MacLean's
Tabelinha
The story of the first football in Brazil used to take us to Charles Miller’s involvement in, if not instigation of, the laying in 1898 of the country’s first pitch at the Sao Paulo Athletic Club (SPAC). We now know that football arrived in the country in three places, of which the city of Sao Paulo was just one, and did so in all cases in the minds and feet of several Scots-born or Scots-Diasporan enthusiasts. But football in Brazil is not just about the game per se. It is or at least has been about a certain style and style has two ingredients, place and people.
With regard to people Brazil is a multi-ethnic country and it is huge. Its football to some extent reflects both the ethnic diversity and vastness. Yet that diversity might not have been so. For thirty years from its beginnings Brazilian football had been a predominantly white sport and might have remained that way but for an originally majority Scottish club and presidential intervention. That club is Bangu. And in terms of place Brazil's vastness is today less of a factor than it probably should be. Brazil's top-flight teams are in the largely white south of the country where European styles of playing are increasingly aped. The reasons are simple, if disappointing. The south is where the money yet the club need to sell players to Europe to balance the books and, presumably to keep costs down, lazily tend to draw from local talent instead of scouting nationwide. This is whilst the north and perhaps its difference, extemporisation, originality, flair can be largely and foolishly ignored.
It is a complicated situation but a little over a century ago it was much simpler. Brazilian footballing style would develop but in 1912 it began, no more than began, with one place and one man. The style was A Tabelinha, the "little chart", the rhythm. The place was Sao Paulo. The man was Archibald McLean.
Archie Mclean, or Maclean, is said to have arrived in Sao Paulo in 1912. That he did, but there was more. He was born in Paisley in 1886. At 24 in 1911 and married, he was still in Paisley with a full-time job as a mechanic with local thread makers, the ubiquitous J & P Coats. He was also a semi-professional footballer. He had played for Ayr F.C.. He also said to have played for Galston, just outside Kilmarnock, next to Newmilns and then a major team, and for Johnstone, just outside Paisley, not to be confused with Perth's St. Johnstone. However, in 1912 he, as SFA records show, was actually registered with Ayr United, the result of an amalgamation in 1910 of Ayr F.C. and Ayr Parkhouse, and at the end of a season, in which Ayr had finished top of Division II but was not elected to the First Division and was therefore not promoted.
It was in that same year, 1912, that Mclean was sent by Coats on a job at the company’s factory in the Sao Paulo suburb of Ipiranga that was supposed to take three months. Ipiranga's football team had been founded by the company the same year. The club exists to this day. His playing-contract at home was even said to have been kept open. He was clearly expected to have been back for the 1913-14-season, but, perhaps disgruntled at St. Mirren staying up and he missing his chance to show his abilities in Division I, he was to remain in Brazil for almost 40 years.
It seems like an off-the-cuff decision but perhaps not. He might have had it in mind for some five years. You see, Archie knew Sao Paulo and its football knew him. He had already been sent there in 1907 for two months after the football season had ended at home, perhaps to similar work, and had turned out four times on the right-wing for Germania one of the league founding members. Once it had even been against
Charles Miller and his team, Sao Paulo Athletic Club (SPAC) and with a certain
Jock Hamilton
as referee. And on his return in 1912 it was to SPAC that he went directly and quickly into its struggling team.
However, too soon after returning to Sao Paulo, now a city with a population exploding to about ½ million, doubling in five years but as yet still only half the size of Rio de Janeiro, McLean seems to have found himself caught up in one of the increasingly frequent footballing soul-searching with regard to amateur and shamateur and the periodic spats at the Sao Paolo Athletic Club between football and rugby. The club was firmly amateur. Football was increasingly not, as the city's game split and SPAC took the decisions to withdraw from the Sao Paulo League and also not to join the new alternative.
