Paulistano
The story that is told of football in Sao Paulo always begins with
Charles Miller. The square in front of the old Pacembu stadium where the city's wonderful football museum is housed is named after him and rightly so. He was and remains one of the three men responsible for the establishment of football in Brazil's second city, of whom the first of the other two is Casimiro da Costa. Although and importantly Swiss-educated, Switzerland being the first country outside Britain, where football found a home, da Costa was the teenage son, born in 1878, of an established Paulista family and thus would be the advocate for locals in the game, the first translator of the game's laws into Portuguese and the link with the then capital, Rio de Janeiro. And the third man responsible was Hans Nobling, from Hamburg, already a player there and the figurehead for the non-British but European players in the city.
Charles Miller was born in 1874 on the edge of Sao Paulo, a town then of perhaps 50,000, on the estate of his grandparents, Henry Fox and Harriet Rudge. That part of the story is straight forward. As to the rest of it there are anomalies. The story has been that he was the son of Scottish engineer and a Brazilian mother. That the father, John Miller, was Scots is undoubtedly true. He was born in the village of Fairlie just outside Largs, the son of Andrew Miller and Elizabeth Brown, who soon moved to settle in Greenock. It is also said that it was working as an engineer for the railways that took John Miller to Brazil in 1867. That is also true, at least to begin with. However, on his death certificate he was recorded as a “General Merchant”. However, that his mother, Carlota, Charlotte in English, was Brazilian is not completely true. She was certainly born in Brazil but into a British, an English merchant family, the Foxes. They had arrived two generations earlier, prospered become an integral part of a British community that was constantly being reinforced and reinvigorated by arrivals, not least more railwaymen but also merchants, bankers and others. Those others included in Sao Paulo two of John Miller's brothers, Peter and William, and a third, Andrew, in nearby in Santos, the fledgling city's port.
That four Miller brothers went to Brazil is also complicated. Their father, a humble porter, died in 1869. He drowned, aged 53, found by the town's steamboat quay. John was twenty-five, his brothers much younger, two under 10. The arrival of football in Sao Paulo is also more complicated than as first it seems. Charles Miller had been sent to school in England, to Southampton at the age of six. He returned for the final time in 1894. By then both his grandmother and his father were dead. She had died in Greenock in March 1886, signed off by her son, William. John presumably returned to Scotland on news of her death and deciding there to be operated for a hernia, himself died as a result of that operation in Glasgow in October that same year and is buried alongside his father, mother and other members of the Scottish family in Greenock cemetery.
It meant that at the age of twelve Charles had lost his father. Then his uncle William, who in Brazil had married Charles Miller's mother's cousin, would die in Sao Paulo in 1892 as would Charles's younger brother, John Henry. But in the meantime Charles's education at a school just outside Southampton would continue and it had to be paid for. In fact the truth is that the family was comfortable financially from Charles's mother's side. In their years in the city the Foxes had been heavily involved in business. They were also instrumental in the foundation of the British club and its sporting offshoot, the Sao Paulo Athletic Club (SPAC), which exists to this day and would also play a substantial part in the Paulistano football story.
There is no doubt that Charles Miller was a footballer of talent, as a youngster a winger. He was also a keen cricketer. He had arrived with John Henry at boarding school at the age of ten in 1884 and at a time when football was growing in strength even in a South of England that was slower to take to the game than the North. He was on the face of it very much a product of the English public-school system but had, like so many British South Americans, whose families prospered, came from a Scottish background that was much more humble.
Charles Miller would play regularly for his school, for Hampshire, occasionally for St. Mary's that would become Southampton F.C. and a couple of times for the elite amateur club, Corinthian, alongside C.B. Fry and the Anglo-Scot,
Gilbert Smith, both England internationals, when they were touring the area and were a player short. But the football he knew was the English game with its emphasis on long-ball and dribbling, and not the Scottish one.
There seems little doubt too that when the young, twenty-year old Miller returned from school for the final time and landed in 1894 at Santos to take the train the short distance to Sao Paulo he brought with him the most up-to-date football equipment, note not the FA rule-book but the Hampshire FA one, and a desire to continue playing the game. But his initial move was to join SPAC with the Brazilian summer on its way to play cricket. The club itself had been formed six years earlier. Amongst its founders were William Snape, William Speers, Percy Lupton and Charles Walker plus William Fox Rule, Charles Miller's cousin, and his late uncle, Peter Miller. It meant that when the young Miller suggested that the club might also play football he would be listened to as he was later when he suggested the laying of a pitch.
