In 2023 it was suggested that the new thinking on Scottish, foot-ball and football history and football history 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. as a minimum thesis, antithesis leading to synthesis.

The proposal was, however, without explanation knocked back, which denied the academic route but saved £15,000 and, because on-line technology, still left fully open 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, that state and allow, with more knowledge still becoming available, the amendment the antithesis yet without the need for compromise. The crux of the offering on the one hand is that:

Association 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 game.

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 our country and countrymen but not as formally posited Glasgow's Queen's Park club, which provided new tactical thinking that a) created in two major steps over the next fifteen years the framework of our modern game on-field, b) consolidated it in Britain on-field and in-club as a universal and not a class-riven sport, c) caused, both unofficially and officially, the professionalisation of the game and in doing so created the competitive structure followed by most of the World and d) were the driving force in taking the game global.     

But it begins with a little background and immediate thanks to Andy Mitchell, the doyen of real historians of wider Scottish sport not least the beautiful game.