Thus at the end of the 1912 season and, with no interest in rugby, McLean, who nevertheless remained a life-time SPAC member, found himself potentially club-less. It did not last. He and fellow Scot, another Hamilton, not Jock but John Hamilton, lined up in the first game of the new season at the end of April in the new league for Americano. However, it was a combination that would again not last. By the end of May Hamilton was playing for Internacional. where he would stay. In the meantime McLean remained at Americano, where in the last game of the season he was joined by another Briton, Hopkins, and clearly either had other thoughts or events caught up with him. In the closed season as Americano seemed to disappear, if only temporarily, to re-emerge two years later, McLean, Hopkins and mainly ex-SPAC players, several Scots amongst them, formed a new club, Scottish Wanderers.
Scottish Wanderers debuted in Sao Paulo's alternative league, the APEA, in the very first game of the 1914 season. Coincidentally or not against the Coats company team, Ipiranga. The league that year was won AA Sao Bento. Paulistano was runner-up and The Scottish Wanderers just fifth of six. However their distinctive style of play, their short-passing game, particularly the combinations between McLean and Hopkins, had attracted attention. Developed in Scotland forty years earlier, refined and exported over the intervening years to English clubs, where the Scottish professional was highly prized, and known now in Brazil as A Tabelinha, 'the rhythm', it was a style not seen before but which proved ideal for Brazilian conditions. Many players and clubs at first in Sao Paulo chose to adopt it, replacing the dribble, kick and rush approach, abhorred by McLean that Charles Miller had brought from England. And they adapted it over time for themselves, until it became the unique style of play, for which Brazil half a century later became famous.
Archie too attracted attention. Said to have been the typical small, slight, quick and tricky, Scottish forward he was soon dubbed "O Veadinho", the little deer, or The Gazelle. A mazy runner now at inside-left, he and Hopkins outside him, Bill Hopkins, 19 year-old William Frank Hopkins, from Portsmouth, who had himself arrived in Brazil only in 1911, would be admired for their exchanges of short, quick passes. Indeed they were soon picked for the Sao Paulo state team, demonstrating their prowess and style against Rio de Janeiro and beginning the spread of the word.
In 1915 The Scottish Wanderers were again to be fifth in their league but then hit trouble. Remember that McLean back home had been semi-professional. Scot footballers were professionally not just in Scotland, of course, and England but increasingly everywhere, as players and coaches. And for a lad from a working-class background even semi-professional was a good and accepted way of earning extra money as Archie knew from his playing career at home. Almost certainly he brought this attitude with him and the Scottish Wanderers were playing in a stadium that could and did at times take crowds of 10,000. The Wanderers were making money, some of which was being no doubt given to the players legitimately as expenses and some no doubt under the table. It seems not to have been a problem, or at least one to which a blind eye was turned, that is until a player, possibly from rivals Mackenzie, who had been knocked back by the Wanderers, to use a footballing metaphor, blew the whistle. The league, which was supposed to be entirely amateur, had no option but to react but did so not with a ban on the players involved but the Wanderers club itself. It folded shortly afterwards but SPAC, again coincidentally or not, resumed football the following season.
As for Archie McLean, he was far too good a player to be cold-shouldered and probably also too good for SPAC. The next season he and Hopkins were at Sao Bento, still in the same league, and still there in 1917 as the city's rival groupings were reconciled, the Sao Paulo Association of Athletic Sports absorbing the Sao Paulo Football League.
Archie McLean would remain with Sao Bento until 1920 by when he was thirty-four and, although hanging up his top-flight boots, he might have from turned out from 1926 for the British-based team, Britania, and is said to have continued playing friendlies for Sao Paulo Athletic Club. Certainly his sons did. In 1938 in a confrontation that was redolent of the early, Brazilian game Sao Paulo Athletic Club played Rio Cricket and in the SPAC team were J. and R. McLean, Archie McLean's two sons, John and Robert, John born in Scotland in 1911, perhaps the reason, why his father decided to remain in Sao Paulo simply because it was financially advantageous, and Robert in Brazil in 1916. And Archie himself would remain in Brazil long after his playing career had ended, only returning after the Second World War permanently to Scotland and to retirement in Paisley, where he and his wife had maintained a house. It was there he died in 1971 at the age of 84. For a while he was ‘The Forgotten Father of Brazilian Football', but his story is now better known and his special, stylistic contribution, always appreciated in Brazil, with its Scots roots now finally better understood in his home country.