Football: A brief overview
Ask FIFA who invented football and they’ll point south of the border, to England and the 1863 founding of the Football Association. But the game we actually play today — the game built on passing, rapid movement, and teamwork, rather than a half-drunk a mob chasing a poor guy with ball, that was born in Glasgow.
This is the story of how a Scottish football club changed the sport forever, and how Scots then carried that idea to every corner of the globe.
Before the rules: football in the glens
Organised, codified “association football” is a Victorian invention, but ball games involving kicking and running are far older in Scotland than any known rulebook. Chroniclers and church records describe rough, violent kicking games played in the streets and kirkyards of almost all Scottish towns for centuries — and were often condemned by ministers and magistrates for the many injuries and gross disorder they caused. The Scottish Football Museum at Hampden Park does not give an exact date as to when this all began, but it is argued that the deep folk tradition of a running-and-passing ball game laid the groundwork for what came next.
1867: Queen’s Park and “Combination Football”
The real turning point came on the 9th of July in the year 1867, when a group of young men, many with roots in Perthshire and the Highlands, met together on Glasgow Green and founded Queen’s Park Football Club. Queen’s Park FC is the oldest football club in Scotland and when it was founded football everywhere was dominated by a form of “dribbling” where one player barrelled forward with the ball while his teammates clustered around him like a rugby scrum, hacking, shoving and sometime punching their way upfield. Queen’s Park changed that. Through relentless practice matches the club developed a radical new idea, where instead of scrum moving like a turtle waiting to be tackled, they chose to pass the ball to a teammate who was in space.
This new style of play became known as the “combination game,” and it is the direct ancestor of every passing move you see today in modern football. At the time journalists were stunned by it; and the contrast between the old shield-wall style and the new fast-pace form was finally laid bare on the 30th of November in 1872, at the first official international football match in history, a game between Scotland and England that was held at Hamilton Crescent in Glasgow.
For the match, the entire Scottish side was drawn from Queen’s Park, with a later newspaper reports published in The Graphic noting that though the England’s players did manage some individual dribbling runs, the Scots were more adept in transferring the ball from man to man, a style that some modern football historians have since only half-jokingly compared to Barcelona’s tiki-taka, but just a century earlier. However, despite the use of better tactics, the English had a tactic of their own. By playing 8 up front and using only 1 defender, they took advantage of the rule that an attack was only considered onside if there were three defenders between the striker and the goal. This meant that almost every single Scottish attack was offside, because they only left one player at the back.
The “Scottish Professors” go south
Learning from this Scotland began to dominate the early internationals, winning ten and losing only twice against England between 1872 and 1887 and the new style of play could not be ignored.
English clubs, especially in the Midlands and the north, thus began to recruit Scottish players specifically to import the passing game. These players became known, admiringly, as the “Scotch Professors,” prized for the “science” of their play. Aston Villa’s William McGregor, later the founder of the English Football League, credited Queen’s Park’s missionary tours with genuinely teaching English football how to play; and it was the influx of paid Scottish talent into English clubs that was one of the reasons that forced English football to become professional in 1885 — while Queen’s Park itself, remaining true to its motto “Ludere Causa Ludendi” (“to play for the sake of playing”), stayed staunchly amateur for another 134 years, until finally turning professional in the year 2019.
Scots take the game to the world
However, the Scottish influence didn’t stop in England. As engineers, teachers, merchants, and railway workers, Scots fanned out across the British Empire and beyond during the 19th century — and they brought football with them.In Argentina, Alexander Watson Hutton, a schoolmaster originally from the Gorbals in Glasgow, is widely credited as the father of Argentine football for introducing the sport into the school curriculum and helping found the country’s first football league.In Brazil, Thomas Donohoe, a textile worker from Busby near Glasgow, is credited with organising one of the earliest football matches in the country, years before the more famous story of Charles Miller.Across continental Europe, Scottish engineers, sailors, and businessmen founded or inspired some of the earliest clubs in countries from the Netherlands to Hungary, spreading the same passing principles that Queen’s Park had pioneered in Glasgow.By the early 20th century, the tactical DNA of Scottish combination football — quick short passes, players moving into space, teamwork over individual heroics — had become the template for the sport everywhere it was played.
