The Blueing of the Game
Chapter One
First Facts
That formal football, association football, soccer, let’s not argue about name, began essentially at a bar is perhaps fitting. Some might even argue that it has for most never left it. But remember that formal rugby began at one too, the same one, and the bar was in a tavern so a measure of respectability where a measure is both poured and due.
Said bar was in London, the Freemason’s Tavern on Great Queen Street, numbers 61-65 to be precise. Come out of Holborn underground station, turn south and the street is still there, second on the right, although the original drinking place is long gone. It is now the De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms, conference centre with still, I believe, a small bar on its ground floor.
But this book is not about drinking nor the first London breaths of the modern, round-ball game but the reality about how it first walked, then talked and has since developed and matured into the worldwide one we know today and did so not simply elsewhere, but specifically first in and then from Scotland. And to that end as my point of introduction I want to transport you on three decades give or take.
It is fact that in the 1895-96 Football League season, the English football league season, in the teams in existence at the time that were, had been and over the almost two subsequent decades to the Great War would be in its First Division, some thirty-one teams in all, the services of just over 220 Scottish players were being employed. Believe me. I have laboriously counted them. It is an average of seven per squad or roster, as it might have been called then, and is an annual number that had more or less doubled since five years earlier, when three of those same teams had not existed, so just twenty-eight and four per squad, having already doubled over the two years before that. And the reason was success.
Professional football had been sanctioned in England in 1885, although it seems then to have been something of a slow burner, not least because the reality was it had existed in certain teams for half a decade already and, whilst they carried on much as before, others havered mainly over the financial commitment. In 1884, so the season before professionalism was legalised, the Scottish Football Association had drawn up a list of players in England but from north of the border it considered as actually if illegally being paid to play. That list had had sixty-four names on it and, whilst individual players came and went, the number I have identified as of 1888-89, the year the English League was founded, as Scots professionals at English clubs is also, as its happens, sixty-four.
So on the face of it the number of Scots players had not changed one iota. However, where there was a difference lay not in that number per se or in the location of the clubs that employed them, still predominately industrial Lancashire, but their concentrations and the effect it had and would have not simply on results but now success as exemplified not solely as before by FA Cup progress but now by League position. Firstly in the 1888-89 season of the sixty-four fifty-three so 83% were employed by League clubs and represented about 20% of all League players. Secondly ten of those Scots were at Preston, nine at Burnley, eight at Everton, six each at Blackburn and Bolton so thirty-nine in all. And of those five teams three, Preston, Blackburn and Bolton finished in the top six league slots, Preston top.
Furthermore, in that first year two of the League teams had club-secretaries, proto-managers, who were also ex-pat Scots. One was again fourth-placed Blackburn, where Dumfries-born Thomas Mitchell had joined two years earlier and would stay another six. The other was second-placed Aston Villa. It was a team that emerged from church cricket through the efforts of Glasgow-born George Ramsay and those of the Lindsay brothers from Golspie in Sutherland as players. And it was Ramsay, whilst no longer playing himself, who had already been at the off-field helm for three years, would remain there for another thirty-seven and that season had a team with admittedly just two Scots in it but with Ayr’s inimitable Archie Hunter as club and on-field captain.
And then there was the FA Cup Final where Preston with three local players in the side, a Welshman and seven Scots, or rather six Scots and a notional Anglo, an English-born Scot, roundly defeated 3-0 an all-English Wolverhampton Wanderers team. It was a first League and Cup Double, unarguably predicated on Scots players but also a product of probably of the technique, more certainly the style and also a measure of tactical superiority that they brought to the feast. Indeed analysis of the season’s results in terms of the teams/squads of the League and Cup winners and runners-up, on-field leaders of those teams,/squads the captains, the off-field leaders, the secretary/managers and the leading League scorer, in 1888-89 the Anglo in question, John Goodall, brought up in Kilmarnock of Scots parents but because of the rules of the time allowed only to play for England, indicates a Scots input, a Scots penetration, if you will, in this first year of England’s League’s of 25%.
Yet it was only half the story. Penetration does not indicate success so if much the same analysis is concentrated on the two teams to reach the FA Cup Final and be League Champion and runner-up, so Preston, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Aston Villa the figures are 13% and 40%. Thus it appeared, because Wolves had no Scots input at all, as if in the Cup that input mattered not too greatly in the League the very opposite was true. In fact, in the latter having a large Scots input seemed to increase the chance of success by precisely 60%. And, of course, as of that moment, albeit gradually, the League due to its very existence and not the income but the guarantee of income it produced began to matter more.