Introduction

In 2023 it was suggested that the new thinking on early Scottish, foot-ball and football history to the beginning of the Second World War, and, indeed, football history in that same period more generally, emanating from the SFHG and others might be worthy of a academic recognition through a PhD. And one over two to three years at Edinburgh University was applied for, but on the understanding 1) that it would be in the name of the whole group and not one person and 2) it would be a replacement for or at the very least the dominant part of a merging with the old thinking i.e. an antithesis to the current thesis leading at the least to synthesis, if not more.

The proposal was, however, without real explanation at the time but possibility hinterland, knocked back, which denied the academic route but saved £15,000 and, due to on-line technology, still left fully open the possibility of it being worked through, completed and simply posted. And what follows here is the result, not in a heavy but largely ignorable and ignored tome but in a series of articles, essays, if you like, sometimes loosely-linked, that state and allow, with more knowledge still becoming available, the amendment the current thesis yet without much need for compromise. The crux, in something of a repetition, of the offering on the one hand is that:

• Association, Association Rules (AR) football is provably not a product of the English Public School system.
• At its creation it probably would not have survived but for the Sheffield Rules (SR) game and the input specifically of Sheffield F.C..
• Much of the off- and on-field innovation in the early game also came from that same Yorkshire city before, for internal reasons, its football imploded. 
• From the early 1870s when the game arrived North of the Border it was Scotland and Scots, our country and countrymen, and not England and the English, which and who for much of the next fifty years picked up the baton and successfully ran with it.
• But that it was within Scotland but a) not at Glasgow's Queen's Park club as formally posited, b) major tactical innovation took place at two stages over the fifteen years from baton transfer fundamentally to change the framework of our game on-field, c) Association football was in the same period consolidated in first Scotland and then wider Britain on-field and but also in-club as a universal and not a class-riven sport, d) it caused, both unofficially and officially, the professionalisation of the game and in doing so created the competitive league structures followed by most sports and by most of the World and d) Scotland was then the driving force in taking that same game global.     

But it begins with a little background and immediate thanks to Ged O'Brien, the founding Curator of the Scottish Football Museum, Europe's first, and to Andy Mitchell, the doyen of real historians of football in Scotland and wider Scottish sport. Thanks to O'Brien there has been the identification from 1627 at Anwoth in Dumfries & Galloway of what is just now considered to be the oldest football field in Scotland, Britain and therefore worldwide. But here a note: We have no indication of whether it was used in summer or winter or both, although knowing the Dumfriesshire winter the former  must be favourite. And from Mitchell we have his research into John Hope and the Foot-Ball club he founded in Edinburgh in 1824 and ran for the best part of twenty years. Gone into in depth in John Hutchinson and Andy's book, "1824 The World's First Football Club" we have a strong, and perhaps the earliest example of what could be called football's, that is the round-ball but not yet Association game's "modern" era of both written codification plus games, albeit then only intra-club, and continued organisation over an extended period of seventeen years.

And this trend was further covered to the late 1850s in this, in retrospect, admittedly somewhat peevish, SSHG piece, "The Absurdity of the Parochial" (See next column). It was written in response to the claim by Sheffield, Home of Football (Our Brackets: Not Association football) that it was in 1857 and at Sheffield FC, the important nullifying proviso being that its rules were at that stage also only in-house. You will note here that the English Public Schools have not been mentioned because codification of their footballing iterations came mostly later, Rugby School in 1845 with its thirty-seven being the exception and with our SFHG Supplementary Timeline  giving the more or less definitive chronology.  

However, when it comes to organised, competitive, inter-club football, but still not the Association game, then it is the game played on Boxing Day 1860 again in Sheffield between Sheffield and Hallam F.C.s that is the marker. Indeed it is those two clubs and almost twenty more that followed in the same city over the next three years, which at that time represented the round-ball game's only real driver.        

And the truth is that even with, in London, the formation in 1863 of the Football Association and therefore of embryonic "soccer" that role as driver did not really alter. It is questionable whether the FA would have survived birth had it not been for the support, even including travelling down to meetings, by a remarkably benign, philanthropic, almost paternal Sheffield and in 1866, even whether it, the London FA, might have dissolved itself but for the same. And through these three early years it was also Sheffield, which was the source, on-field, of a good number of sensible, practical rule-amendments as well as, off-field, competitive and even marketing innovation. It agreed to play, indeed suggested, inter-city, i.e. regional matches, conceptually the forerunner of the international, even agreeing that they take place to local rules. And it in the Youdan Cup produced the blueprint for the FA Cup. 

