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:
Sweden
Photo thanks to Roger Andersson
The story of the coming of Association football to Sweden is of particular interest, not just because it arrived with Scots but as the first example of the working-class game on the Continent. Football, that is of a Swedish variety, already existed in the country but the game we know today began and took root with
Major John Shields, although he may not have realised it, just as a few, short years later in not dissimilar circumstances he would be equally instrumental, again indirectly, still in Europe but almost on almost the furthest edge to Scandinavia, that is in Spain, specifically in Barcelona.
Major Shields was the joint-owner of Johnston Shields, lace-makers, officially lace-curtain manufacturers, of Newmilns in Ayrshire’s Irvine Valley. He was also a local man, the son of a local joiner cum innkeeper. Moreover, the Irvine valley was a footballing hotbed. Galston was a team of note from its foundation in 1891 to the Great War and it was in the very early 1890s that Shields, then aged in his mid-thirties so perhaps a player when younger, having started his own spinning business at least a decade earlier, bought a 25% share in a newly-opened Gothenburg lace-mill, the Svenska Gardinfabriken. The mill, literally the Swedish Curtain Factory, was to produce specifically net curtains on machines of a Nottingham design, Shield's partner was a Nottingham man, a known football enthusiast, and in 1891 they sent over one of Shields' younger brothers, James, to get the operation started and some of their employees, thought to be about ten in all, from Newmilns and its environs to Sweden to teach the locals the required techniques.
And so it was Scots lads were one day having an ad-hoc football game close to the back of the factory in a field called Balders Hage, when members of a local sports club, Orgrtye, were passing and intrigued by what they saw. They wanted to learn more. The Scots boys were happy to oblige, the Swedes would join in and the result was the rapid formation of an Association Football section within the Orgrtye club. The first game, the first official Association football game in Sweden, followed swiftly, played on the 22nd May 1892 in the Heden district of the city a short distance from the factory. It was against IS Lyckans Soldater, the “Soldiers of Fortune”, another local club, previously playing Swedish-rules. The result was 1:0 to Orgrtye with a team playing 2.3.5, consisting of both Scots and locals - Matthew Connell in goal, a mainly Swedish defence of William Jamie and Magnuss Carlsson, Otto Sjoberg, Alfred Sjoberg, presumably brothers, and Aron Hammaback with a completely Scottish forward-line of William McKinnon, Alexander Boswell Thomson, John Lawson, said to be the leading organiser, John Paterson and William Scott. The fixture was repeated the following year and Orgrtye were to win again; this time 6:0.
John Lawson has been described as a textile engineer and that he might have been. But his start in the trade had been much more humble and in Sweden his role might have been engineering and more. He, like Jack Shields, was also a local boy, born in 1865 in Darvel, up the valley from Newmilns, his father, a lace weaver, from the former, his mother from the latter. At five he was living in Loudoun between Newmilns and Galston, and in 1881 at fifteen already a lace weaver. However, he was not there in 1891, although his parents were. It has to be assumed that he was already in Sweden. He was certainly there the following year because in Gothenburg's Episcopalian Church, St. Andrew's, he married, not a Swedish girl but Elizabeth Wilson from Galston. The witnesses were, however, both Swedish. He is described as a Manager of a Lace Curtain Factory. In other words he was the boss but from the same background and with the same penchant for football as his workers, a boss who a decade later would be back in Loudoun with an eight-year-old daughter born in 1893 in Sweden, and be living there still in 1911 . In fact after his Swedish excursion he would live out the rest of his life in his Ayrshire valley, dying there in 1924.
Of the other Scots team members, Matthew Connel was actually born in Newmilns in 1869. He remained a lace-weaver and had married an Ayrshire girl but she too had joined him Sweden. Their first child was born there in 1894, their second the following year back in Scotland, where he was to die, still in Newmilns and buried in the village cemetery in 1945. William Jamie too had been born in Newmilns in 1870. He too remained a lace weaver, at least until he moved to the United States, to Philadelphia, a centre for lace production in America, where he died in 1925. However, in 1896 he had also married in Gothenburg but to a Swedish girl and in 1901 they were back in Newmilns with two children, the eldest born in Sweden.
Of William Mackinnon there are no identifiable details but there are of Sandy Thomson. He was another weaver who in 1864 had been born in Newmilns and by 1901 had returned there with a Swedish wife and two daughters that were Swedish-born, the younger in 1896 or 1897. It it even suggested that the family and other of the Scots returned home via a stay in Norway, which opens up the possibility of the involvement of them and perhaps others in the arrival of football there too. It had begun to take root from 1894. Thomson is another buried in Newmilns Cemetery. Which leaves John Paterson or Patterson. He is once more not easily identifiable. And nor is William Scott, although both might have been Newmilns-born, the former in 1891 a thirty-two years-old lace-weaver, married with a family in the village then and a decade later, dying still in the village in 1912 and again buried in Newmilns cemetery. And the latter might have been young man of barely sixteen, recorded in Newmilns in 1881 the son of Cheniel Weaver but not after that date.
Major Shields, his interests now elsewhere in Europe, was then to sell his shares in the Swedish company, seemingly in 1897 or thereabouts and the last of the Scots workers returned home. He had opened his Barcelona operation in 1893 and it was flourishing but none of the ordinary men, management and weaver alike, who had lived and worked in Sweden seemed to transfer to Spain. They simply settled back into equally ordinary lives no doubt unaware of what their footballing passion and amateur prowess had implanted. Gothenburg, and by extension Swedish, football was on the march. Orgryte, from then a completely local club, would go to dominate Swedish, national football into the 1920s, gaining honours in leagues and cups almost every year before being eclipsed by local rivals and the city's present top-flight club, IFK Goteborg.
And now there is also the wee tale of: