Dan's mother was to have three more children with her second husband but there is only partial indication that the two sets of children were fully integrated. In 1881 Jane Doyle in 1881 is still in Paisley with just the two youngest of her Doyle children. And that same year now at age sixteen Dan was still in Airdrie, still with the same aunt at the same address as a decade earlier and now working as a miner. So it seems likely that his football was learned in the pit-country of Lanarkshire, not the cotton of Renfrew. Certainly it began with local Airdrie team, Rawyards Juniors from where he moved with work across to Slamannan before at nineteen joining Broxburn Shamrock. 

From there he was at twenty-one selected for the county before in early 1887 stepping up to Hibernian and into its First Team almost immediately. However, gambler that he was a year later with the coming of the Football League down South he was clearly looking for a professional opportunity, which came with a trial at Sunderland Albion and a final berth, for the moment, at Grimsby Town. 

It was there that a young footballing career might have come to an abrupt end. Doyle was a powerfully-built young man, a left full-back of the most robust kind and in January 1889, as a consequence of one of his challenges, an opponent, also a well-known Derbyshire cricketer, died. And, although Dan was cleared of blame by the Coroner's court he moved on, briefly to Bolton and then to Everton. 

There he remained for two seasons, winning the League in 1891. In that time he is recorded as a Labourer, boarding alongside five other Scots players at the club, Duncan McLean, James Kirkwood, Alex Brady, Patrick Gordon and James McMillan. However the situation was changing in Scotland for all. The Scottish League had been formed and was clearly shamateur enough for Doyle to able to sign for Celtic, with the tenancy of a bar in Bellshill as the sweetener, and from 1893 professional enough for him to stay. In fact he would spend the rest of his career at Parkhead, retiring in 1899, in the interim in 1892 winning the first of eight caps, five against England, captaining once, four League titles and a Scottish Cup.