty-one, the half-backs to have been promoted to either side of Gardiner. Connor stayed just a season but Campbell three. Brown became Villa's centre-half for a season or two before Cowan replaced him, Baird returned from Kidderminster to convert to left-half, local boy Harry Devey was trained through to form a Villa half-back line in losing the 1892 FA Cup Final that might be described as at the very least quasi-Leven. And the Scots input would be ramped up. What in 1892 had been eight Scots in the squad including one more from Vale of Leven, centre-forward Jock Fleming, the following season became ten, eleven with a brief return from Robert Paton and again with a Vale of Leven import, Daniel Paton, Jimmy's brother and also a forward. It would see a rise in the League from ninth to in 1894 League winner, the taking of the Cup in 1895 and four more League titles in five seasons, including the Double in 1897. In fact Villa by the turn of the century, having drawn on Leven Vale clubs to start with had turned itself into more than something of an English Renton.

But it had been done with a twist. Villa would and has never passed its peak Scots contingent of 1892-3 and therein lies the second strand of Ramsay's astuteness. The combination of his initial foresight and subsequent correction had, as it turned out, gained his club at least a three year advantage over its opposition. That can be seen by the fact that as his Scots count first tripled and then further almost double to that date before then dropping away, elsewhere there was a lag. Overall employment of Scots talent throughout the game at seventy in 1888 became ninety a year later, one hundred and fifty in 1890-91, over two hundred in 1893 but reached a peak at just under two hundred and fifty only in 1896-7, when Villa just had four yet won the Double. Indeed its Cup-winning team included only three of the four, James Cowan now joined by his younger brother, John, and John Campbell. In fact defeated Everton had more, many more, seven in the team that day and sixteen in all in the squad.

And here is the crux. At Everton not postulated "Scotch" but now the real generation of actual Scots Professors were clearly in place in team and squad, albeit as might be expected as older, experienced tutors. The evidence is the average age of the post-1888 influx of Leven players, with it difficult to believe the contemporary, non-Leven were any different, was not the twenty-one of 1884-5 but almost twenty-four. These were not sallow boys but men, players in their prime, experienced enough to have something to pass on and confident to do so. And there was the generality of sheer numbers. and density of penetration. The total in England in Villa's Double-season was two hundred and forty-five, the average per First Division club nine. The contrasts could not have been starker and here I have a suggestion. Professors there had certainly been at Villa Park but now unlike Goodison Park were mostly gone. The reason was they had done their job. Systems were in place. Five of the winning eleven were locally born. Local talent was brought through playing the Villa way, not just whilst Cowan until 1902 remained a player. Beyond that, even as the number of Scots around diminished to one, he coached English players at the club the Scots way for a further three years. His manager then saw the process continued for two decades more, as the overtly Scots baton was comprehensively passed to Newcastle for the best part of one of them, partially for two decades more and to other teams. Everton once more, Preston still, Sunderland, the two Manchester clubs, Arsenal, Spurs and newly-formed Chelsea with between eight and thirteen Jocks on their rosters all continued to import in attempts to embrace the pedagogy before through success or failure and for simple survival adopting much the same more localised approach. Whichever it was cloth was either tailored or trimmed. The numbers of Scots in the major English game that was at 217 in 1906 and already almost a fifth down from its peak would fall by 1914 to just over one hundred and seventy. It was a reduction now of a third. But then some six thousand Scots had already plied their trade, or rather Scots player/seasons had been seen on the training and football grounds of our nearest neighbour; many of what from the 1880s have become known as "Scotch Professors" but I maintain were merely demonstrators, perhaps sixty in all, were already dead; and even what I would suggest were the real Scottish 1890s profs in both senses, I remind you, two hundred and fifty at their seasonal max., were retired, the game forever embellished, job done.