Imagine the situation today if two Scotsmen ran English football. Imagine the social media storm, the abuse, personal and racial, if, as inevitably they do at times, something went wrong; a match was lost, the lights went out, actually or figuratively, or the Bovril wasn't hot enough. But between 1890 and 1911 that was precisely how it was. The game or at the very least two fifths of the World game were in the absolute control of two men so different in background it makes it difficult to conceive they were branches cut from the same tree, the same Scots pine.
One branch, one man was William McGregor. He was a village boy from rural Perthshire, who began as a draper and became a Knight of the Realm. There was only acquired privilege there. The other was born into it. He was Arthur, 11th Lord Kinnaird. Kinnaird itself seems wee blip of a place on the hills above Blair Atholl. Blink as you drive through and you've missed it. Keep your eyes open and the views are superb. But Arthur Kinnaird was not born there, nor on the family estate at Rossie Priory, Inchture, halfway between Dundee and Perth, a town for which his father was twice the MP. No, he had been in London. The year was 1847. William McGregor had been born just ten months earlier. They were almost exactly the same age and they even looked similar, in their later years sporting, as was the fashion, substantial beards.
Kinnaird's father, the 10th Lord, also Arthur, was a banker, the managing partner of Ransome & Bouverie, which in 1888, the year after his death merged with Barclay, Bevan, Tritton and Co to form Barclay, Bevan, Tritton, Ransom, Bouverie and Co. or put more succinctly what we now know as Barclays Bank, of which Arthur Kinnaird would be a director until his death. So there was no question the Kinnairds were both wealthy and powerful but they did retain their Scottish religious roots at least. The 10th Lord was President of the National Bible Society of Scotland, the 11th the Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. But then they also kept their fine London addresses, the father on Pall Mall East, the son on South Audley St.
So how did Arthur Kinnaird, the 11th Lord, come to football. The answer is through education, education. He went to Cheam School, then Eton and Cambridge. Everything about his background of wealth and privilege, of education and milieu should have signalled urbane but somehow he was, well, not so much a scientific pugilist but a bit of a bar-room bruiser with fists not necessarily hitting the best targets. Whereas McGregor was largely consensual, Kinnaird was not.
From early on Kinnaird had shown himself to be a fine sportsman. At Eton he was a runner. He won an international canoe race in 1867 at the Paris Exhibition and then at Cambridge was a swimming and fives champion and won two tennis blues, after which he seems to have turned much of his attention to football. As a player he was known for a rough approach. A story is that his wife, fearing his return from a game with a broken leg, received the reply from a friend of his,
"You must not worry, madam. If he does, it will not be his own."
He began his playing career in 1866 at nineteen, just three years after the foundation of the English FA, joining its governing committee just two years later in 1868. In 1870 and 1871 he took the field in the second and third unofficial internationals against England as a member both of the Old Etonians and The Wanderers. He won his one proper cap in 1873 playing for Scotland in the second official international in London, having been said to have previously played so forcefully against Charles Alcock and Morton Peto Betts that they could not take their places in the English team. Certainly Betts cried off but Alcock, the Secretary of the FA, would probably not have been selected. Anyway Scotland still lost the match largely, it is said, because the individualistic style of the three London-based, Scottish players did not blend with the teamwork of the other eight from Queen's Park. Nevertheless for Kinnaird there would be compensation. Three weeks later The Wanderers won the FA Cup, beating Oxford University, with Kinnaird one of two Scots on the pitch. He was, however, not the first Scot to play in the competition. The previous year, in the first ever final, there had been four, all military men, Royal Engineers.
Kinnaird was, still with The Wanderers, again to win the Cup in 1877 and 1878, then with Old Etonians in 1879 and 1882 and also finish as a losing finalist in 1875, 1876, 1881 and, at the age thirty-six, 1883. In other words he was a finalist in eight of nine years. It is measure of how good a player he was but also how narrow was the footballing base still particularly in England. And in the meantime in 1877 he had become FA Treasurer and was officiating. Games would have two umpires, one from each team, both on the field and a third “referee” as arbiter on the side-line. In 1879, as the umpire representing England at that year’s England-Scotland international, he became embroiled in controversy, not the first or the last time. Scotland, 2:4 up in London thought it had scored a fifth. The Scottish umpire, no less than Mr. Colquhoun, the Vice-President of the SFA agreed but Kinnaird called it off-side. A melee followed and the referee (from England), disallowed the attempt. Scotland, upset, even angry, lost concentration. England profited, scoring three more without reply and took the match 5:4.
It would be the only victory England would have in almost a decade and a half. Kinnaird did not umpire or referee an international match again. However, he continued with the FA, succeeding Francis Marindin as President in 1890, Marindin resigning over the encroachment of professionalism, not least from the Football League, after its formation in 1888 at the suggestion of William McGregor.
Like Marandin Kinnaird is also said to have opposed professionalism. But for him it was clearly not a resigning matter. Pragmatically he would accommodate it through the first decade of his presidency, the last of the 19th Century, until, in Britain at least, it was insupplantable. And at least for the first five years of his term England also enjoyed good results by to an extent adhering to the rules of eligibility of national selection rather than the ethics. In 1887 the International Football Association Board, set up the previous year to settle disputes between the four footballing associations of the four Home Nations had ruled that players born in the Empire could not just play for England as had been the case but could choose the country of their fathers' birth. What it certainly did not do was agreed that the Home Nations were part of the empire and insist on the same eligibility rules for each of them. For Scotland it was residence and birth. For Wales it was either/or. For Ireland it was residence. For England it was birth and England both continued to take full advantage, now able to choose from amateurs and professionals, and seemingly be very insistent on the other countries sticking to theirs. It meant from 1888 England for the thirty years used players, who otherwise might have chosen in one case to continue with Ireland or to play for Scotland. Results improved remarkably and it would take almost a decade for Scotland first to organise its own league, then go professional, catch up and overtake.
