He, John Craig Strang, is said to be the equivalent of Alex Watson Hutton, the Scots Father of Argentine football, except his influence was not to be in South but North America, and in a place not normally associated with the game, the eastern seaboard of Canada, specifically Newfoundland and its capital St. John's. There the Association code was said from 1878 to be first organised around Terra Nova, a Scot's owned foundry started in 1875, its team also known as The Gemmells after one of the owners. 

In fact the start of the organised game coincides with Strang probable arrival in St. Johns. He was born in 1857 so would have been twenty-one in 1878 and, after what looks like an unsettle childhood,  was quite likely to wanting to get away from Glasgow, for that was where he had been at least at thirteen, working as a Messenger Boy, staying in Hutchesontown with an uncle and aunt. But he had not been born there but in Eaglesham in Renfrewshire, the son of a joiner and a local girl.