Historians of "soccer", indeed, the mythology of it too, seem to have it that competitive football in the USA began in Kearny, New Jersey with ONT. New York had a club a decade earlier but apparently no opposition; the equivalent of a Queen's Park prior to 1873. Perhaps in the analysis there is therefore more than a touch of the victor takes the spoils with, again like the Spiders in Scotland post 1873,  the Clark's mill-based club winning the first three playings of the American Cup before the baton was handed over to southern Massachusetts and Fall River, in the Scottish context its West Dunbartonshire and Vale of Leven. However, the truth is with the foundation of ONT in 1883 that it may not have been the first football club even in Soccer Town USA.

Facts are that two clubs were formed in Kearny in 1883; ONT in November, although games did not start until early the following year, and Kearny Rangers, for which there is no foundation date with a good chance that it was earlier. However, whatever the case there two two clearly fed off each other in rivalry, in location certainly and also it would appear in tactics and in nationality. That ONT emerged from a thread mill, indeed an internationalising business that was in instigation entirely Scots, is without doubt. Clark's was Paisley through-and through. But that it drew on skilled labour, cotton-spinners and others, not just from Renfrewshire but also from elsewhere, notably England's cotton-county, Lancashire, is also true. And therein there might have been some rivalry and disagreement both on and off the football field.

Football had exploded in Scotland as a working-class participant sport from 1873. It was five more years before it began to do the same in England not without Scots input and specifically in the north Lancashire mill-towns - Bolton, Darwen, Accrington, Blackburn and Burnley. By 1883 both were strongholds, Scotland in terms as Britain as a whole, Lancashire becoming so in terms of England. And there was already tactical divergence. In 1872 Scotland had invented defence and from that its passing-game developed from its 2-2-6 tactical formation, the one it would stay with until 1887 and the still Scottish introduction of 2-2-1-5. In England defensiveness, having been at first largely ignored, was already in the process of being taken a stage further with the introduction of a third half-back in a 2-3-5; what Jonathan Wilson has called The Pyramid but given the convention of defence to attack is actually the inverse and more like a top. Said to have been devised in Wales, clubs in Lancashire and elsewhere were already using it, the Welsh too internationally from 1882 with the England national team first doing so in 1884, albeit with a Scot as the new-fangled "centre-half".         

Thus when the first round of the first American Cup kicked off in 1885 ONT would be first up, taking the field and winning with a team that was largely Lancastrian. Even Jimmy Douglas, whose surname means in Gaelic lierally "blackgrey" was a son of Farnworth and grandson of Denton. Only William Clark was certainly Scots.  James Mitchell was probably so. James McGurk was the locally-born son of Irish immigrants, as was Spillane. In fact later in the campaign a local journalist observed that all but one of its players was from the Red Rose county and, with Clark and Mitchell dropped, he was probably correct. Moreover, from the start ONT adopted a 2-3-5, which was in obvious contrast to the Rangers team. The latter in its first fixture is recorded definitively as a 2-2-6 and fielded an eleven, where, even if the transient forward-line was not, the defence of David Ferguson, the Hood brothers (John and William), Morris, James Lennox and Robert Raeburn, at least two from Paisley, whilst still mostly employed at the thread-mill and therefore working alongside ONT's Swithenbys, James Howarth, Joe Swarbrick etc, was largely Scots. We thus may have had a situation where the birth of Kearny if not US soccer was not a single child but twins, born more or less simultaneously as is the case and from a Scots womb but in rivalry, even perhaps in chosen and lasting schism. The official team within a Scots company was largely English, the local town-based rivals, including employees of that same company, Scots. The English played the English way, the Scots outwith and the Scots way.

But interestingly that to change, at least in part. Whilst the core of ONT would remain until the team aged, dropping away only by the end of the decade, and the Rangers defence would also be in place for a couple of seasons, it would in the second of these switch formation, to 2-3-5. William Hood stepped forward to centre-half, presumably defensive, as his brother and captain Lennox moved to be the full-back pairing. And this as the same transition, the skirl of the pipes clearly heard even on the American side of the Pond, was also temporarily taking place in Scotland. The outcome was an 1886 final of the American Cup between the two Kearny clubs with both participants set up the same way and still very Lancastrian ONT the easy victor. At the top fight the ex-patriot red-rose would eclipse the Diasporan thistle in that moment at least for, notably, whilst ONT is long defunct, the mill closed, the town still has its Scots American Athletic Club, chaired by an equally Scots-American Andrew Pollock.