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:
Turkey
Football is said to have came to Turkey some time before 1889. Certainly a match was played that year in Moda, today a suburb of Istanbul and bridge-linked to but across from ancient Constantinople on the Anatolian, the Asian bank of the Dardanelles. The two teams were the football clubs of Constantinople and Bournabat, both made up almost entirely of expatriates, some British, some French and others, only one of whom was a Turk; Osman Effendi, an employee of the British Embassy in the Turkish capital. Indeed, both teams also included members of the Thomson and Whittall families, some residents of the Turkish capital and others from the port city to the south known then as Smyrna and now as Izmir, for that is where Bournabat, now known at Bornova, is to be found.
But that Moda game was played to Rugby not Soccer rules and this rugby start has caused confusion with regard to the founders of football in Turkey. One is said to be Henry Pears and the other James La Fontaine. Pears was the game's referee and the son of Sir Edward Pears, the British solicitor in Istanbul, so unlikely on the grounds of class and that he was a known rugby player to have been involved with soccer directly, at least not yet. And Fontaine, actually Wilfred Edward James La Fontaine, was just twelve years old and may not even have been in the country at the time so once more an unlikely participant. Nevertheless, it again does not mean to say that he would not later also become involved in the game and relatively soon. In 1891 he was staying at Hampton Court in the apartment of the Rev. David McAnally and his family. He was there with a number of other boys from British families from the Middle-East. But it is probable that he returned to Turkey, to Smyrna in about and certainly no later than 1894. That was the year, which saw the foundation of the Bournabat Football and Rugby Club, clearly now playing both codes, which later became Smyrna FC and with amongst its founders said to be James himself, now eighteen and presumably his education in England over, his cousin Richard, three Whitalls, a Joly and a Giraud, although once again here there is slight problem. Richard La Fontaine was only ten at the time but who knows. Perhaps he was an early starter.
What Smyrna, Bournabat as was, did for opposition in the first years is unclear. It is reported that, although Moda FC was not officially formed until 1904, it played a team from Moda away in Istanbul in 1897, at home in 1898 and on other occasions after that. It is said too that James la Fontaine himself moved to Istanbul. In fact the whole family might have done so, his father, who was manager of the Imperial Ottoman Bank, being simply transferred. James was certainly there in 1902, the year that in Kadikoy he married Janet Maltass, the daughter of another Anglo-Turkish family. He was there too in 1904 in the team of the Constantinople Football Club, seemingly alternatively known as the Kadikoy or Cadi-Keuy Football Club. Kadikoy is the neighbouring suburb to Moda. Its club was formed in 1899 or 1900 and in 1903 its team appears to included just one Turk, Turks being officially banned from playing the games as it was too Western, five Greeks and four British. James La Fontaine was one. Henry Pears was another and a third a player, it appears, of a different cut. He was the Yorkshireman, Horace Armitage.
With in 1904 certainly two teams already in place in Istanbul, that is Constantinople and Moda, it seems football in the capital began to take off. That year would see the formation of the essentially British and Greek "Constantinople Football Association League", also known as the Istanbul Sunday League. Four teams would take part, Moda, the crew of HMS Imogene, which arrived in 1904 and took the first championship, Eplis F.C. formed that same year and the Greek team and finally Cadi-Keuy, Kardikoy. Cadi-Keuy would top the league in its second year and again in 1906-7. Moda would take it in 1907-8 but in the meantime the success of the league had led to the foundation of not just one but two Turkish teams that continue to this day.
The first in 1905 across the Dardenelles in a northern Istanbul was by college student at The Lycee Galatasary, from which emerged the club of the same name. It joined the Sunday league that same year and won its first title in 1908-9 with Moda runners-up. And it was by then being coached by Armitage, who by accepting the job perhap demonstrated as clearly as could be the difference in approach of the South and the North of England to the game and, who, effectively as manager, would never lose a match in also taking the title for the next two seasons. And Galatasary was followed in 1908 back in Kardikoy once more by a second, Fenerbahce, for which Armitage is also said briefly to have played and which, having entered the league in 1909, won it for the first time in 1912.
Meantime, in 1906 the Olympic Games had taken place in Athens, where football was included amongst the unofficial" sports and four teams took part. Two were from Greece, from Athens itself and Thessaloniki respectively. A third was a Denmark squad and the fourth from Turkey, in fact from Smyrna, or Smyrna FC to be precise with a mainly Anglo-Turkish Smyrna team was as follows ,
Edwin Charnaud, Zareh Kouyoumdjian, Edouard Giraud, Jacques Giraud, Henri Joly, Percy de la Fontaine, Donald Whittall, Albert Whittall, Godfrey Whittall, Harold Whittall and Edward Whittall
Just as almost two decades earlier for another match in another sport there were Whittalls, Jolys, Girauds and others and all the Whittalls, five of them, were either brothers or cousins, as were James "Jacques" Giraud and Percy La Fontaine. Both their mothers were Whittalls as well. Moreover, in what was clearly a small Diasporan world Percy La Fontaine was also related twice over to earlier name-sake,James. Through their fathers they were once more cousins and Percy's grandmother had also been, like James' wife, a Maltass.
In retrospect the 1906 Olympics might be seen as the high-point of Anglo-Turkish soccer. After that date inevitably founding players aged and drifted away from the game. Richard La Fontaine married, still in Kadikoy, in 1906, and Turkishisation gathered pace with the ending that same year of the law that forbade Turks playing the game. The Moda club was dissolved in 1910 as was Eplis, although from them emerged Rumblers FC, the team beaten into second place in 1912 by Fenerbahce in taking its first title. Cadi-Ceuy ceased to exist in 1912, in spite of La Fontaines and Armitage continuing to live in the Turkish capital. And it was the Great War, as was the case elsewhere, that marked the final end of any real British involvement in the game there, at least on the field. Horace Armitage returned to the UK after the War and died Bradford in 1937. James La Fontaine died in Istanbul in 1948, Richard also there in 1960.
Nevertheless, British involvement, specifically Scottish influence was reasserted briefly in the 1920s, when the mysterious Billy Hunter arrived, seemingly via an upbringing in Alva, Millwall, Bolton, Holland and Switzerland, all of the last three with a possible connection to a certain Jimmy Hogan. Hunter would coach Galatasary from 1924 to 1928, in the meantime the Turkish national team from 1924 to 1926, both not without success, and then seemingly still only in his mid-forties seemed simply to have disappeared from game and planet alike. That is until recent research. Read on.........