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:
Thomas Scott, founder of teams in Campinas and Jundiai in Sao Paulo State in Brazil, would die there in 1913. But it would be far from the last involvement his family would have in the game there. Of his seven sons David would come back to live in Scotland where he was a textile factory manager. His brothers when they visited the Old Country would give his address in Carnoustie and elsewhere in Angus as theirs. He would voyage to Brazil only in 1939. And Hugh, after enlisting in the Great War, would settle in Rio de Janeiro. However, any or all of John, Alex, Robert, James and Archibald, would remain active, not up-state but in the city of Sao Paulo itself.
And as they settled into their new home football in Brazil but especially in Sao Paulo was going through an expansive but unsettled period, both in terms of clubs and organisation. 1912 had seen the arrival, or rather the return, of The Gazelle or The Little Deer, the names that were soon given to the diminutive and fleet-footed and -thinking
Archibald Fulton McLean. McLean had come to do a summer's work three miles from the centre of the city in Ipiranga, at the new factory built by his employers, Coats, the cotton thread makers based in his home town, Paisley. It was the second time he had visited Brazil. In 1907 he had also spent a summer between early May and June, perhaps early July, in Sao Paulo and between Scottish football seasons for Archie Mclean was also a semi-professional footballer. He had played four games on the right wing not for Sao Paulo Athletic, the British club's team, nor for Ypiranga Athletic, formed just a year before but curiously for Germania, with its obvious roots. Nor was he the only Scot prominent in the Sao Paulo game. In his first appearance he had played against the centre-forward for SPAC,
Charles Miller, the Diasporan Scot who had brought the game to the city. And that same appearance had been refereed by Jock Hamilton.
Hamilton was also spending the British summer again between seasons in Sao Paolo. He was a coach at Fulham, hired by Clube Atletico Paulistano during the British off-season to bring some professional training to the richest of the Brazilian city's teams. It clearly worked. Paulistano would finish the season in second place. But then Hamilton, born in Ayr, knew what he was doing. He had been as a player a centre-half, a Scottish centre-half, for half-a-dozen English clubs and Fulham had just won promotion to the Football League having been led to the top of the Southern League by another
Hamilton, Robert Cumming from Elgin, a former Scottish international.
It might have been expected that on his return to Sao Paulo in 1912 Archie McLean would again step straight into his old team. In fact he played just two games and not for Germania but SPAC, on the 1st September and 20th October at the end of the Brazilian season and after the date when he would have been expected by his Scottish team, Johnstone, to have returned. In spite of the club keeping his contract open he did not go back. In fact he was not to return permanently for almost forty more years.
However, Mclean had chosen a bad time to join the SPAC team. The growing problems of shamateurism that had really begun with the arrival of Jock Hamilton in 1907 had worsened. More trainers had been employed professionally and players were beginning to move clubs, even internationally, for more than just convenience. SPAC, which had been struggling to keep up with the competition, objected to the rising tide of shamateurism and at the end of the 1912 season in spite of finishing above two other clubs, International and Ipiranga, withdrew its team from the Sao Paulo League. And thus it was for the 1913 season Archie McLean would find an alternative club in ambitious Americano still in the Sao Paulo League as three of the elite clubs that had shared SPAC concerns formed their own separate league. Moreover it was at Americano that 28-year old McLean first teamed up in the last game of the season as the team topped the league with Bill Hopkins, a 17-year-old English clerk, who had arrived the previous year.
By now Sao Paulo's two leagues were in open conflict and the new league was recruiting. By the start of the 1914 season the three original members had persuaded Ipiranga to cross over and two new teams had been formed. One was Sao Bento Athletic Association based on the school of the same name and the other was Scottish Wanderers. It was exactly what its name suggests, a team with several Scots in it, seven ex-SPAC players including Archie McLean with the addition of Hopkins and three others. It would also become known not so much for its victories, it would finish second to last in the league, but for the way it played, notably the way McLean and Hopkins played in combination. It would bring them selection for the Sao Paulo team to play Rio de Janeiro and is said to be the origin of
A Tabelinha, the short-passing, interchanging style of football on the floor that would developed in Brazil over the next fifty years and result, after the disaster of 1950, in the World Cup victories of 1958 and 1962. But there was something else. Throughout the first months of the season Bradfield had been a regular member of the forward-line. In September he was gone. He would return the next season, perhaps after leave in the UK, but meantime his place was filled by a Scott. It wasn't Hugh, for he had gone to enlist, so was probably John, possibly Alex.
In 1915 the parallel leagues would continue and Scott would retain his forward place for the season. The returned Bradfield would slot in as right-half instead. Scottish Wanderers would again finish second from bottom but there would be problems off the field. It became clear that money was being paid to Wanderers players in contravention of amateur rules. From this distance it hardly seems surprising. Crowds to watch the games were growing. They could be 10,000. They came to see McLean and Hopkins. Shamateurism was rife and had not Archie McLean been semi-professional in Scotland? He was used to having his weekly wage from Coats topped up at home and openly from his weekend sporting activity and, in truth, in Sao Paulo there had been and was similar topping-up, if under the table, not least in the alternative league. However, in Scottish Wanderers' league it had to be discrete and had clearly not been discrete enough. The league had to be seen to act. The club was was punished, relegated in 1916 to the Second Division. The players were, however, curiously unaffected. Perhaps McLean and Hopkins were considered too valuable. They were simply allowed to join Sao Bento and remain in the top division. But any mention of Scott disappeared, a least for the moment.
