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:
Where Honour's Due
The Scottish Football Hall of Fame is good, as far as it goes. The caveat is, although Scottish football has existed for almost one hundred and fifty years and had its greatest eras in the 1870 and 1880s, as the nineteenth became the twentieth century and in the 1920s, periods when first Scots players, amateur and professional, and then coaches were at the forefront of taking the football in general and our football in particular worldwide, from the SFHoF you'd think that this country only starting playing post-Second World War. Therefore, whilst I make no demands, as the deeper history of Scots in football and footballing thinking at home and, importantly, across the globe is uncovered might this not be the moment to start to recognise others, whose influence frankly far outstrips that of many in the more modern game. Here, as a start, are twenty-odd suggestions.
Robert Gardner
The first Scottish captain, his country's first goalkeeper and the World's first football tactician, is not a bad sporting résumé by any standards. But then add coach, selector, administrator at two clubs, club, international referee and President of the Scottish Football Association and it becomes exceptional. Here is a man, who changed football forever by building from the back, yet was allowed to drop out of the game and died young building the Forth Railway Bridge.
John Ferguson
It took fifteen years for working-class association football to arrive in England. In Scotland it was there in little more than one. It took the same fifteen years for England to field its first working-class player, whereas in Scotland it was fifteen months and three years earlier That player was Vale of Leven's John Ferguson, club captain, a winner of six caps at a time when there were just one and then two internationals a year, the first flying winger and the pioneer of Scotland's second contribution to the game, pairings.
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George Ramsay
A player in the first Scottish Cup and probably the second as well, George Ramsay was the man to bring organised football to the English Midlands. And although it was little more than simple fate he was also one three main and a half-a-dozen Scots to create Aston Villa, the club and the concept of the football manager. A player first, then club secretary he would from kick-about guide the Villa for the best part of fifty years, win six English league titles and six FA Cups.
William McGregor
Quite simply William McGregor, son of Braco, Perthshire, made modern, commercial football, in fact, modern commercial sport, but only after he had helped to build, ensured the survival of his club and put the lion rampant on its badge. The club was, of course, Aston Villa, with which he was associated for thirty-odd years. The commercial organisation he suggested, founded and led in its formative years was the English Football League, the blueprint for all sports leagues world-wide.
Malcolm Eadie Fraser
Eadie Fraser was potentially one of the greatest players of his day but one who fate did not allow to develop. Because, although he, a son of the manse, was raised in Scotland but born in Canada, a promising international playing career was cut short by an arbitrary rule, probably not meant to affect him but someone else. Thus confined he had to find another path. Work, needs must, took him to Africa, to illness, a return, a final journey to Australia and death there, aged just twenty-five, within days of arrival. He deserved far better.
William Alexander Mackay
The club he founded, Recreativo, is the oldest still playing in Spain, the doyen of Spanish football. Yet he was not Spanish but Scots, born in Caithness. Nor was he a player but a doctor, who believed in the health-generating properties of sport and in his adopted, Andalusian, port city of Huelva created a sports club, ultimately a football club, not just for Britons who worked there but for the population as a whole, British, Spanish or any other, permanent or just passing through.
Archie McCall & James Kelly
James Kelly was not the man who invented it. The "it" is the Scottish style of play, The Cross, that would save the World from 2-3-5 and be the portal to the modern game. Invention might come from his team at the time, his hometown team, Renton, or more specifically his captain, Archie McCall. But it needed both, the tactician, on and off field, who never moved club and the one, whose particular set of skills made it possible and in whose feet it was transferred to Celtic and, in time, beyond.
Alex Watson Hutton
Much of the World's best football in the last hundred years has come out of South America, mainly from three countries, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. And in the last of the three Alexander Watson Hutton, born in Glasgow, raised in Edinburgh is regarded as "The Father" of his adopted country's game. In fact he is not but he is The Father-figure, the Figurehead, and no less important for that. And he might even be considered the saviour of the game there at a moment when Rugby could have swept it aside.
Tommy Donohoe
In Brazil there were three Scots, who might be said to have introduced the game at much the same time, Thomas Scott, Charles Miller and Tommy Donohoe. Two of them, the Tommys, Scott and Donohoe, from the beginning also introduced both multi-racial and working-class football, whilst the other, if unknowingly, would facilitate the development of the unique Brazilian style Brazil. So why choose Donohoe for the moment? Two reasons. It was Mrs Donohoe who brought the first football and she did it to Rio, a city close to my heart.
R.C. Hamilton
Think Robert Cumming Hamilton and understand the Mighty Magyars, the greatest team of the 1950s, perhaps of any era. Like them Hamilton came seemingly from nowhere, the Magyars from behind the Iron Curtain, from Hungary and he via Glasgow and Fulham but from Elgin. And the connection between the two; a style of forward-play. At Number 9 Hungary had Hidegkuti just as fifty-year earlier Rangers had R.C.. If Hidegkuti was the most famous False No. 9 then Hamilton was the first. All it needed was the message carrier over time and fifteen hundred miles, Jimmy Hogan.
