Imagine today a Scots player, a player in dark blue with the Lion Rampart on the shirt, who averaged 0.91 goals a game in club football, 1.5 in one season, 1.1 in the six years between the ages of 27 and 33, and 2 per game against international opposition. Imagine what the market value of such a player would be. To give you an idea of what that means in today's terms, Lionel Messi for Barcelona also has an average of 0.91, and for Argentina of under a goal every two games.
True Barcelona's first Messi, Glasgow's
John Pattullo, had a better average for the single season that he played in Catalonia, just over two a game, and Messi has done it now, season after season, for the decade since his début at the age of seventeen and undeniably at the very top flight of football. But this player also managed a good few seasons, in spite of interruption from the Great War, at the top of his game in his time and place, twenty-two in all, at his best from 1924 to 1930, The only real difference is Messi has played over a hundred times for country. This player played none and just twice for his adopted land.
His name was Stark, Archibald MacPherson Stark, like Pattullo Glasgow-born, in December 1896 within half a mile of Fir Park, but unlike Pattullo not an amateur player. Stark was a shamateur and then professional almost from the age of sixteen, that is from the season after he left his birthplace in 1912, a young man perhaps already seasoned in the cut and thrust of junior football on the banks of the Clyde but too young to have proven he could make it at senior level, when he arrived in the United States. His father had been a picture-framer in the Auld country. In America after his arrival with in 1910 he became a clerk and settled into life in the Scottish-American town of
Kearny
across the river from Newark in New Jersey. It was there he was joined by his older children and two years later by his wife and two youngest children, Archie amongst them. The reason for the moves appears to have been financial but there may have been other reasons. The Starks would on the face it appear to be Protestant. In fact his American family have confirmed that he was raised a Catholic. He was taught by nuns. His old school is still there and still Catholic. His parents' marriage was mixed at a time when it would have been difficult, not least in Glasgow. And there is a second reason. His mother was Mary Macdonald. His father was Glasgow born and bred. She was not. She was a Gael, a Gaelic-speaker born in Sunart on Ardnamurchan. She had already left home once for for a new life in Glasgow. Another move to America was perhaps in the circumstances neither here nor there.
But back to Archie. There is, of course, an argument with regard to Stark, and, indeed to others who also went, that football in America was not the strongest. Certainly in the immediate aftermath of World War One that was the case. In the summer of 1921 a squad of professional players, the first, although amateur teams had toured from 1901, not least Corinthian in 1911, left for Canada, invited by the country's FA and dubbed by the marketing men on the other side of the Atlantic as the All-Scots. It was nothing of the sort. It was sanctioned by the SFA but had no official status. Nevertheless it had at its core several of the Third Lanark team with the addition of good number of guest players drawn from Partick, Motherwell, Dumbarton, Aberdeen, Ayr, and Albion Rovers and Dunfermline. None, however, were playing at the time for Rangers, Celtic, Hearts or Dundee, the four teams that had finished top of the First Division but it did include several players, who had been or still were Scottish internationals and one who would represent Scotland in the future.
There was versatile Jimmy Gordon, coming to the end of his career after Rangers at Dunfermline had played ten times for Scotland, interrupted by War, the last time in 1920, including three times against England, a win, a draw and a loss, captaining once. Andy Wilson, also with Dunfermline, was just beginning his international career. He would play twelve times at centre-forward including twice with Gordon, score thirteen goals, having moved to Middlesbrough and Chelsea. And he would between 1922 and 1924 play for Scotland in front of Neil McBain, then of Ayr but soon to join Manchester United and then Everton. Jim McMenemy had been a Celtic stalwart. From 1902 to 1920 he had played 456 times for the Parkhead club and twelve times for Scotland, in his final one at inside-left alongside Wilson. James Brownlie, the goalkeeper more or less to replace Harry Rennie in the Scottish team, had been a Third Lanark stalwart for seventeen years, playing sixteen of the last seventeen internationals before the Great War. And he had played in the same Scotland teams as Alex Bennett, who had won eleven caps to 1913.
After the bulk of the tour in Canada, nineteen games, all wins, eighty-seven goals for, nine against, the squad travelled to the United States. Its first game was not in New York but New Jersey. The All-Scots played and defeated an XI, the Jersey City Celtics, drawn from the teams in one of the heartlands, perhaps the heartland of the game south of the 49th parallel. The Americans, in spite of being a something of a scratch team, performed well, initially taking the lead, but nevertheless losing, 4:2. Then for the All-Scots it was on to Pennsylvania for an encounter with what was considered, if not the best American club squad then second best, Bethlehem Steel. Once again the Americans opened the scoring through Beith-born, Tommy Fleming. The All-Scots equalised four minutes later and that was how it was at half-time. However, in the second half it was a different story. McMenemy scored a second for the Scots, Wilson a third. In fact Wilson was to complete a hat-trick as the visitors turned it on in with a passing display of precision and as fitness told. The final score was 1:8. It was an embarrassment. The Steel goalkeeper was blamed, as was Rutherford, the left-half, the ex-Chelsea forward, Harold Brittan and also studs; apparently they had been too short for the muddy conditions. But it had been American mud.
