And a further, American expansion of his biography tells us that he was the "Son of a university professor, was originally trained for the ministry, was born in 1870 in Paisley, Scotland and died on August 10, 1948 in Ravenna, OH" and "He came to the United States at the age of 20 and played soccer in Philadelphia......."

That Andrew Brown was born a Scot and in Paisley and died in Ohio an American is correct. That he was born in 1870 on 11th December is not. The day and month are right, the year was actually 1868, he the second son of local parents, his father Thomas, then a "power-loom tenter", a weaver, and his mother, Elizabeth McLure, hence in the Scottish way the "M". But she would die in 1872, aged just thirty-one, in childbirth, and the following year his father now of three would remarry, still in Thread-toun, to Agnes Osborne, twelve years his junior, they having four more children. 

And Andrew's father was clearly good at his trade. In 1891 he was Weaving Instructor and in 1901 had moved the family to Glasgow, where he was employed not as a "Professor" but as a teacher, a lecturer at a Technical Weaver's College. Of course by then Andrew himself had made the move to America but not as reported, or at least not permanently so. And the reason is in 1891, whether having trained for the ministry or not, he was still in or had returned to Glasgow, recorded with the family already specifically as a Carpet Weaver. And all that means that, whilst he may have left shortly after but it was not at twenty but twenty-one plus and once more not, as implied, specifically to be a footballer but more likely simply to weave and then design American carpets, in first Philly and then Yonkers, whilst continuing to play the game as a hobby, much as he must have done in his home town.   

Then there is the question of his playing career itself. It is possible but unlikely that in the 1909-10 season he played for Philadelphia Thistle. He would have been forty-one at the time. It is more probable that in 1897, although there is otherwise no indication of what position he played, that at twenty-eight he was the Brown at full-back in the Philadelphia Manz team, which that year had won the American Cup. However, whatever the situation not only did he have a presence on-field but off-field too such that by 1913, having already been a delegate, he was President of the 1884-founded, Newark, New Jersey-based, American Football Association, from which position he is clearly seen as instrumental in healing the rift with the 1911-formed American Amateur Football Association, the two merging that same year to become the United States Football Association (USFA), now the United States Soccer Federation, and in its official joining of FIFA in 1914. It had for the best part of year been a provisional member.   

And that might have been it. For the next decade Andrew Brown might well have been active in the game, albeit not overtly. But there was background. He had married still in Philadelphia in 1895. He bride was Janet Swan. She had been born in 1874, brought up in Dysart in Fife and arrived in the USA in 1888 and they were to have two children. 

But in 1908 Janet would pass away, leaving him, he never remarrying, with their daughter aged twelve and son eight to bring up alone, remaining in Philadelphia, the family still there in 1910. However, with the creation of the USFA it seems it was to move. By 1915, he, still designing carpets, was living in the the New York suburb of Yonkers, and now serving during the period as Acting President of the New York Association. Yet at that point and for a decade he rather disappears, both in footballing terms and footballing and personally, to re-emerge in 1925 as the  Honorary Secretary of the USFA and then, whilst now lodging in Kearny, "Scotstoun", in New Jersey, across the river from Newark, recorded as a clerk, from 1926/7 as its President, succeeding Morris Johnson. 

It was to prove pivotal. Having left FIFA after The Great War due to objection to the continuing membership of Germany and Austria the Home Nations had re-joined in 1924. It meant that Scotland, which had from 1921 suffered the most from players registered with its FA being able without recourse to walk away from contracts with Scots clubs for far better money and conditions playing in America, could now, albeit belatedly, begin to apply real pressure member-to-member via that international organisation. And the matter by the middle of the decade threatened to come to a head from not least because of resistance from the US clubs themselves, notably those in the 1921-formed, increasingly powerful and belligerent and independently-thinking American Soccer League.  

But first there was a twist. After the 1924 Olympic Games, which were, of course amateur, a proposal had been made by Belgium and generally accepted by the other members for the payment of compensation, i.e. expenses, for lost wages to the footballers, who would take part in the 1928 Games. One country, however, then registered its disagreement by a letter that stated it had not voted for the measure. But the letter was disingenuous. The minutes of the Congress where the matter had been discussed showed that far from voting against the proposal it had actually abstained. That country was England and there was a complication. At the Olympics the team in theory representing not just England but also Scotland, Wales and by then Northern Ireland was Great Britain and objection and non-cooperation by England effectively meant the withdrawal not only from the Games but from FIFA itself of all three of the other home nations, whether they liked it or not.                       

Thus, in 1927, when FIFA had eventually stepped into the trans-Atlantic contract argument it had done so, firstly, at the official instigation of Hungary and, somewhat ironically, Austria, both of which had suffered similarly but to a far lesser extent, the pair acting effectively in-proxy for the SFA, and, secondly, by telling the USFA's President to attend, whether he had planned to or not. And that Andrew Brown duly did, not without criticism from home but to effect, a Scot effectively talking indirectly to Scots.

The result was in theory a compromise solution but it was not one that some of the American clubs were willing to accept with what, as Brown's two year's in place, were coming to an end, are called The American Soccer War the outcome. Major American soccer was completely disrupted, as it happened fatally with the Great Crash of October 1929 and then The Depression that followed. And whilst Brown was the US delegate to the FIFA Congress in 1929, the one that voted to hold the first World Cup the following year, that appeared to be his last national and global involvement. 

However, his dalliance with more domestic football would continue. At some point in that same period from perhaps as early as 1920 he had become associated with the engineering company Babcock and Wilcox. An American concern, founded in 1867 in Providence in Rhode Island, an early centre of soccer, in 1908 it would begin operations at Renfrew, so four miles from where Brown had been born, having already in 1901 opened a plant in Bayonne in South New Jersey and about a dozen miles from where he had been living. Furthermore, again in 1908 based the Scottish works a football-team, Babcock & Wilcox F.C., would immediately be founded, continued into the this century, and in 1913, based on the Bayonne works, a second, American Babcock and Wilcox F.C. followed,  in 1921 becoming the company team. 

And Brown might from then have been involved with team, were he not already. Certainly he became the company's personnel manager, still there at the age of sixty-two, actually almost sixty-four, when, and the reason probably for the B & W team's eventual dissolution in 1932, the company decided to close the Bayonne site and move to Barberville by Akron in Ohio, he moving with it. In fact the company's headquarters are still in Akron itself and its around that city he was to spend the rest of his life. In 1940 he is recorded, living in Barberton, as the Director of Personnel at a Boiler Factory, i.e. B & W, in 1947 at seventy-seven cum nine he very briefly recalled to national duty was head-coach of the US team and in 1948 to international duty once more as the US Goodwill ambassador to the Dominion of Canada annual meeting. 

But its was to be his last act. Later that same year he was dead, found unconscious in his car, as stated, in Ravenna, a town just to the north-east of Akron and, his passing confirmed in the local hospital. He is buried in Akron's Greenlawn Memorial Park and so well regarded that just two years later he was amongst the earliest of the inductees, a man older than his years and of far humbler but still Scottish origins than stated, to the Hall of Fame.