Football: The Sport Scotland Gave to the World

100 Reason Why Scotland Founded Modern World Football, Ged O’Brien, Fairfoul, £18.

Reviewed by John McIntosh

Football historian Ged O ‘Brien is deeply committed to setting the record straight about how and where football first appeared. In his new book, 100 Reasons Why Scotland Founded Modern World Football, he burns with indignation about the false narratives that have become the official version of the origins of the game. It quickly becomes apparent that he has much to be indignant about. O’Brien argues that a game recognisable as the direct ancestor of modern football first appeared in Scotland hundreds of years before the 1860s, the decade commonly assumed to be when football first appeared, and goes on to suggest that that reality has been deliberately covered up by those keen to preserve a fictional version. The credit for inventing football, he argues, has been quietly stolen from the Scottish nation. 

Years of meticulously poring over parish records and newspaper reports have led O’Brien to conclude that ‘the Beautiful Game’ really is Scotland’s gift to the world.  It can safely be added to the list of Scottish inventions adorning tea towels in tourist shops around the country. Modern football, and its basic universal principles – passing between teammates; playing as a team and not individuals; picking around 11 players to specialise in specific positions; playing with a plan – were born in Scotland. We, you, us, the Scots, invented the damned thing. Who knew? 

The English Lineage of Football

Well, very few apparently. O’Brien is clear about why we have never been given the proper credit for this invention. It seems the dastardly English have been determined to prove that it was in fact them wot dun it. This has led eventually to the common misconception that, when England hosted the European Championships in 1996, football was, apparently, ‘coming home’. It is not difficult to imagine how and why this might happen. The English ruling class consistently claim that all good things have sprung from England’s green and pleasant land. Having, it says here, ‘civilised’ half the world, it surely makes sense that the credit for creating something as generally loved as football should go to the English. It’s really just common sense. And if one or two facts have to be lost down the sofa along the way, well then – no great mischief. 

It was, of course, the visionaries of the English private school system who invented football and graciously passed it down to the lower orders. Old Etonians eh? Why are they so good? The hitherto unchallengeable orthodoxy is that modern football emerged when the English private schools decided to get involved by codifying ‘mob football’, basically a street brawl with unlimited numbers of players and a ball somewhere in the middle of it all. O’Brien will have absolutely none of this. Mob football was undoubtedly a very real phenomenon, but modern football did not emerge from it in the 19th century. O’Brien shows that a game recognisable as modern football was being played in Scotland for hundreds of years before that.

Telling Scotland’s Story of Football

O’Brien argues that there is no connection between this mob football, with its hundreds of drunks rampaging up and down the town, and modern football. He refers to numerous accounts from Scotland from the 16th century which suggest that football already existed as a game between two teams, limited in numbers, with rules, and little excessive physicality. For example, he describes a game in 1599 between 6 Border Armstrongs and 6 Englishmen of Bewcastle – organised six-a-side football being played in the 16th century – and refers to another incident, in Blairgowrie in 1603, when the local minister ‘kicked and hacked’ at people to get them to stop playing. The locals were playing what O’Brien calls an ‘intelligent and scientific’ game, a game that evidently did not allow ‘kicking and hacking’.  So no. This was not mob football or anything like it. 

Much of the evidence cited by O’Brien comes from Kirk records, usually accounts of ministers railing against people wasting their time playing football when they could be engaging in more godly activities. Interestingly, O’Brien makes the suggestion that football was often viewed as a Papist activity, a remnant of  ‘the old times’, i.e. pre-Reformation times, when poor people might take advantage of Saints day holidays to enjoy getting together for a game. Predictably, many Presbyterians felt that such frivolity had to be curtailed. O’Brien describes a incident in Lamington in Lanarkshire in 1656, when locals were dragged before the Kirk Session for:

… participating in one superstitious and abominable custome… promiscuously to play at foot-ball upon Fasting’s even. 

O’Brien does not pull any punches in pursuit of ecumenical harmony:

All the fun things people did, were seen as bad. This tells you what an amazingly pleasant place Presbyterian Scotland must have been.

The English claim that they invented football clearly irritates O’Brien. He sees this as an example of what inevitably happens in partnerships when one of the partners is ten times bigger than the other. English historians of the game have used a variety of familiar tactics – ignoring or downplaying Scottish involvement; bigging up the role of ‘posh’ English people; dismissing any objections as just the usual disgruntled Scots’ instinctive anti-Englishness. A version of this very successful tactic is still routinely trotted out by many Scottish politicians during election campaigns. You can hear it in almost any statement by spokespersons from any of the anti-Independence parties. Support for the English position on football is of course also reinforced by sheer weight of numbers – for every Ged O’Brien crying in the wilderness, there are ten opponents explaining how he is obviously wrong. 

The pioneering role of the Scotch Professors 

Somewhat thrillingly for Scottish football fans, O’Brien argues persuasively that Scottish players and teams played a fundamentally different and more modern style of football than the English. Crucially, ‘Scottish Combination’ involved players passing the ball to their team-mates and running into positions to receive passes. In other words, a proper team game, not just a collection of individuals. This style brought early Scottish teams great success, and players known as ‘Scotch Professors’ were in great demand. O’Brien states that…

… Scotland were the first nation to realise that planning a game and carrying out particular tactics was the way to success. When England got really really tired of being gubbed again and again by Scotland, their complaint was that the Scotch Professors knew one another’s play.

The English game was based around individual dribbling, while the Scots played as a team. Perhaps controversially, O’Brien goes as far as to suggest that this is a reflection of different national characteristics – the Scottish clan system, for all its faults,  encouraged a kind of shared group ethos – the community (or team) was all in this together. The rugged individualism of the English was not conducive to success in a team game. England did earn a draw in the very first International match in 1872, and actually managed to win the return fixture in 1873, but O’Brien explains that Scotland had only been able to afford to send 8 players down for that game. The other three players had to be drawn from Scots living in England, who were upper class and steeped in the English style. O’Brien says that these three ‘weak links were not capable of intelligent Scottish Combination play’. By 1878, the pattern was set, and Scotland ran out 7-2 winners. 

At a time when Scottish football has for years been plummeting down the international rankings, and is routinely dismissed and mocked by English pundits as a sub-standard product, it is good to know that this has not always been the case – we were the best in the world, streets ahead of our southern neighbours, who played a basic and predictable version of the game. Scotch Professors brought their Scottish Combination game to the rest of the world, where it took root and flourished. 

At one point Liverpool FC and Sunderland FC, two of the most successful English sides, were turning out teams of eleven Scots. I myself remember echoes of this as late as the 1970s, when no top English team played without a sizeable quota of Scottish players – Law, Dalglish, Souness, McQueen, Gray, Lorimer, Holton, Hansen, Cooke to name but a few.

Sadly, Scotland’s pivotal role in creating ‘the beautiful game’ has, like so many other inconveniently positive Scottish facts, been largely air-brushed from history. The thrilling climax to this domestic season, however, one of the most gripping in living memory, has caught the attention of the international media and with the Scotland men’s national team finally qualifying again for the FIFA World Cup Finals, football’s Scottish origin story needs to be told and retold.

Thanks are due to Ged O’Brien for reminding us of the true history – as always, it is buried deep. So, if football has played a small part in making our lives a bit more colourful, a bit noisier, a bit more joyous, and we’re counting the minutes to the fantastic circus of the World Cup this June even if it is being cynically exploited by Trump – you’re welcome.

Can you hear us David Baddiel?

100 Reason Why Scotland Founded Modern World Football can be purchased from Lulu HERE.

We continue publishing as we crowdfund for the next twenty years.

Support us here: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/bella-caledonia-2020