Whilst football in France began in the 1880s the game there, whilst it had been shamateur from before The Great War, would not organise itself on a professional basis until the 1930s. However, by then the French already had a large and increasingly influential toe in the international soccer pond. FIFA was founded in Paris in 1904 following on from the Olympics games in the same city in 1900 and when the football gold medal had been awarded retrospectively. The game had been included originally for demonstration purposes only, the medals an afterthought. The recipients were a Great Britain team that was actually English only. And the Olympics would be held in Paris again in 1924, the first time the gold medal had been won by a non-European country, Uruguay. Moreover it was also to be the venue of the 1938 World Cup when as the hosts it beat its neighbour to the north, Belgium, but would lose in the Quarter Finals to one of its two southern ones, the eventual champions, Italy.
By the time of the 1924 Olympics, apart from the early Parisien introduction across the Channel of the game forty year earlier, and when in the years before the First World War James McQueen had played there and John Goodall
had briefly played and coached at Roubaix Scots influence, unlike several other European countries, had been minimal and a decade later it would be minimal once more. Yet in the intervening years not only would there be Scots involvement, albeit briefly, but supposedly Scots-generated controversy, at least in England, with seriously disruptive consequences for Scotland's national team and arguably in the longer term for the Scottish game in general.