Each year and interestingly for every season since 1935, so for almost a century, the oldest youth soccer trophy in America has been presented. It is the James P. McGuire Cup, awarded the under-19 national champion and is named for a man, who was President of the American Soccer League, twice President of the USFA, for twenty years until his death in New York in 1974 on the FIFA World Cup Organising Committee and already in 1951 had been inducted into the US National Soccer Hall of Fame.

So who was James McGuire? The first and obvious answer, given the modus of this site is that he was a Scot, an Edinburgh-born Scot and one who from a young age showed his footballing prowess. At sixteen he is said by American sources to have been a Scottish Youth internationalist. Except that he wasn't and for two obvious reasons. He had been born , not as elsewhere reported in 1911, but on twenty-seventh April 1910 so would have just turn sixteen in 1926 and on 10th May that same year after a week's crossing from Glasgow he, his mother, two brothers and a sister landed in New York, there to join another brother, who had emigrated a year earlier and their father, an engine-fitter, who had already made the crossing in 1923.

But that is not to say that James had not represented the country of his birth and at football. In 1924, whilst at Leith Academy, so aged thirteen, perhaps fourteen, he had been in the Scottish Schools' FA squad of thirteen to have played the boys of the other Home Nations. And as such he was clearly a young player of some talent, a wing-half, centre-half or a full-back, and that did not go un-noticed in his new home. At nineteen he was turning out for Brooklyn Wanderers and would do so eighty-two times, a regular, over the next two seasons.

That is until in 1931 Celtic toured, he was spotted, working officially as a Cement Finisher, signed for the Glasgow club and crossed the water. However, the return to Scotland did not work out. He played not a game for the Bhoys but did not return to the States, except to visit. Instead in 1932 he took himself South to spend four seasons at Northampton Town in the middle of the English Third Division South. That is until injury is said to forced him to step down. But he did not step away. Instead in the summer of 1936 he returned to New York, there marrying a lass, Mary Wilson, from Grangemouth, whose family had emigrated when she was five. They were to have two daughters. And he also joined and captained the new club, Brooklyn St. Mary's Celtic, taking them to the 1938 National Challenge Cup final.

However, it was at that point, and aged still only twenty-eight, he finally hung up his boots to turn to football administration, which would in 1947 lead him to national and by the mid-fifties to international prominence. Indeed on his death at sixty-four in 1974, just seven years after what might be regarded as the revival of professional soccer in the US with the inauguration of North American Soccer League and months before Pele joined the New York Cosmos, the he was still in harness, as President for the second time of the USFA.

James McGuire, James Paxton McGuire, a Scot, in fact a Scots-Irishman born within sight of Easter Road and faithful to football all his life, is buried in New York's Cemetery of the Holy Rood.