The next All-Scots game was in Philadelphia against a city all-star XI, at the core of which were still several of the Bethlehem players, but to which a number of others were added, not least two brothers, Jim and Bart McGhee. As with the previous games the home team scored first and again the visitors responded, just four minutes later with an Andy Wilson penalty. After forty-five minutes the All-Scots had hit a second but in the second half this time there was no American collapse. Only one more goal was scored. The final result was 1:3, but more important were two observations by one of those reporting.
“One of the most outstanding features in connection with the Scots game noticeable more than ever is the formation of the team for various plays. It is not necessary for the captain to coach his players on the field for the purpose of ‘tipping’ them off for the next play as they all seem to have that instinct what to expect, or where the pass is going every time that one of the Scotchmen has the ball at his feet.”
And,
“In both periods, play was of a fast order. The short passing game, compared to the long slinging passing game of the Phillies, giving the spectator the two style of game, with the Scotchmen showing the most finish, particularly in the forwards, where their passing, repassing, and dribbling left nothing to be desired.”
In other words the Scots visitors, although drawn from different clubs, had a common style, a short-passing style, that they all seemed to understand. It was that same short-passing commonality that was also to be a feature of the Scottish national team for the whole of the following decade. It was the same one that had already been introduced by
John Harley to Uruguay and
Archie McLean to Brazil and would stick and evolve into their national styles. On the other hand the Americans, in spite of having several Scots in the team, at that time played a more long-ball game, English-style. Why is unclear. It must have been an inheritance from the American game pre-Great War and here we can speculate. Might its comparative lack of success on that day and in other games on the All-Scots tour then have triggered efforts by American clubs to change tack and for the rest of the decade, aided by Scottish clubs' action on salary with which the tour coincided, to import new and specifically Scottish blood.
So where did this leave Archie Stark? Before the Great War he had played, aged fifteen probably still an amateur for local team Kearny Scots. It won the American Cup the first season he was three. He then went on to play for the Babcocks and Wilcox works team alongside a certain Bob Millar in nearby Bayonne and where he was certainly paid. That was until he was, aged nineteen, called up. Quite by whom is also unclear. It is said he served with the US Army in France but also that it was with the US Airforce and the RAF in Britain. He was after all still a British citizen. Whatever the truth he returned to New Jersey unscathed in 1919, aged twenty-one, initially to play for Kearny's local rivals, Paterson. However, that same year, a player now with Erie, a club, in spite of the name, local to Kearny, called after the railway that then connected it to Paterson, he had travelled with Bethlehem Steel as a guest on its Scandinavian summer-tour and actually still British. He did not become a naturalised American until December that same year, aged almost twenty-three, having now married. His wife, Elizabeth in one version was said to be from Paterson, in another from Kearny itself and by then they had a two-month old son, Billy, later also a professional player.
Stark remained with Erie until 1921 when, as it disbanded and as a free agent, he moved to New York and was playing on the right wing for the Field Club, notably scoring forty-five goals in sixty-nine games over three seasons. Nevertheless, he appears not to have been in New York All-Stars team that would only lose that same year to the All-Scots by the odd goal in three, yet regarded highly enough in 1924 as New York had financial problems to be transferred to Bethlehem Steel, having scored three times against them in the previous season and where he was already known from touring.
Stark made his Steel debut on 13th September, by his own admission originally as a replacement, a late and urgent wing replacement for a certain
Alex Jackson. Nineteen year-old Jackson, having played a season for Dumbarton, had joined
Bethlehem Steel a year earlier as an addition to his elder brother and Kilmarnock centre-forward, Wattie. Wattie had been good but Alex had proved a sensation and word had clearly reached home. Both brothers had travelled home
to Renton
in the Leven Vale
that summer ostensibly to see family. Both signed for Aberdeen without telling the American club and Alex had already already made his début for his new employers, a home defeat to Rangers, on 23rd August.
At Bethlehem Alex Jackson had been on $50, then £12 per game. Archie agreed to a signing-on fee of $500 plus bonuses. It was good but not great money. However, at the age of almost twenty-seven, he soon found himself switched from right-wing to centre-forward, thus replacing not Alex but brother, Wattie Jackson, and there he found his true niche. He scored his first goals for the Steel, four in all, in his first appearance and in the season 70 in 46 games, a ratio of just over one and a half. For his prowess he was put on a wage of $75 per week or then £17, more than twice the maximum in Britain. It might have seemed reason enough for him not to follow the Jacksons, that is not to consider a move back to Scotland, even England. It made him certainly the highest-paid player in America and probably in the World. Yet a move back to Scotland seems to have been something he had already contemplated before The Steel. He had returned to Scotland in 1913, aged sixteen, perhaps hoping to be picked up by a club and in the summer of 1923 he, his wife and son had again travelled to Scotland, to Glasgow. It seems inconceivable that he would not have talked to clubs there, although there is no trace of him signing, and when he returned his wife and son had even remained behind. And he was in Glasgow again in the summer of 1924. It was from there in the September he returned directly to Philadelphia. It implies possible, initial desire on his part, met by uncertainty from clubs in Scotland. He was after all a player who had lost four years to the War and, although in his prime at twenty-seven, was not young and at five feet nine in height and just over eleven stone neither a centre-forward in the big, tall English model or short, stocky and powerful in the Scottish one. Nor was he British any longer. And in the end there was the urgency on the part of The Steel to draw him back conclusively.
