Transatlantic connections and diasporic dimensions: association football, the Scots, and North American men’s soccer, c. 1870s-1921

Abstract

From the 1870s, the new game of association football increasingly became a hegemonic sports culture in Scotland, reaching a level of social significance unparalleled by any other sporting pastime. Within a matter of decades, the game’s global presence was also growing, often instigated and assisted by Scottish transnational and diasporic agency. Although increasingly acknowledged in celebratory terms, a rigorous assessment of the Scottish factor with regards to the emergence and development of association football in certain locations, as well as the game’s meaning and place in the lives of the Scottish diaspora in context, has largely been absent. Consequently, the following study begins to critically explore some of the more prominent transatlantic connections and diasporic dimensions that existed between association football, the Scots, and North American men’s soccer between 1876 and 1921.

This study historically contextualises the Scots’ relationship to both Canada and the United States, including the overlooked importance and changing nature of sport to this dynamic. The relatively late emergence of association football as a specific sporting, social, and cultural phenomenon, but the game’s early Scottish aspects (both nationally and globally), demonstrates the proactive and living nature of Scottish diasporic and transnational culture during this period, as opposed to something that was typically romantic and/or anachronistic.

Nevertheless, the continued prominence of the Scottish (and wider British) factor within early Canadian and US soccer also hindered the game’s national place in both countries, especially when compared to other increasingly nationalistic sports cultures, like baseball, ice hockey, and gridiron football. Initially, the game was largely perceived (and implicitly constructed) as one for “British Protestants”, but like British Protestantism itself, association football had four nation underpinnings. As rigorous case studies into four ethnically named Scottish soccer clubs reveal, the game could act as an important and varied repository of Scottish diasporic content, albeit one that was rarely counter-cultural or radical. Moreover, although never treated as notable Scottish societies in North America’s major Scottish diasporic publications, such clubs can undoubtedly assist in better understanding the Scots in Canada and the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

As further demonstrated, there was also wider substance to the Scots’ early engagement with soccer in North America beyond the game’s origins and ethnically named Scottish clubs. This included continued individual awareness of association football in Scotland, and the reality of transatlantic tours. Indeed, whilst being cautious of a degree of sport-orientated hyperbole, it is perhaps not too farfetched to suggest that in both group and individual capacities, association football may have become (and remained) one of the most prominent secular areas through which Scottish transnational and diasporic activity continually asserted itself globally, at least between the 1870s and the 1920s. As this study demonstrates, this was very much the case with regards to Canada and the United States prior to 1921.