So, how many people with Scottish surnames play football today?
This is a fun question, but sadly nobody actually tracks football players by surname or ancestry, so there is no official number. What follows is a simple rough, back-of-envelope estimate built from two publicly available figures, and is not a hard statistic.
Number of Players in the world
FIFA’s “Big Count” survey which dates to 2006, put the number of people actively playing football worldwide at around 265 million, a figure that is still widely cited today. Broader estimates that include informal, unregistered play could easily push this closer to 350–500 million), then there are the unknown millions who play infrequently at the park with their kids.
Concerning Scottish descent, the Scottish Government and independent researchers estimate that there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million people worldwide who claim Scottish ancestry, or employ a Scottish surname, with the largest populations being in English speaking countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Wales; and I am reliably told that due to the existence of Guinness, Ireland became an especially popular destination for those leaving Scotland.
It is also widely understood that this widespread distribution throughout the world only occurred is because Scots are so good at picking up foreign languages, with it being observed that Scots quickly becoming adapt in leaning American English from almost the first moment they touched its welcoming shores. They are also some pockets of long-term generational expats in various parts of South America, and lastly it has been heard that there were some who willingly choose to live in England despite being told how bad the weather is, and some being forced to play cricket at school.
Against a world population of roughly 8.2 billion, which is about 0.4% of humanity this suggests the share to the global football-playing population who carry a Scottish surname or claim Scottish descent. must be around 1 to 1.3 million active footballers outside of Scotland. This means, when the approximate 500,000 to 750,000 active players in Scotland are added to the total, we believe there are around 2,000,000 active players worldwide, which would make a Battle of the Clans League/Championship one of the largest football fun-leagues in the world. This includes everyone, from Sunday league regulars, to school kids to full-time professionals.
And as a heads up it has also been undemocratically decided that in America we will call the Battle of the Clan matches football games and not soccer. Yes, it will cause confusion, but we don’t care. Our hope is we will finally see what happens when a team of 11 with a round ball takes on a team of 15 with a rugby ball, with the ball played on the ground, and yes any videos from the match should be uploaded immediately to Youtube.
Also, depending on the interest shown, with so many active players, we hope to eventually create competitions for different age groups, women leagues, and both five aside and full-scale matches. As a note for those who might be worried because their links to a specific clan only arise from their mother, which means they might mean they do not bear the name of their favoured clan, yes you can compete for your clan in these competitions. This rule can be applied back generationally, which might allow you to play in multiple Clan Battles for different Clan teams, but be aware, once you select a team, that decision is fixed for that entire season. Full rules for each of the competitions will be published soon.
The legacy
It’s a strange irony of football history that the country that transitioned football from the ugly brutal scrum to the passing game is rarely given credit for inventing modern football. But the next time you watch a team string together twenty passes together, don’t think they have forgotten where the goal is, what you are looking at is a game that originated in the minds of a group of young men in Glasgow who had forgotten to head home to help the wife make dinner that night, and that is the true story behind the start of Football.
The Aims of the Battle of the Clans Games
Our aims are simple; to increase membership at local clubs, to create an alternative fun competition during the Highland Game Season, and to encourage people to try other sports, including sports they may never have tried before.
Over the years I guess many have attended Highland Games, and found the strength games are for there only for us mere mortals to gaze upon. In creating The Battle of the Clans our desire is to allow spectators to become part of the Scottish Highland Games in a way that has never been possible before.
It is hoped that at future games just perhaps a small area can be created where we can participate in the more human-level games, in a fun competitive, non-head chopping off manner. If you think you can help, or want to compete, just drop us a line.