But the question remains 'why', to which the answer might lie in origin and personality. Sheffield Rules football was very much the child of the city's legal profession. What it was not was founded by Public School boys. There was influence, particularly, it seems in the rules, from young men returning from school further south, noticeably Harrow, but the two men who were founders of Sheffield F.C. and therefore considered to be founders of Sheffield-Game, Nathaniel Crestwick and William Prest, were a locally-educated solicitor and a wine-merchant respectively and neither in footballing terms young. The former was twenty-five in 1857, the latter twenty-four. They were comfortably middle- but not upper-class and had come to the game sedately through cricket. And even when they stepped back, Crestwick in 1862, their successors were until 1866 William Chesterman, stepping down aged twenty-nine and a maker of measuring-instruments, and from 1866 to 1876 Harry Chambers, another lawyer, who at twenty-five/twenty-six also served for its first two years as President of the Sheffield Football Association when it was formed in 1867.    

And this was a pattern that was fairly closely matched six years later in London. Of the four main, initial office bearers one was a solicitor, two were stockbrokers, and one a wine-importer. Moreover, only one, Robert Graham, had been to a public school, Cheltenham, but for just a year, three of them had come to the sport this time from rowing and Ebenezer Morley, regarded as The Father of the Football Association and therefore of Association football, had been born the same year as Crestwick, so in 1863 was already thirty-five, was also a solicitor, non-Public School and a Yorkshire-man to boot. He had been born and lived until twenty-two in Hull, and as the son and grandson of non-Conformist ministers so no more than middle middle-class. 

It meant that one hundred and seventy miles apart there were two groups of football enthusiasts, who could talk to and interact with each other, not just on a sporting level but culturally and professionally. And talk and interact they certainly did. Sheffield's Chambers in his records states that he attended the first London meetings of the (English) Football Association in 1863, thus giving Northern encouragement as it struggled into life. In January 1864 he was played in the match in London to test the FA's new laws. He also took part in 1866 in the first inter-city match. It was played in Battersea Park between London and Sheffield teams and to London Rules. As to Chesterman he had been the one to propose the London versus Sheffield game, was Sheffield captain that day, represented Sheffield F.C. at the 1867 meeting of the FA, arguing against, giving it Northern backbone, as it almost dissolved itself, and that same day was elected to the FA, the London FA Committee and served on it until 1871. And in doing so he must have reported on developments in the Sheffield game, passing on its thoughts on adjustment of rules and competition, indeed competitions. The Youdan Cup of 1867 was followed a year later by the Cromwell Cup. 

Thus by 1867 the characters, who were to dominate English football's off-field, some for just the next few years, two for extended periods, might have been beginning to fall into place but were not in charge. John Alcock had been an FA Committee member from its inception until replaced in 1866 by his 24-year-old and briefly Harrovian younger brother, Charles Alcock. Harry Chambers was his contemporary, when he arrived the next year. Then in 1868, the year the Association actually ran out of money with the officers covering the shortfall out of their own pockets, Arthur Kinnaird, just twenty-one at the time, would join and he would be followed in 1869 to 1872 by James Kirkpatrick, The Quiet Baron, just a year older than both Chambers and Alcock. He was the man who would go on to organise with Kinnaird the "Scottish" input into the series of five unofficial internationals from 1870, captaining the mainly Diasporan side for the first two matches. He also provides a link back to very first day's of the modern Scottish game in that his father had in Edinburgh been a member of John Hope's Foot-Ball Club. And in the background there was first Robert and then James Smith, who had both come South for work but were the liaison-men with their former club, Queen's Park in Glasgow. Robert Smith would play in the second, third and fourth of Kirkpatrick's and then Kinnaird's international sides as well as for South Norwood and in the first two official internationals before emigrating to America later in 1873. James, who would play in the first official international, would remain, still the link, in London until his death back in Scotland in 1876.