It was then possible that Kinnaird might have turned his "leg-breaking" potential administratively fully against the Scots once more but he had by then had another fish to fry, internationalism. In 1902 the Dutch suggested an international competition, played to uniform rules recognised by all participants. It was a novel suggestion although there had been individual, international matches. The USA and Canada had first played each other in 1885. 1888 saw a Canadian XI, managed by Scots-born,
David Forsyth, and including several Diasporan Scots tour Britain. In 1891 England had played a North American eleven, which included at least two Diasporan Scots. 1899 saw an England eleven on tour to Germany and then Bohemia, there playing a team drawn from Prague and Vienna. The 1900 Olympics in Paris included football for the first and Germany came to England in 1901, the same year Argentina and Uruguay began their rivalry.
As a proposal the Dutch suggestion was perhaps premature but not by much. The first European, international game not including a Home Nation, a 3:3 draw between Belgium and France, took place in 1904, although Austria and Hungary, both parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had faced each other in 1902. And it was from this first Continental European game that FIFA, the Federation International de Football Association, can be said to have emerged. It was founded just three weeks after it on 21st May 1904, not as FIFA itself now maintains as a reaction to a growing number of Continental international games, of which there had clearly been just one, but more in anticipation of such games becoming more frequent. In 1905 two more followed, between Belgium and The Netherlands and Switzerland and France. Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Austria played their first in 1908, Italy in 1910, Finland in 1911 and Russia in 1912.
FIFA’s original members were France, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Madrid F.C., representing Spain. Germany joined by telegram later on the day of its foundation, which took place in Paris but there was no British participation. Prior to its creation Kinnaird’s Football Association in London had been invited to be the lead member of an international football association of some sort but havered sending the following reply to the French approach.
“The Council of the Football Association cannot see the advantages of such a Federation, but on all matters upon which joint action was desirable they would be prepared to confer”.
It was clear that Kinnaird's fundamental conservatism and with it lack of vision had surfaced with regard not to money, which he understood all too well, but to footballing foreigners. Had it been otherwise the organisation might have been, indeed, might still be, based in London. Instead, its offices, now in Switzerland, were originally at those of the Union Francaises de Sport Athletiques, again in Paris, with Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the Olympic movement, an early force in their creation.
However, with FIFA in place within two years of its foundation Kinnaird and the FA had back-tracked on their original stance. It ‘formally approved’ the existence of the new body, i.e. joined, and sent a powerful delegation to a FIFA conference in Berne, where in 1906 at the first time of asking the Lancastrian, Daniel Woolfall, was elected its second president. Yet even with Woolfall in place, or perhaps with him there the English FA, that is Kinnaird, continued to behave cavalierly or thoughtlessly without considering long-term consequences. In June 1908 England embarked on its first, official foreign summer tour. Two games were played against Austria, one against Hungary and a fourth was scheduled against Bohemia. Austria objected on the grounds that Bohemia was not a country. England carried on regardless and Austria did not forget. It began a campaign, supported by Germany, to prevent Scotland, Ireland and Wales joining FIFA, on the grounds that they were not countries but simply parts of England, a campaign that was not halted but perhaps eased by England making the same summer tour the following year pointedly without a Bohemia fixture.
Scotland and Wales were finally able to join FIFA in 1910, Ireland in 1911 but friction still remained. It surfaced again at the end of the Great War, when an objection was lodged against Austria and Germany's memberships basically on the grounds that they had lost. It was foolish in the extreme and was rejected by the FIFA membership. The response from the Home Nations was to hand their memberships back. It would not have happened without England, therefore Kinnaird, being part of it. And, of course, it back-fired spectacularly, in the end producing the reverse of what had been wanted – Germany continued to play an active and important role in the increasingly large World of football, from which by withdrawal the Home Nations were excluded.
That is not to say that the Scottish FA was not equally foolish. It was led when it could have made its own way, its own decisions. It is perhaps the one great failure of the presidency of Tom White and the otherwise very enlightened one of Peter Campbell during the fourteen years until 1933 that Scotland did not formally rejoin the World football organisation independently in spite of having the opportunity. And in fact it was Scottish football, Scottish clubs and eventually Scotland that would suffer the worst of the consequences. Firstly, whereas , England, after a short stand-off, continued to play the occasional non-British international team, starting with Belgium in 1921 Scotland only met its first such opponent in 1929, Wales in 1939 and Northern Ireland, for whom isolation was total, not until 1957. In addition there were no Olympics until 1936 and no World Cup until 1950. Meanwhile with the development of soccer in America the the 1920s and the outflow of talent across the Atlantic there was no no mechanism to enforce the payment to clubs of transfer fees. And finally when English clubs in 1931 decided not to allow the release of non-English, i.e. mostly Scottish players, and the English FA failed to help there was again no arbiter.
However, not all of this, or at least not all the failure to provide solutions, can be put at the door of Kinnaird. He died in 1923 at the age of seventy-five still in office. Charles Clegg took over and moves were begun almost immediately for England to rejoin FIFA only for them to flounder on the rocks of his personal bete-noire, shamateurism, and its place at the 1928 Olympics. Prior to them a not unreasonable Swiss proposal had been accepted to allow payment of players for time taken off work to participate. Clegg objected, would again not accept a lost majority decision and did his own Kinnaird. England once more emptied its parm of toys, which not only included its own but sadly by association most of Scotland's too. Only the possibility of international games, if unofficial ones, against chosen FIFA opposition remained and it was, as Kinnaird's shadow faded, seized with alacrity, if some thirty years later than might have been the case, if, for example, fate, specifically between 1904 and 1911, had seen William Macgregor in his shoes.