In 1918 only McLean, now aged thirty-two, would play. There is no mention of Hopkins, either at Sao Bento or any other club. The reason was simple. He had been called up and travelled to his home-town, Portsmouth, to enlist. He would return in 1919 back to Sao Bento but he would not be alone. On 22nd June the club would field a Hopkins on both wings. On the left it would be Bill and on the right his brother, Fred. Three years younger he had in 1913 and aged just fourteen joined his elder brother in Brazil, presumably playing football at a lower level. At the age of twenty, having also returned from enlistment, he was ready to step up and, as Bill seemed to drop out in July, he played until September.
Meanwhile, Archibald Mclean had returned home on leave missing the first part of the 1919 season. He would be back in Sao Paulo by mid-September and back into the Sao Bento team. And in the background there had also been another development. A new club, F. C. Britania, had been formed, playing at a lower level in the Amateur League. Its timing was not coincidence. The end of the Great War saw the return of some of the British who had worked in Brazil and survived the conflict. Reinforced by new recruits it was they who with the remnants of SPAC and Scottish Wanderers formed the constituency not of a “Scottish” but a more “British” club. And it became clear that there was a close relationship and movement between it and Sao Bento in both directions. The Hopkins may have decided to play for the new club at times. And in Sao Bento's game on the 16th November alongside McLean was a second player of British origin. His name was Scott.
The 1920 season would see McLean and the Hopkins in the Sao Bento team, although never all together, with McLean in goal for several games and Bill Hopkins dropping back into the half-backs. An era was clearly coming to an end. In 1921 none would play a game. Yet Sao Bento would continue to introduce players. In September a Hamilton would make two successive appearances and a third in October and in three of the last five games of the season at centre-forward yet again there would be a Scott. And Scott at centre-forward still for Sao Bento would be there again in November and December 1922, a Scott would also be on the right-wing for a single game in October the following season and then would play in all but one of the games in 1924, yet in 1925 there would not be a sign of one. However, there was an explanation. The Scotts were playing for Britania, lifting the club to the level where in 1926 it accepted an invitation to join the League of Football Amateurs, the newly-created rival to the Sao Paulo League of Athletic Sports, as arguments about payment in football broke out once more.
Britania's first game was played on 9th June. There were three Scotts in the team plus Bradfield, from Scottish Wanderers a decade earlier. However, they were not enough. Britania would finish bottom of the division at the end of the season and would drop out. It seemed the Scott dynasty might be at an end but it was not so, or at least not quite yet. In the second game of the 1927 season at inside-left and scoring twice now for Palmeiras was a Scott once more. He would play in six of nine of the season's games and be top-scorer with six goals, The next season, 1928, it would be fifteen of twenty-two games with less success. There would be just four goals, still a top scorer but in a team that would finish bottom of the table. Yet there would be some nostalgic consolation in home and away games to Ponte Preta from Campinas and Paulista from Jundiai, both teams his father had been instrumental in founding. All four games against them home and away would be lost but Scott junior would at least score a goal away to Ponte Preta.
And then it seems he too might have been gone, through age or injury it was unclear. No Scott played until the eighth game of the 1929 season, six games in a row, none against Ponte Preta or Paulista and without a single goal before dropping out again. But there are two notes to be added. One of the games in the run had been against the team from Campinas but was cancelled by Ponte Preta and in Palmeiras's sixth game of the season at centre-half was Hopkins. It was a last hurrah but whether it was Bill or Fred in unknown.
At the end of the that 1929 season Palmeiras would finish eighth of twelve, in the year Britania was dissolved. Paulistano would be champions, winning fourteen of seventeen matches, but was having the same problems with increasing professionalism as a decade and a half earlier SPAC had had. It also decided to withdraw from football altogether. Its action precipitated the collapse of the Amateur Football League. From two just one remained, one which several of the clubs that were now without a league joined, but not Palmeiras, at least not directly. Instead it and the footballers of Paulistano effectively amalgamated to form Sao Paulo F.C., (SPFC) and it was the new club which immediately joined or is it rejoined what was now a league without clubs from outside the city, that is without Campinas and Ponte Preta.
SPFC played its first game on 16th March 1930, a 0:0 draw with Ipiranga. In its fifth on the left-wing there was a Scott. In the sixth he was there again and scored. He was there once more in the seventh and eighth games and then once more simply gone. Almost twenty years after the death of their father and forty years after he had arrived in the country the last Scott had seemingly played his last top-flight game in Brazilian football. Which Scott he was or they were is impossible to tell exactly although John, having travelled to Britain in 1922 and 1927, would do so again in 1933 but in 1930 was already in his forties. He was therefore unlikely to have been playing at any high level. It left Alexander, Robert, James and Archibald. James travelled to and from Brazil, indeed from Santos, to Britain as late as 1948 and 1952. He would then have been fifty years old so twenty eight in 1930. Archibald would have been slightly younger. Robert would have been about thirty-one and Alexander thirty four. All could still have been playing, but which were is unknowable. The only thing that is certain is that Scotts came, introducing football to the interior of Brazil, and stayed as active players in the top flight in its then second city almost until 1933 when the game they had first pioneered, then nurtured through participation and clearly loved as “amateurs” finally officially became what it had unofficially been for a generation, professional, and has never looked back.