So given that Morley was still in overall control and Graham would remain Secretary and Treasurer until February 1870, only then to be replaced by the younger Alcock, there was in place from the turn of the decade an FA Committee, with Graham still on it until 1871, that was finally settled in terms of core personnel and influences. Moreover, from perhaps 10 member clubs in 1866, the number had grown to fifty or so,  with Sheffield about the same, the organisation as a whole was finally also financially stable and could therefore move on. The internationals, the first in March 1870 with organisation clearly already commenced pre-Alcock, were one aspect. The Youdan-like FA Cup was another. A third was the agreement from Queen's Park to enter the FA Cup by its start in November 1871 but presumably negotiated earlier in the year. And finally there was the first official international in 1872, quite possibly seen as necessary following the example, and challenge, of the first-ever rugby one of March 1871, firstly, taking place in Scotland in Edinburgh, secondly, with actual Scottish Scots in the team and, thirdly, won by Scotland. At that point it might have looked to Queen's Park as if round-ball football North of the Border was in danger of being chased South completely, about which it believed, to its eternal credit, something could and would be done. However, all the above throws some doubt upon the real role of Charles Alcock. To some he was football's first marketing genius, but perhaps not.

As it turned out Scotland's first participation in serious footballing competition, Queen's Park's entry into the FA Cup, could not have gone better. Twice the club was drawn at home to a school team from Lincolnshire, quite possibly even today one of the most difficult places in Britain from where to get to Glasgow, never mind the cost. Once the London FA was able to defer the problem with byes to the next round. On the second occasion there was no helping Donington. It had to scratch leaving the Glasgow a free run without touching a ball to the semi-final. If the draw had been, Heaven forbid, tampered with, it would turn out to be masterly, again quite possibly changing the course not just of Association football but football more generically forever. If not, and it was just happy serendipity, then fate was smiling broadly when the hardly-known, Scottish club travelled to the London Oval for the game against the assumed winners, The Wanderers, Alcock's team, and shut them out. 

In fact  the result was itself perhaps nothing special or at least not too unexpected. The London team was perhaps the best the South had to offer but hardly a whirlwind. It had also had a walk-over and a bye to get to the round of four and had scored three goal to one in the two matches it had had to play, one being another 0-0 draw. However, with the game at The Kennington Oval, the fact that Queen's Park could not afford to travel South again for the replay and The Wanderers went on win the trophy, defeating The Royal Engineers in the final, did generate interest North of the Border. Indeed enough that other clubs playing other footballs, cricket and other sports, notably shinty, were now more prepared to listen more attentively to what Queen's Park had to say. And Queen's Park were also forward-thinking in this period and beyond, prepared to travel to demonstrate the sport, for which they were the first and only Scottish advocate or at least seemed so.

In fact it now seems that, thanks in large part to research from Andy Mitchell once more and Richard McBrearty, curator of the Scottish Football Museum, with his blog The Origins of Scottish Football, round-ball football, 11-a-side or otherwise, and even to Association Rules had been already played in Glasgow and along the Solway coast, specifically in and around Stranraer and also by Annan. In the first case it had and would centre around John Connell, who in 1861/2 in his mid-teens had arrived from Perthshire to the old town above Glasgow Green and with a ball that he would hire out for games; what he called a "public ball". His full story as initially non-Association and later Association footballer, a player for Glasgow against Sheffield and almost an international (he was a reserve against England in 1875) is probably best told in Andy Mitchell's piece, The Man who owned the first football in Glasgow, in this SFHG biography and in his own words in an article, which can accessed in readable form and with greater detail by clicking on its image in the next column. The gist of it is that, once in the city, from where he stayed Connell could drop down High St. to Low Green or Fleshers' Haugh, where ad-hoc games, using both feet and hands but surely with basic rules understood from week to week, seem to have been taking place from at least 1862. 

It means therefore that the first centre of Glasgow football was actually north of the Clyde in the city itself not, as wrongly advocated elsewhere, south of the river in the newly developing then still Renfrewshire suburbs. Furthermore, it would also be from Glasgow Green that by 1866 or 1867 the first attempts at teams cum clubs would emerge. The Orkney Exiles was one such earliest on. Connell himself mentions that at about that time he joined the Thistle club. And it was that same Thistle, which, on the formation of Queens Park, the Southern Suburbs' initial specifically but note summer/autumn-only football entity, was, and not the other way round, first to issue a challenge; one accepted on 1st August 1868. Indeed it came from Connell himself, (See: Queen's Park History 1868-1870), indicating that it was he, who had the finger very much on the local footballing pulse. It might even be no exaggeration that in fact he was that pulse and for the best part of a decade. It was again he, when Queen's Park was still getting virtually no interest in its adopted version of neo-Association rules and at least equally emergent rugby was getting much of the attention, who again would challenge it on joining, indeed, in 1869/70 forming, his next but short-lived club, Drummond. The challenge would be met in July 1870. The club was made up of fellow lads from Perthshire, playing, it seems, to non-Association, still hybrid rules but with the change and adaption about to come. 

