Hugh McColl
Some wee while ago, when exploring the introduction of football to Spain, specifically in Seville, one of the several Scots found to be involved and as captain of the that city's team was a Hugh McColl, a Glaswegian engineer. And when doing the same for the game's beginnings in Santiago de Chile the name seemed to reappear with the photos we have of the two pioneers showing some similarity. As a result, without having gone into the detail , I speculated that the two men, with some Spanish acquired, might have been the same.
But they were not, not least because Chilean Hugh, originally a Commercial Clerk to trade, later South American Merchant cum Export Merchant, was actually McColl and Spanish Hugh MacColl. And all this and more is known because of the, as ever, great work that was done by the inestimable Andy Mitchell and our inimitable Chilean colleague, Sebastian Nunez Mardones. The research by them and his background, from his birth in 1852 to his death back in Glasgow in 1928, is available in an article from 2025 on Andy's blog, Scottish Sport History. Click
here to read it in full. The only additional details are that McColl was born and passed away, a widower of seventy-six, less than a mile apart, in Anderston, and by 1879 had been living in England. He married in Dukinfield in Cheshire in April that year.