Graham Kelly: Scotland stakes a claim for England's legacy

It was only a passing reference to England, the birthplace of the (modern) game having representation at Fifa, but it brought such a swift response from north of the border that I felt obliged to visit Hampden Park to investigate.

Ged O'Brien, director of the Scottish Football Museum, contends the Scots, with their passing game, invented modern football, largely because there was little agreement on which rules to adopt in England, with the different associations promoting variations which were not ironed out until the inauguration of the International Board in 1886. Support can be found in the work of historian James Walvin, who notes that, when industrialists waged campaigns against recreational activities, they were less forceful in Scotland, where football survived longer as a casual rural game.

In 1867, the Queens Park club of Glasgow was formed, and the Football Association secretary Charles Alcock wrote to the Glasgow Herald inviting nominations for a representative match in London between English and Scots: "In Scotland, once essentially the land of football, there should still be a spark left of the old fire..."

The first international was between England and Scotland, in 1872 in Glasgow before a crowd of 4,000. It ended in a 1-1 draw. Charles Clegg, from the Sheffield association, was selected to give the English the appearance of a national team and complained that the other players refused to speak to him.

Scotland won 10 of the first 16 encounters, their passing style overcoming the English dribblers. Instrumental in two of the victories was full-back Andrew Watson, the world's first black footballer, not, as thought, Arthur Wharton, who played for Preston North End in 1885-86 and later Darlington.

Watson was born in May, 1857 in Demerara, Georgetown, British Guyana and educated in Halifax, Yorkshire. He held a regular place in the mighty Queens Park team, the Manchester United of the time, and also toured with England's élite amateur side, the Corinthians, in Lancashire in 1884. He also played for Bootle in 1887, when he was working as an engineer in Liverpool.

Football, or English football if we accept the Scottish argument, the game which was stigmatised earlier as leading to riotous behaviour, was ironically the means for controlling the turbulence in the public schools in the early 19th century when a new wave of reforming head teachers, led by Dr Thomas Arnold at Rugby, placed the emphasis on "godliness and good learning". The middle classes became wealthier and their sons the beneficiaries of the new brand of muscular Christianity and rigorous team discipline.

By the dawn of the 20th century the game had become the sport of the industrial working class. Saturday was a half day. Ex-public school men, keen to tackle social deprivation, formed teams from working class churches. Old boys teams also flourished, as did teacher training colleges, which encouraged the growth of school teams to attract pupils. The game was cheap and simple and when better forms of communication and transport helped the spread of football, it was well on the way to becoming the phenomenon we know today.

As the game grew as a spectator sport, particularly in the industrial centres such as Lancashire, so it became obvious in the 1880s that the issue of professionalism would have to be confronted. Many Scottish players were migrating to England to take advantage of the better economic opportunities. They faced antipathy from those who believed that professional sport was ethically unacceptable. Though the FA tried to ban professionalism, it was merely driven underground.

The conflict lasted about six years. In 1884, Upton Park accused Preston North End of having hired help in an FA Cup match. The Preston chairman William Sudell effectively pleaded that, as all the top teams were doing it, he needed to.

The FA threw North End out of the Cup, but after a further period of bitter controversy, during which a rival British Football Association was set up, Charles Alcock persuaded the FA to legalise professionalism. Faced with the need to find regular income to pay their newly professional players, the clubs in the north and Midlands formed the Football League in 1888.

Football's museums, the Scottish Football Museum in Glasgow and the National Football Museum at Preston, are stocked to the rafters with the stories of our social heritage, but why do we have to pay admission charges to bring history to life for children of all ages?

Both have overcome football's parochialism to establish an independent foothold, but there is still an urgent need for funding to provide a central archive and learning resource.

grahamkelly@btinternet.com