Meanwhile, however, it now seems that Association Rules, if not quite in their entirety, had been seen on Scottish soil, if only just. John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquis of Queensbury, born in in 1844 in Florence in Italy, compiler of boxing's Queensbury Rules, elder brother of Lady Florence Dixie, who in 1895 would become the first patron of the first women's football club, the London-based British Ladies' F.C., had, aged fourteen, inherited the title on the death of his father in 1858. He would then be educated in the Navy, serving until 1864, aged twenty, and before going up to Oxford for two years, not completing a degree, marrying in 1866 and probably for a while subsequently living in London. And it must have been there he, a consummate sportsman, came into contact with football. Even in terms of his known involvement in cricket he would have moved in the same circles as his almost contemporary, Scottish, footballing nobles, Lord Arthur Kinnaird and James Kirkpatrick.  

So it seems that when he moved north in 1867/8 for a couple of years at least - his elder child was born in 1868 at Kinmount House, the family seat at Cummertrees by Annan, his second in 1870 in Worcestershire - he took the essence of the London game with him, perhaps combining it with a local tradition of other football and setting up a small series of equally local matches to Association Rules but with larger teams, 15- a-side being mentioned, and he himself playing. But note, these were not "Yuletide Games". They were played not in mid-winter but from the middle of March 1868 so as Spring first arrived on the Solway, which may have been just chance but could equally have been a reflection, outwith alcohol-fuelled Hogmanay, again of an older, specifically summer, round-ball sport. Indeed, with, for example, the Anwoth ground it is hard to imagine anyone even then in far hardier times looking forward to a kick-about up there on the top of a hill in the freezing horizontal rain, sleet and snow of anytime between November and March/April.

It is these games and the pioneering work on early South Scottish football by Richard McBrearty, the Curator of the Scottish Football Museum and PhD Researcher at Stirling University, and covered in his blog Scottish Football Origins that were gone into more detail in the article reshown here in the adjacent column and entitled "Stranraer - and the Coming of Football to Scotland. And it is it, which also takes us onto Stranraer and Newton Stewart and the third specifically Scots arrival of the early, not yet modern but modernish game. 

The rise of wide-scale competitive sport was and continued for a good century to be made possible by the railways. It had arrived at Stranraer in 1862, connecting it with Castle Douglas via Newton Stewart. Castle Douglas had itself been connected to Dumfries in 1859 and Dumfries to to the Glasgow to Carlisle line in 1850. As to organised football, it arrived in Stranraer at least by 1865 by when there were four teams, three of which are still identifiable as areas of the town. Of the how and why it got there there is is no current idea. It could have come from north or south. It may even have been once more a long-standing tradition, again a summer one. The quote from John Boyd's 2002 paper "The First Thirty Years" is "they played intermittently on Wednesday afternoons and during the summer evenings on farm fields". However, clearly cooperation between the teams existed, suggesting even a local competition, because that same year, 1865, a Stranraer team, a "town" team, travelled the twenty-five miles to Newton Stewart. It was to take part in the first, over the next ten years, of three known, 11-a-side encounters, presumably again to agreed rules other than just number of players against specifically Cree Rovers, a team that according to other sources would not exist for another decade and more.  

Furthermore we have the names of the Stranraer players taking part and there is (See again the article) remarkable continuity of players from 1865 to 1870, even some to 1875 and the move in the interim from non-Association to fully Association Rules. Moreover, those names, thanks to the historically game-changing Scotland's People web-site, can to a degree be pinpointed to the town itself, to surrounding villages and possibly to Ayr. Despite Ayr F.C., one of the two component clubs of present-day Ayr United, having its foundation as 1879, we know, again from Queen's Park's History, that the Cathcart/Crosshill club in 1868 put out feelers for a game to "newly-formed Ayr Football Club" suggesting, similar to Glasgow Green, a form of ad-hoc football already being played in that town before that "official" date, perhaps even before 1865. Here more work is needed. - a deeper trawl through the local papers, perhaps.

