Jock Hamilton arrived in Sao Paulo on 23rd April 1907 as the British season ended and the Brazilian one began. And he stayed only the best part of two and half months leaving on 9th July but his effect was profound. He brought British, indeed Scots, training methods with him, introduced them but crucially left them in place. In the time he was there Paulistano played just three games, first a loss to SPAC then a win and a draw. Then there was a stutter as he left before the last six encounters of the season were all won, setting the pattern for the following season as Paulistano would continue the run of form to top the league, in the course of which it lost only once.

But that was not all. Firstly, he was during his time in Sao Paulo to take the field as referee in five of the initial nine games of that 1907 season, and in doing so began lifting the standard of officiating to nearer British levels. Moreover, through his training methods he had perhaps on-field also provided a first glimpse for Brazilians of what was to come in terms of the country's future and much-lauded, much admired playing-style.

Whilst Miller in his school-days in England had been a successful winger with a recognised ability to take on defences and centre, early Sao Paulo football had a reputation for being long-ball crude. But this was to change, perhaps started by Hamilton, who had just worked a season with the redoubtable Scottish internationalist, R.C. Hamilton, and was training Jimmy Hogan, but with another name possibly already in the background. It was MacLean.   

It appears in the first game of the 1907 season on 3rd May. SPAC played Germania at the Velodromo. Charles Miller was centre-forward for the former. MacLean was inside-right for the latter. Hamilton refereed. SPAC won 4-0. And MacLean was to be there again still for Germania, this time on the right-wing, two weeks later; then the week after that and finally two weeks further on still before he was gone. Germania, now Esporte Clube Pinheiros, was the city's mainly German team but clearly consistently drafted in non-Germans including names that were British. MacLean's had been amongst them in May and June for six weeks but notably just as Clarks Coats, cotton thread spinners of Paisley, was finishing the construction of its Correntes mill in Ipiranga, a suburb (see map above) three kilometres to the south- east of the city centre. It was officially opened on 18th June 1907. MacLean had played his last of his four games for Germania on 16th.

Now the MacLean story may have been simply circumstantial, coincidental. But the reappearence five years later in Sao Paulo once more not a Maclean but McLean was not. In the late summer of 1912 and, if the same same man, no longer a single one of twenty-one but twenty-six married-man with the first of two sons just born, playing semi-professional football, living in Paisley but also working as a loom-fitter for Clarks was sent temporarily to do some work at Ipiranga. He would stay for forty years. 

However, he was not alone. In September 1909 there had been the first appearance at the Velodrome, one of four between September and November, but as a referee of an "A. D. Hutchinson", also said to have been brought in, mimicking Jock Hamilton the previous season, as the coach/trainer but of Sport Club Americano, founded in 1906 in Santos but having just moved that same year to Sao Paulo proper. 

"Hutchinson" is reported by Brazilian sources to have been a player, "brought from England, where he had the previous season taken part in the First Division Championship". In fact the Brazilian historians have been confused on both name and background. "Hutchinson" was in fact Alexander Downie Hutchison and it much more likely that his involvement with professional football had been in Scotland. Moreover that participation was probably in Paisley, where he had married, stayed and worked as a Thread Mill Foreman, so at Clarks. Thus it meant his club was St. Mirren or in the circumcances more likely still Abercorn. It had at the end of the 1908-9 season just won not the English First Division but the Scots Second Division, the Brazilians not understanding the difference, and moreover had on its board just then seven members of the Clarks/Coats families. Abercorn was quite simply at the time effectively the local Clarks/Coats company team with Americano perhaps becoming its Brazilian one of choice. 

And whilst there was a small gap at the start in May of the 1910 season Alex Hutchison was to be wielding the whistle once more until July and again for a single match in October. This as Americano had a second place finish in the Sao Paulo up from third the previous year. However, in 1911 there was no sign of him as Americano again finished third but in 1912 he was back, but only for a one off for an appearance at full-back for SPAC in July. Perhaps he was there but concentrating on training as Americano topped the table at the end of the season. Certainly he was there back as the the man in the middle for the first game of 1913 in April, there again in June, in July, September and October as again the championship was won by his club and with ease.  

Yet for the whole of 1914 and 1915 he was gone as was the Americano club itself, only to reappear for a single season in 1916. Perhaps the war took him back to Scotland, albeit that he was by then thirty -eight. However, it was not to be the last of him. When the 1916 season kicked off with Americano back he took charge of the first match of the Sao Paulo league and thirty-four more of a total of forty-eight plus one of the rival APEA league. He was without doubt considered the foremost footballing official in his adopted city and like Jock Hamilton before him setting the standards, this as at the age of forty he stepped away. Whilst he remained in Brazil, perhaps for the rest of his life, seen to be travelling back and forth to Britain over the next decade, with his second son marrying in Sao Paulo in 1931, after 1916 and as Americano was actually dissolved he appears not to have refereed a single top-flight again. 

Yet Paisley's involvement with the top-flight did not cease. On his arrival, perhaps return to Sao Paulo in the late summer of 1912 Archie McLean had joined not Germania once more but SPAC, playing twice before the season's end. However, the members Sao Paulo Athletic Club had fallen out of love with Association football as they saw it being organised in the city and turned to rugby. McLean did not follow but instead for the following 1913 season joined Hutchison at Americano and with as already mentioned consideable impact. Indeed on 15th June both men were on the same feld of play.

However, Americano was a club, a team clearly not without problems. And when in 1914 it dropped out of the championship Archie McLean moved and by forming his own club, the Scottish Wanderers. It, also based at the Velodromo, was a blend ....