David Ballantyne
Sometimes it just needs someone, who to get things up and running does everything. In Venezuela that was the case. The man was David McAlpine Ballantyne. He was born in Kilmarnock, married and raised a family in Caracas and must be assumed to have died there too. And in between he, with perhaps a little help from brother, Jimmy, formed that country's football, at first as player, then club founder, administrator and finally as referee. Yet no-one knows his name. That is until now.
John Harley
There can be few footballers ever more important than John Harley. Born in Cathcart and dying in Montevideo he was to change the face of Uruguayan, then South American and finally World football in not just one but two ways. To Uruguay he gave its style of play, "short pass to foot". To South America it was the multiracial, international game. To the World he supplied the ethos behind teams that would win two Olympic titles in the 1920s and the first two World Cups Uruguay competed in. And that before Scotland kicked a ball in either.
Archie McLean
It is fair to say that Brazilian football would not be Brazilian without "O Veadinho", the Little Deer, the Scot, Archie McLean. He would be born and die in Paisley but in between spend forty years in Sao Paulo. A semi-professional player in Scotland he arrived first in 1907, worked a little, played a little, went home and then returned in 1910 to stay. And over the next decade he played for a number of teams in the city, formed his own, Scottish Wanderers, played for the State and introduced the Scottish short-passing style that became the basis of Brazil's A Tablinha, Samba football.
Peter McWilliam
He was called Peter the Great by Newcastle fans and, as player and then manager, was precisely that. Yet he is hardly known. It is barely credible for a man, who played 242 times for The Toon, as a player won the league thrice, was FA Cup runner-up also thrice, won it once, gained eight Scotland caps, then as a manager won the FA Cup once more with Spurs, as Chief-Scout at Arsenal claimed two more leagues and a Cup , invented semi-Total football, the club nursery system, Push-and-Run and had a profound influence on modern Barcelona and Spanish-style football. But then he was born not in Glasgow or Edinburgh but Inverness.
Patsy Gallacher
Patsy Gallaher is simply a player dishonoured by no honours. Scots to the core by up-bringing, he arrived from Donegal aged three. He even died in Scotstoun after a playing career of twenty years, well over 550 league appearance, from the wing and inside-forward a goal very two and half games and eleven caps, alas none for Scotland. Whilst there is no doubt Willie Maley, similarly born in Armagh and arriving in Scotland aged one deserves the place he has in the Scottish Hall of Fame, how can Patsy, one of his greatest Celtic players, be denied?
Johnny Moscardini
Born in Scotland, in Falkirk, he died here too, in Prestwick. It was also in Scotland he learned his football and for much of his life ran cafe's for his father, his uncle and then for himself. However, for six years after the First World War he played for the team of his father's Italian hometown of Barga in Tuscany, then for Lucca and Pisa, guested for Genoa and was Italy's centre-forward. Barga's football stadium is even today named after him but in Scotland there is no recognition of the only "Jock" to play for a country in Continental Europe.
Archie Stark
Lionel Messi is rightly lauded but the stats have it. Whilst he in 2011-12 scored fifty goals in thirty seven La Liga games at 1.35 per game and bettered the ratio with 1.43 in 2012-13, a certain Archie Stark in 1924-25 netted sixty-seven times in forty-four starts. That is over the season a ratio of 1.52. Archibald McPherson Stark was a goal machine, admittedly in the American Soccer League, but it was by no means a walkover and just how strong outwith Barcelona and Real Madrid is La Liga really. And he was born, indeed grew up, in Glasgow.
Bob Millar
Sadly there has been only one Scot, Paisley's Robert Millar, who has managed a country to the semi-finals of the World Cup. He did it with a team that also included five other Scots. Indeed it might have been one, perhaps two, more; Archie Stark at centre-forward for one. As a player Millar had been something of a fire-brand, an Exocet, at St. Mirren and his many other clubs. Yet as a national team manager, alas not for Scotland but the USA, he had a plan, one that almost worked, failing only in the face of brutality from Argentina. But for it the final, that first Cup and immortality might even have been his.
Robert Campbell
Bob Campbell was, having been for St. Johnstone the club Chairman that had made them, perhaps the best SFA President of them all, although perhaps not the luckiest. He inherited a good team and made it better. The Wembley Wizards were his, after which came an eight game run without a loss, So were the first internationals against non-Home Nation opposition. Yet at the same time he had to negotiate his was through the American Soccer Wars, England, amateurism and FIFA, and English clubs non-release of Scots for international duty. No wonder he stepped down exhausted in 1933.
Alex Jackson
Quite literally, if not the best player of his time, then the most exciting. Nicknamed "The Gay Cavalier" when words had different meanings he was playing professionally at seventeen, abroad at eighteen and internationally at nineteen. He was perhaps the best and the most innovative winger of his era but would abandon football early and be cast by some as capricious and difficult. Yet, he would have "a good War", carving himself an impressive army career, rising to Major before an accidental, tragically young death.
McGhee, Bart and James
The suggestion of McGhee is twofold, one for Bart and the second for his father, James. Bart's claim to fame is simple. He was a first; one of the first five Scots to play in a World Cup and the first Scot to score a goal in that same competition. The claim of his father, James, is a little more contentious. He was certainly one of the first two Hibernian players to take the field for Scotland. It was in 1886 against Wales and it looks also as if that day too he became, perhaps with James Lundie, the first Catholic to play for the national team.
