Austria
Austrian football began in the 1890s in Vienna. To the turn of the century it was lead by an Englishman with a Scottish name. He was:
Then for a decade Austria was one of the most successful and probably the most watchable team in Continental Europe. It was the 1930s. Its status had on the field been largely due to the The Paperman, Matthias Sindelar, in his prime in succession to Scotland's
Alex Jackson, Uruguay's Jose Leandro Andrade and America and again Scotland's Archie Stark perhaps the World's best player. However, for all its success Austria was not the World's best team. England and Italy had perhaps better claims, Uruguay possibly too. What it did have, however, was one of the World's best coaches, an Irishman born in Northern England, who had learned the style he passed on like no other from a Scotsman he had played alongside for a single season in London. It was the season that took the London club into the Football League.
The Scot was
R.C. Hamilton, Robert Cumming Hamilton, a player who largely goes unrecognised today. He is not even in the Scottish Football Hall of Fame. The club was Fulham in the season that took it into the Football League. The nascent coach was Jimmy Hogan. The style was that of the deep-lying centre-forward, the false-number nine, or inside-forward playing not the bustling, all action game of the conventional attacker but striking from deep with long shots and skilled, subtle or late runs. It would be a style of team play, entirely ignored in the country of its origin, which would reappear indirectly via Hogan with devastating effectiveness two decades later on the emergence of Hungary's Magic Magyars and perhaps individually and serendipitously in England in another Scot, John White, the man known as The Ghost.