However, let us at this point turn attention back to said Glasgow, initially to Queen's Park F.C. but then not the round- but the oval ball-game. The foundation story of Queen's Park is well-known. It is one of a form of presumably round-ball but ad-hoc football being in 1867 played on Queen's Park itself by local YMCA members and seen by a group of more northerly Scots, from Perthshire, Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire and Moray, forced from their former place of practice of field-athletics by Lorne Terrace in Strathbungo by encroaching development. The latter joined in with the former, took to what they saw and decided to and did form a football-club, but one with a difference, indeed, that was in a sense elitist. This is all excellently covered in the chapter "The Beginning" of the modern Queen's Park's History and by Robinson's 1920 "HISTORY OF THE QUEEN'S PARK FOOTBALL CLUB 1867-1917". And it said that it was William Klinger, the son of a German medical doctor, from Portsoy via Fordyce Academy (See Andy Mitchell's beautifully alliterative "Football's Founders from Fordyce" and "Fordyce Academy") who first acquired a copy of the London Association, noticeably not the Sheffield Rules, would see them subsequently almost completely adopted by the new club, the only one in Scotland at that time to do so, hence the elitist element, and with just one real deviation. It was with regard to off-side and, as it happens, was prescient. In 1925 essentially the Queen's Park variant was adopted by IFAB i.e. World football, replacing the London one, and has remained in place ever since.    

But that is to a degree by-the-by. Once in place Queen's Park frankly struggled to gain any real foothold in even the Glasgow sporting scene, never mind the Scottish one, one reason for which being the club wanted to play as had been long traditional in the summer when cricket was already well embedded. Rugby, from its base largely but not exclusively in Edinburgh and most definitely a winter, preferably soft-, wet-ground past-time looked as if it might win the day. Between 1820 and 1850 new private schools were being founded in Scotland, Edinburgh Academy, Loretto, Merchiston in the capital, Glasgow Academy in the West and Trinity College in Perthshire's Glenalmond. They seem, as Down South, to have rapidly developed their own, in-house codes, which by the early 1860s were beginning to coalesce into something that was somewhat rugby-like but doing so, importantly and unlike Association football, separately to England. For Scottish clubs-only the first set of agreed simply "football" and not "rugby-football rules" were formulated in Edinburgh in 1868. Yet Down South again, and a first example of English sport's historical gas-lighting, whilst the Blackheath club led the majority exodus from the Football Association - i.e. effectively from the round-ball game, by proposing at the fifth, note not first, meeting of the FA the retention of carrying and hacking before actually withdrawing at the sixth meeting - no common agreement on how to play with the oval ball was in place really until eight years later on the foundation of the Rugby Football Union in early 1871. And the Scottish response to it? In 1873 clubs north of the border would form the separate Scottish Football Union, again with no "rugby" in the title, only amending that to Scottish Rugby Union in 1924. So essentially in the fifty-year interim, and certainly at the start, there were two countries playing different games off-field, which, however, they could agree to be basically the same on-field and demonstrated by the first ever "football" international of any sort. The modern equivalent is perhaps the annual, composite rules matches played by Scotland's shinty players and Ireland's hurlers. 

The challenge for that oval-ball international had been issued in December 1870 in the English Press but from five Scottish club-captains. It would be played in March 1871 in Scotland in Edinburgh yet under Rugby- so English-Rules - but still won by Scotland. Its catalyst was quite probably what had occurred first a year earlier in London, again in November 1870 and for a third time a month earlier in February 1871. And it itself would probably be the catalyst of certainly some of what was to come.  

