Scots ‘taught English how to play football’

SCOTS showed the English how to play football and their more skilful players may have saved the sport from dying out, a new BBC documentary has claimed.

While Fifa credits England with drawing up the first universal rulebook for the world’s most popular sport, Scottish historians have insisted the modern version of the game was “100 per cent” invented north of the border.

The claim has been branded “absurd” by other experts, who said that no single country could lay claim to creating modern football.

However, the BBC programme argues that football south of the border was on the brink of disbanding in the late 1860s. This is said to be partly because passing the ball was seen as a “cowardly act” by the young English aristocrats and upper middle classes who played it, making it unappealing to spectators.

But in the first officially recognised international, between Scotland and England

in Glasgow in 1872, Scots showcased passing, heading and even an overhead kick.

The players, who became known as the “Scotch professors”, were then lured south to show the English how the game should be played, the documentary claims, even though the fixture had ended in a 0-0 draw.

“The problem that the game had in London was that the style might have been fun to take part in but it wasn’t fun to watch,” Richard McBrearty, the curator at the Scottish Football Museum at Hampden Park, said.

The BBC Scotland documentary,

credits a Scotland team made up of players from Queen’s Park FC as the early pioneers of the new type of play that would dominate to this day.

It was a Scot, Willie McKinnon, who performed the first overhead kick during the game, while the Scots also introduced heading the ball.

In contrast, English players would simply attempt to “barge” their way towards the opposition goal.