Ireland
Ireland was the last of the four Home Nations to embrace football. But the game crossed the Irish Sea not from England but Scotland. As a result it took root first in the North. That fact alone makes its early years complicated, if not controversial. The Irish Football Association, formed in 1880, a decade and a half after England's, six years after Scotland's and four
after Wales's. It was then Ireland-wide but now only holds sway in the North. Soon after the partition of the island a second association for the twenty-six counties, the Football Association of Ireland, was founded, in 1921, affiliated to FIFA two years later as Ireland's only representative and on Eire's independence became the game's governing body there.
But before politics interfered and Ireland not only had two associations and therefore two leagues the island had had combined competitions and one national team. It played its first game in 1882, against England. It won its first international in 1887. Its first game against Scotland had been in 1884 and by 1891 using the residency rule Scots-born players were already in team. The best of them, Bob Milne, had first taken the field in 1894. In the meantime Ireland had made its first administrative impact. In 1887 it had questioned penal player-qualification regulations. It had used the newly-formed International Football Association Board to force the rescinding of the rule that stipulated all players born outwith the British Isles but in the Empire were de facto English, although it was not able similarly to push through the parent/grandparent rule for Home Nations that now applies. That would take another eighty-odd years.
However, the direction of travel of players was not just from Scotland to Ireland. The arrival of Irish workers in Scotland notably from the the time of The Great Famine would create through their children a flow of energy and talent that would learn the Scottish game, some of whom would stay, in time playing for the Scottish national team, and others pass through and onward taking what they knew and loved across the World.