The initial catalyst was, of course, the first of the eventually five and from the current point-of-view rather unfairly disparaged, "unofficial" Association football internationals, which seems to have been a natural product of taking the Sheffield-London gentle, on-field rivalry but off-field amity and the inherent Anglo-Diasporan Scottish mix of the FA Committee a stage further. And, whilst at the time the London crowd, perhaps 500, and interest (a report in The Sporting Life but at least on the front page) might have been small  it would grow somewhat and set a mark. By the fifth, still London-encounter the number of spectators was nearer a thousand, for the first FA Cup Final again in London 1872 it would be two thousand. And in the meantime that oval-ball game in Edinburgh had pulled in four thousand, which by 1873 and back once more in Scotland would be a thousand more; comparisons, which might have been seen at the time as a measure of the appeal of each sport but in retrospect is probably more that of the willingness of Scots then and later not just to enthuse and but also pay to watch. Indeed, almost two decades later that very characteristic would be the founding impetus of Celtic F.C. and in 1871 may already not have gone unremarked, for the next development in the round -ball story would be the FA Cup and with Scottish involvement from the off.

At its inception the FA Cup was seen as a competition for all Britain. Essentially that meant in its first year the South of England and Queen's Park but the door would remain open for another two decades until shut and not by England. It was, with Sheffield still very much on the FA Committee, modelled, as previously stated, on that city's Youdan Cup and, whilst the Yorkshire committee presence dropped away from 1871, by 1873-4 Sheffield F.C. was competing in it and reaching the last eight. This was whilst Queen's Park had dropped out after that first foray not returning until 1876-7, (Clydesdale having dabbled meanwhile for a season) then again to be very generously given two byes before having to allow a February, third-round walk-over to Oxford University, which itself would go on to the final but lose. And the reasons for the missing seasons and the walk-over were no money in the coffers in 1873-4 and probably the Scottish Cup and date-clashes from then on. 

Thus quite why the Scottish Cup was actually deemed necessary is something of a mystery but again rugby might have been an indirect cause. Despite five founding clubs already being members from the previous two years of the (English) Rugby Football Union, on 3rd March 1873 eight Scottish, oval-ball clubs had, as already outlined, decided to form the Scottish Football Union. Moreover they did it not in Edinburgh but Glasgow. And the response? Ten days later also in Glasgow eight, or rather seven round-ball clubs plus one got together to found the SFA, the Scottish Football Association. But they went further. Instead of being content then with entering the FA Cup en masse they created their own competition to start the following autumn, officially, as it still is today, the Scottish Football Association Challenge Cup. Now it may well have been a financial decision. With most of the FA Cup teams at that time in Southern England a walk to Third Lanark or even a day-return to Alexandria or Kilmarnock was infinitely preferable to one to St. Pancras. It still is. But what it did was very rapidly to create two power bases on the one island, not least because almost as quickly Scottish football became visibly very successful on-field and consequently crowds in Scotland comparatively flocked to see it at both club and international levels.       

But here we have to take a step or two back to look at the slightly vexed and vexing questions of how, why and even where our game at home took off. There seems little doubt that the drawn FA Cup semi-final in the March of 1872 had aroused footballing interest North of the Border and not just in Glasgow. But then so had the "rugby" games also. Moreover, the interest was enough for thoughts to be turned by a number to founding football clubs, in some cases from scratch and in others out of previous entities or as a winter-filler between cricket seasons, the important six letters being "winter". In accepting the invitation to join the "English" FA Cup Queen's Park had done two things. The first was to accept fully and to the exclusion of all others, i.e. Sheffield, the London-based FA's rules. The second was that Scottish football would from then on until modern times be played only in the winter. 

So it was that already as exampled in 1872 Clydesdale F.C was able to emerge at Kinning Park also on Glasgow's Southside to emerge clash-free out of Clydesdale Cricket Club, whilst Eastern F.C. with John Connell as a founding member, that same year did the same on the north side of the river but from Thistle F.C. and therefore as simply a footballing continuation. But even then still there was some havering from clubs, existing or potential, as to what shape of ball to adopt and here the Queen's Park club is beyond praise. With it, as previously stated, apostolic in its readiness to spread the word, to demonstrate the new game near and farther, the result was, firstly, that the parish of Cathcart, in which Queen's Park, the open-space, is be found, would not just usurp Glasgow Green to become the cradle of today's Scottish football but, secondly, a situation was set up whereby it would never be the home of the "Scottish-Game".    

