Andrew Watson

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Trailblazing footballer of the 1880s Andrew Watson, the first Black man to play at the top level of the game, carved out his early career in Glasgow. He will always have a special place in the hearts of Scottish football fans thanks to a superb performance as head of the national football team in 1881 in a game against England.

He led them to a 6-1 victory in London, still a record home defeat for England and one of several hammerings doled out by the Scots between 1880 and 1882.

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Born in 1857 to a plantation manager and former slave owner, Peter Miller Watson, and a British Guyanese woman named Anna, Andrew moved to England with his father and sister Annetta in the early 1860s. His father died several years later and a substantial inheritance allowed him to enrol at Glasgow University in 1875 to study Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Civil Engineering. He left after a year to get married and start an engineering apprenticeship.

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Andrew lived in Govan and played for Maxwell FC, but his skill and speed soon captured the attention of bigger clubs. In 1880, at the age pf 23, he represented Glasgow against Sheffield before joining the city’s elite club Queen’s Park. He went on to captain Scotland three times.

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Not only was he Scotland’s first Black international, he was also the world’s first Black football administrator, the first Black player to win a national football trophy and the first Black player to play in the FA Cup following a move to London Swifts in 1882.

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His wife, Jessie Armour, sadly died in 1882 and the couple’s son and daughter returned to Glasgow to live with their grandparents. Andrew married a second time, to Eliza Taylor, and had two further children. The family moved to Liverpool, where Andrew trained to be a marine engineer. He died in March 1921, of pneumonia.