In November 1925 Stark in front of 12,000 would once more alongside Robert Millar hit four in a 6:1 defeat of Canada, Stark's second and last international, the USA's first on home-soil. His first had been defeat in June in Quebec against the same opposition. In the 1925-26 season he would score fifty-nine goals in total in 47 games, a ratio 1.25. In 1926-27 it would be twenty-seven more seemingly curtailed by injury and the following year thirty-nine, again injury affected and when Wattie Jackson returned for thirteen games as cover. 1928-29 saw a return to full fitness and sixty-six more on target in a season that included fifty-eight in forty-nine league and Cup games, ratio almost 1.2 and a hat-trick against a touring Preston North End team. Then in 1929-30, with Stark already aged 32, it was another fifty, and six more over the summer in friendlies. The first three were against a visiting Kilmarnock team, eighth in the Scottish first division, without reply, then, with Stark having moved to Fall River Marksmen, following the decision of Bethlehem Steel.'s steel company owner no longer to fund the work's team, one in the middle of June against Scottish League champions by five clear points, Rangers. Rangers had sent a strong squad, including twelve Scottish internationals, not least Scotland captain, Davie Meiklejohn, and one from Northern Ireland, Whitey McDonald, raised in Canada, who had played for Bethlehem from 1924 to 1928 and with Stark before his move to Ibrox.
And so the stage might have been set. In July 1930 Stark might have travelled to Uruguay for the first World Cup. He was selected by declined, stating business reasons. He was setting up a car dealership with his brother-in-law in Arlington, just north of his home town of Kearny and was also committed to tour with his new club in August. How that single decision changed the course of American, Scots and World football history we shall never know.
The club tour was to Europe and here is an indication of the importance of Stark. Six matches were played, three won and three lost. Stark scored in all three wins. On 20th August it was once in a 2:2 draw in Prague with Slavia, coached, of course, by ex. Celtic and Scotland's
Jake Madden; a game watched by 18,000. Then it was on to Vienna and a 6:0 loss to Wiener A.C. On 24th August it was a brace in a 3:1 victory over Austria Vienna then back to Prague and Slavia once more and a 4:0 loss. It was a fourth game in eight days followed by a fifth two days later, Stark scoring in a 3:0 win over Bratislava, followed the next day by a 6:0 defeat by Ferencvaros in Budapest. It was at that point that the club's financial difficulties reached even across the Atlantic. The tour ended, the players were said barely to have afforded to travel back to the USA, at which point Stark again on the move.
Meanwhile Bob Millar's Amerian team in Montevideo scored the second goal in World Cup history.
Bart McGhee was the marksman. There is every chance that Stark might have scored the first. Then the team reached the competition's semi-final only to be kicked off the park by Argentina and defeated. Might Stark's presence have led to a change of Argentine tactics and an American win? And finally Uruguay would in the final beat Argentina 4-2 but with the latter having been 2-1 up at half-time. With America there in the Estadio Centenario instead of the Argentine might Stark have made the difference?
On his return from Europe Stark, now aged thirty-three, went to Newark Americans, across the river from Kearny, scoring eighteen in two seasons and forty-two games. This was as around him “soccer” continued its collapse. In 1932 the American Soccer League (ASL) ceased, temporarily at least. Newark Americans folded. Stark joined hometown Kearny-Irish for a season, twenty-two goals in twenty-five matches in a revived but now semi-professional ASL and two last hurrahs. In 1934 his team easily won the league, Stark as top-scorer, and in May he was in an ASL All-Stars team, scoring a hat-trick, worryingly in defeating 3:1 the US National team squad. At 36-years old he was still good enough to tear apart the national team about to travel to the 1934 World Cup in Italy, a squad coached by Scot David Gould from Newmilns but of which he was not a part.
It was to be his final footballing act. He retired with a record of goals in a season of forty-four games that Messi would only break in fifty-five. And he remained in Kearny until his death in 1985 at the age of 88 with not one but three unknowns hanging over him. There was not just the what-if of the 1930 World Cup. There was also how he would have fared in British football, indeed Scottish football and, finally, might he have even played for Scotland. He would in his prime and a centre-forward have been up against Hughie Gallacher and Jimmy McGrory but, and here is a thought, he might have been eligible in spite of naturalisation. Scotland's requirement was birth and Barney Battles Jnr., who like Stark had emigrated to the USA as a boy and also lined up alongside Stark in 1925 for the USA against Canada, would return for eight seasons with Hearts and in 1931 play and score for Scotland against Wales. The only problem would have been those US caps. Battles was rapidly ruled ineligible because of them. Stark would surely have been so too.