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:
Of Scotland's population roughly two thirds live in the Central Belt and one third outwith. Check it if you wish. It means that of a football national football team seven or eight would come from the former and three or four from the latter. Now there is the complication of players born abroad but that does not alter the ratios only, at times, the numbers. Glasgow has one tenth of the Scottish and, accepting it used to be little more, the number of players per team would on the same principle be one or two. From Edinburgh it would be just about one and from Fife, Perth, Angus including Dundee and Aberdeen a good two. However it has rarely been so with perhaps thirteen ages of Scottish football and profound effects on results.
Yet it all started well. In the first team that was put out to represent Scotland in Glasgow in 1872 three of the eleven were born in the city. It was a little more than might be expected since the team was essentially Queen's Park, a Glasgow club. But then four of those included were from outwith the Central Belt, three from Aberdeen, so, reflecting the North Scottish element in the origins of the club, outwith the Lowlands was also over-represented.
However, it would settle down. After the blip of the second game where four rather than just one playing their football in England, two being even born outwith Scotland, were included and the national team suffered its first loss, for four years until 1877 Glasgow, and still more Glasgow and the Central Belt, dominated as the table below shows.
Then something happened. It was in part the spread of the game into Fife but mainly working-class football. The new game had reached the Leven Vale and from firstly the Vale of Leven club, then from Dumbarton and Renton a stream of proletarian players would emerge, which, despite Glaswegian assertions, would take the Scottish game and there the game itself to a new level. In a first Golden Era decade Scotland would lose only once, in 1879, and then in somewhat dubious circumstances, the
Kinnaird moment, with its aftermath, a win/lose ratio of 87%, Glasgow would play second fiddle and North Scotland tick along.
The heavy defeat of Scotland in 1888 brought that first Golden Era to a crashing end. The loss was due to three things, one factual, the second accidental and the third tactical. Professional football had been sanctioned in England in 1885 but not in Scotland and English teams and players had become more organised and, now full-time, no doubt fitter. Scotland had tried to introduce James Kelly and the Renton system without the rest of the team understanding how to play it. And then it didn't help that England's best forward, John Goodall, was actually a Scot, raised in Kilmarnock but born in London and eligible only to play for England because his Scots soldier father was garrisoned in London at the time and, more importantly, his equally Scots mother was there also.
It was then that Glasgow really for the first time dominated and it was a disaster, a 27% win ratio. A Scots amateur team played an increasingly professional, English one with a system that was neither pre-Renton or Renton and two home draws and four defeats followed until the bullet was finally bitten. The bullet in question was not league football. It was introduced in the interim following closely upon the English example. Nor was it professionalism. It was legitimised north of the border in 1893 but effectively change nothing. Shamateurism was rife. It was residence. Almost every professional team in England had its Scots professional. Some teams, even, were entirely Scots. Yet for more than two decades no Scot plying his trade as a professional or even enjoying the amateur game as a pastime had been permitted to represent his country. Much of the cream of Scots footballing talent had been excluded. That is until 1896, at which point Glasgow's hegemony ceased, its number in the national team fell to its national level, the Central belt outwith the cities, held sway and for the best past of a decade the team itself won, stuttered and won again against all-comers and, most importantly, in the game that really mattered, against England .
It was an era that was, if not golden, then certainly with a win ratio of 57% silver with at its core the genius that was
Alex Raisbeck. Perhaps the greatest of Scottish centre-halves, the successor to Kelly and Cowan, the predecessor to Thomson he played just just eight times for the national team between 1900 and 1907, but saved for seven against England and losing only once. He was also be the player, who would see the beginning of what might be called Scotland's Ayrshire period but equally could be said to be the first, in fact the only period when the national team on most of the country's footballing resources. In all of the eight next years at least four of the team were born in Ayrshire. In all but one North Scotland was represented, whilst in contrast Glasgow contributed none in fout of eight.
And immediately post-Great War North Scotland's contribution remained much the same as what can rightly be described as Scotland's second Golden Era began. After a initial post-War defeat the win ratio was 77% but also included the Wembley Wizards. The 1920s would see the almost total dominance of the Central Belt, with a clear majority from 1920 in five XIs of nine but still more remarkable the contribution of those areas outwith Glasgow, Edinburgh and Ayrshire. In each of the nine years in question it was greater than the four that population alone might have suggested. Indeed in 1926, having twice been eight, it would even reach ten of eleven, two and a half times the four that might have been expected. The only exception was Alex Thomson, a Glasgow-based player with Celtic but born in Buckhaven in Fife.
And in the 1930s
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