But here a short break, a step back. Football is not just about clubs. It began with and continues to be also about people; those who watch and the motivations of and rewards to those who play. And with regard to the last of these there were to be rapid developments, in England but also and with, if anything, greater speed in Scotland. In the former in Sheffield once more by the first half of the 1870s there was already the first first example of professionalism. There John "Jack" Hunter had very quickly emerged as one of the city's best players. Born in 1851 he had joined the Heeley club at nineteen in 1870, having followed his father to trade and remaining officially as a Cutler for the next decade. However, it likely that at some point with marriage in 1872, children from 1874 and increasing footballing commitments the amount of "cutling" he actually was required to do diminished to the point by the mid-1870s, if not earlier, he was effectively paid to play. If that is the case there is a good cause to accept Hunter as the World's first paid footballer, albeit still to Sheffield Rules (SR), so not quite Association (AR) and thus strictly an "SR Professional". What should perhaps be called "Unified Rules", with many of the better ones from Sheffield being absorbed into those from London, the former's clubs agreeing officially, although not all in practice, then to follow them, were agreed only in 1877. And that in turn creates a problem with regard to the pair of players, who are next into the "professional" line, J.J. Lang and Peter Andrews. 

Both were Scots. Both came down in 1876 from Glasgow, where they appear to have played only the Association game. But once recruited and to Sheffield by Wednesday and again Heeley respectively on clearly some sorts of pay-to-play arrangements they too became, because of timing, SR and not AR professionals. Which means that the first purely AR man to take the shilling was one of four, again all Scots, with a pattern already developing. The first was perhaps George Ramsay in Birmingham from Glasgow at Aston Villa from 1876. The second was Archie Hunter (no relation to Jack) on moving in 1878 again from Glasgow to Villa once more but in 1878 and then there were Jimmy Love and Fergus Suter at Darwen, both also from Glasgow, or strictly Partick. The tales of this last two are once more best related in Andy Mitchell's From Partick with Love with the former the briefer but marginally the earlier. Those of Ramsay and Hunter are expanded upon below.

Yet Lang and Andrews, Love and Suter did not simply come South on whims, despite a story that Andrews, a man at the time of almost thirty with a wife, two children and a baker to trade, had first taken himself to Leeds for work (bread consumption had perhaps ceased on the Clyde?) and to play rugby, (a game, of which he had no known experience and was probably already too old to learn). They came because they offered something otherwise unavailable; quite simply in Lang and Andrews' cases an ability proven in inter-city encounters to play a better game than their Yorkshire opponents and for Love and Suter the same shown in inter-club games in Lancashire. Indeed, and quite remarkably, that ability had already manifested itself in just three seasons. By 1870, with these not being absolutely exact figures but at least good guidelines, Sheffield by its own calculation had produced 54 clubs, the rest of England 46 and Scotland just 11. Note "produced" because some would have come and gone. By 1872 it had been 65, 66 and 32, in 1874 134, 87 and 152 and in 1876 it would be 197, 126 and 392. Scotland had gone from third to first. (Much more on this to come). Moreover, by 1876 the Scotland team had played England in official internationals five times, was already two-one up in terms of wins and had also just beaten Wales in the first encounter between the two countries. Furthermore, Glasgow had in the same period played Sheffield three times, drawing the first encounter and winning the second and third, home and away and therefore to both London and Sheffield rules. And in the seven inter-club games between Scottish and English teams that had taken place to that same point only one had been a defeat, sixteen goals had been scored to three conceded and Sheffield Wednesday had specifically lost to Clydesdale and Sheffield Albion to Alexandra Athletic with the obvious question being "how" and the corollary "why" was what could already be described as the Scottish-Game so obviously superior.

And it is at this point that this historiography really parts company with what has gone before, i.e. the dilemma that is the "passing-game" generally and specifically the theory of the Glasgow Queen's Park version of it, if it ever actually existed, and thus its transformation cum development or not into The Scottish Passing-Game. Moreover, it does so not on the basis of hear-say from 1920 fifty years after the event as per Richard Robinson's History of the Queen's Park Football Club 1867 - 1917 but on current origin research based on hard documentation, specifically newspaper reports of the time. 

However, this is not an attempt to destroy but to redirect previous attention. It remains important not in any way to denigrate the contribution to this early era and beyond of, in particular and on repeat, a laudably apostolic Queen's Park, more generally of Glasgow's Southern Suburbs in terms of players and other clubs and to a degree of the city's whole Southside in terms also of players. Events there, as the centre of gravity shifted from Glasgow Green and as outlined in detail in the article in the column to the right, have left indelible marks on the Association game's history. Queen's Park remains this country's doyen-club and even today there are physical traces - the site of the second Hampden at Cathkin Park, Cathcart Cemetery and the the remains of the first Hampden at and around Hampden Bowling Club - which, even as this is written, have just been and are in terms of preservation still being fought over and for. 

