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:
It may come as a surprise but even before football had begun to take root in Latin America, indeed before it had even arrived on Continental Europe, it was being played in Asia. In Burma it arrived in 1879, when George Scott, James George Scott, later knighted, a Fifer, another son of the Manse, born in Dairsie, a man obviously carried away with the explosion of the game North of the Border, is said to have organised the country’s first games. In China too it was also that same year that its first club was founded. There had been a Scottish Club in the city from 1868. It had been created expressly to form a cricket team to play the Shanghai English. However, around 1870 a Beattock-born, Greenock-educated engineer in his early twenties, John Prentice, first arrived in the city, must then on furloughs home also have become infected with that new football bug and returned to the Far Orient in much the same. highly-contagious condition as Scott two and half thousand miles to the west. Games were organised, resulting in 1879 in the Shanghai Engineers Football Club with Prentice elected as it first president and affiliation not to the FA but the SFA. It was followed in 1887 by the Shanghai Football Club as part of the Shanghai Athletic Club, with in 1891 Prentice donating a trophy to be played for by it and the Engineers.
And it had been in the early 1880s, that Prentice was joined in the Shen city by two young man still in their twenties. The first was Frederick Anderson. In 1881 he was in Hong Kong; in 1882 Secretary of the Shanghai Cricket Club. He would in 1899 for a year become Chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council, effectively the city's mayor. Two years later Prentice would also hold the office for his year. And in 1905 Anderson would be elected President of the Shanghai Rugby Club. It was an easy adjustment of code for an enormously important figure in Scottish sporting history, specifically in football. Anderson had been educated at rugby-playing Glasgow Academy. Yet in 1874, having lived in England for a while and returned to North of the Border and then a nineteen year-old clerk, Fred Anderson had been on the right-wing in the losing Clydesdale side in the first ever Scottish Cup Final. Behind him he had had
Robert Gardner
in goal and as captain. Inside him had been
James "Reddie" Lang. Queen's Park, Anderson's previous team, had won 2-0. And in the same year this time from the left-wing he had scored in the forty-second minute of the World's third ever international game. It was Scotland's first ever goal and had set his country on path to its first ever win, 2-1 at the West of Scotland Cricket Ground.
And the second young man was Archie Lang. He was a Marine Engineer to trade, who arrived in Shang'hai in 1881 also with a substantial footballing pedigree. Born in 1859, at fifteen he played a couple of games for his home-town Dumbarton first team. At sixteen he was a regular and would remain so until his departure. At eighteen, a fine full-back, he had been selected for the Scotland trial matches with internationals against England and Wales to be played. At twenty he won his first and only cap, against Wales and might have gone on to many more had work not taken him to China, where he stay for several years. And during that time he play for and captained Prentice's Shanghai Engineers.
John Prentice would die aged seventy-eight still in Shanghai in 1925. George Scott, Sir James George Scott, died in Sussex in 1935 aged eighty-four. Fred Anderson also returned to Britain in 1909, living in London and then also settling not in Scotland but the Home Counties, in Berkshire, where he died in 1940 and a year older than Scott. Lang would return to Scotland, and would die in 1925 at the age of sixty-six not in Dumbarton but still in the Vale of Leven, in Alexandria. Scott himself would not see his early efforts bear much in the way of fruit. The Burmese Football Federation was not founded until 1947, joining FIFA in 1952. The picture in China is more complicated. The Chinese Football Association was first founded in 1924 but, following the Chinese Civil War became the Chinese Taipei FA. The current Chinese FA was then reconstituted in 1949. However, it recognises that football was introduced earlier but not earlier than 1900. Perhaps that is because football seems to have reached Beijing at about that time, its arrival two decades before that and, even though they were in the foreign community and understandably so, the efforts of Prentice, Anderson, Lang and others in Shanghai simply and unjustifiably ignored.