But this is a question not of quantity but quality. The impact of Queen's Park and the myriad clubs and players of South Glasgow might loom large but here the argument is that they were not decisive. For that we have to look at just two, possibly three other clubs, still Scottish but located outwith Glasgow fifteen or so miles away in the valley of Dunbartonshire's River Leven.

In 1872 Queen's Park would play five club matches. A year earlier it had been just one, against Granville from almost neighbouring Myrtle Park. The 1872 games were The Wanderers' one in March, Granville once more and in April, Airdrie in August, Granville again in October and a new opponent in December, Vale of Leven aka The Vale. And it is the early-season, Airdrie encounter that is of most immediate interest because the Glasgow club does something or has it noted and reported on for the first time. With Press-reports, albeit scant probably mainly because few were interested, of the other matches with no indication within them, the one of this particular game gives both the teams and formations. And Queen's Park line up as 2-2-6, with four defenders, two backs and two half-backs, when previously the way, the inherited, English way was three - 2-1 or 1-2  - or fewer. And four months later Vale of Leven would do the same with just the one game where it had used meanwhile - the first official Scotland-England international, at which point FYI in the column to the right "The Dumbarton Leven - the Source of the Scottish-Game" can be found but below also the introduction and first part of "Renton & The Vale - The Making, Remaking, Unmaking, Breaking and the Who. (But the creation of the Scottish Game)".

"Episode 1: The Making

So this story begins not in mid- or late but early 1872. In March Queen's Park, having from November 1871 received byes to the semi-final of the first London FA Challenge Cup, the FA Cup, travelled to London to face The Wanderers. The result was a draw and, with the visitors unable to finance travel to the replay, they had to default and the home team went on to take the trophy. 

Yet the one meeting that did take place tells us several things. The first is that, in order to take part Queen's Park had agreed a twofold acceptance; that Association football was a winter game and the London rules rather than its own would from now on apply. The second is two facts emerge, a) we know the Queen's Park team - Gardner, Edmiston, Hepburn, Ker, Leckie, J Smith, R. Smith, Taylor, Walker, Wotherspoon and Weir - and b) just now we do not know the formation. Moreover, we are also aware from contemporary sources that, whilst the internationals between England and Scotland, now designated as unofficial, all of which had taken place also in London, the first in March 1870 and last just a month earlier, had had not inconsiderable Press-attention, this club-match generated still more but also actually not much on-field activity. A month later a single match - also a nil-nil draw - was played by Queen's Park against Granville, newly officially-formed just up a few hundred yards up the road at Myrtle Park. But that was it.

In fact the game after that was not to be until 28th August and the one after that on 19th October; initially against Airdrie, an emphatic 6-0 win, and then Granville once more, again a win, 4-0,. But there was a difference. In both cases we have the teams - Gardner, Wotherspoon, Taylor, Thomson, McKenzie, Leckie, Weir, Ker, McKinnon, Rae and then Thomson, Taylor, Gardner, Hepburn, Leckie, Weir, Wotherspoon, Grant, Rhind, McKinnon and Rae respectively with captain, Robert Gardiner, in the first playing in goal and in the second as a half-back. But crucially we also have the formations. In the second match, just as The Vale is reported as in Alexandria holding its first practice, Queen's Park, according to The Glasgow Herald, seems to have played, as was the case with English teams of the era, 1-2-7 but in the former, again from The Herald, it had been a completely innovative 2-2-6, the same shape that was to be employed, in the penultimate encounter of the year, played now in Glasgow and the World's first official international.

Now at this point we have to wind back slightly. At some point still in 1872, said to have been in the Summer or Autumn but seemingly before December, Queen's Park, as part of its programme of demonstrating specifically the Association game and creating opponents had travelled to the valley of the Dunbartonshire Leven, to the Park Neuk recreation-ground specifically, on riverside itself in Alexandria. No-one knows exactly when it was but Vale of Leven Football Club is said to have been formed on 20th August, suggesting, albeit as a longish shot, it may have been then with the possibility that it could have been the inspiration, even the source of the formational experimentation just a fortnight later.