By April 1895 Miller was able to arrange the first organised game, played on the city's then edge on scrub-land at Varzea do Carmo between colleagues at the Sao Paulo Railway, where Miller was working, and employee's of the local Gas Company. Miller scored twice in a 4:2 victory for the railway-men. With the first game football had a foothold but it not explode. There were friendly games played in 1895 and 1896 at Chacara Dulley, a country-house estate then a mile or so outside Sao Paulo, a city that had doubled in size from the one that had seen Miller's birth. From 1892 the Chacara, the small estate, has been used by the members of SPAC for cricket and golf and its owner, the American, Charles Dulley, proved just as supportive of Charles Miller and his new football. Dulley, after all, was another of Miller's relatives, having also married a Fox, Ana Fox, his aunt, his mother Carlota's sister.
In 1898 the SPAC golfers acquired land to build their first dedicated course. At about the same time SPAC itself began the search for a site for a dedicated clubhouse and grounds nearer the city. They found the land in 1899, where they still are in Consolacao, a mile and half from the city-centre. It was leased initially for ten years by the owner, a lady, Sra. Prado, from an important Paulista family, whose son, Antonio, it is said, had got into political trouble and been forced to flee the country, helped by William Rule Fox. In 1899 that same Antonio Prado became Sao Paulo's mayor and would remain so for a decade. And it was there at Consolacao that, again with the promotion of Charles Miller, a dedicated football field was laid.
In the meantime both Nobling and Casimiro da Costa had arrived in and returned to Sao Paulo. The German had been born in 1877, arriving aged twenty in the city in 1897 having been a member of the SC Germania team in his native Hamburg. On arrival he organised a Sao Paulo Transport company team, which also played at first at Chacara Dulley and was instrumental in the initiative to form the first football club in his adopted city.
In fact two clubs at first based still at Chacara Dully would emerge when still in 1899 an international group of enthusiasts met together but failed to come to an agreement. Of the twenty there the five Germans including Nobling would form a club they would as per Hamburg name SC Germania, now Esporte Club Pinheiros, and the others, SC International, with which Casimiro da Costa on his return from Switzerland became associated.
Meanwhile in 1898 Charles Miller had left the Sao Paolo Railway and joined The London and Brazilian Bank. Friendly games continued to be played. Charles Miller scored a hat-trick, but not for his old employers, when in July 1898, as Mackenzie, from the city's American-founded, Presbyterian college also formed a team and joined in, the railway company took on his new outfit, none other than SPAC as plans were clearly afoot. 1899 would SPAC installed in its first and present purpose-built grounds. It would be Casimiro da Costa and Nobling, who in 1901 were instrumental in the foundation of the Sao Paulo Football League, the first league in Brazil, drawing together the original and newer-formed teams. It consisted of SPAC itself, International, Germania, Mackenzie College and a fifth, Paulistano, the Prado family team, drawn from Sao Paulo's established, Brazilian elite and formed in 1900. Casimiro da Costa would for the next three years be the league's first president. Sao Paulo football, unlike other cities in South America would never be under British stewardship. Nor would the Brazilian game as a whole. It would, however, be under Prado control, directly under Armando and Antonio from 1904 until 1908, and then again in 1913, 1914, 1924 and from 1926 to 1929.
Charles Miller's stay at the The London and Brazilian Bank was short-lived. In 1900 he left both to become the representative of the Royal Mail shipping-line and to join the Phoenix Insurance Co., managed by SPAC founder, Percy Lupton. That same year too the Prado family took the decision to allow what had been built as a not very successful cycling venue, the Velodromo, to be converted for football. And it was on its new pitch that in 1901 two games would be played by a Sao Paulo-select team against a Rio XI organised by Oscar Cox, Casimiro da Costa's acquaintance from school in Switzerland. The Rio team paid their own train fares to get there and both games were refereed by an Alex Lamont, probably the same one who had been founder and Secretary in Buenos Aires of the first two of that country's football leagues, who had moved from Argentina to Brazil and came up from Rio with the players.
The first Sao Paulo Football League game took place on 8th May 1902, Mackenzie beating Germania, 2-1. Nobiling was at left-back for the Germans. Casimiro da Costa was referee. Five days later SPAC played Paulistano at home. Charles Miller was SPAC's centre-forward. Casimiro da Costa was again referee. And in the third game, Germania versus Internacional, Casimiro da Costa was inside-right for the latter, Miller was referee and the trophy they were playing for was the Antonio Casimiro da Costa Cup. It would be won at the end of the season by Sao Paulo Athletic, by SPAC, playing 2.3.5, after a play-off against Paulistano and by the odd-goal in three. Charles Miller scored both SPAC goals and was the season's top scorer.
In 1903 the final result was almost the same as the previous year. It involved the same teams and a play-off, with SPAC interestingly playing not just the English 2.3.5 but at times the Scottish 2.2.6. Otherwise the only differences were that in the play-off Miller was not on the score-sheet and Casimiro da Costa had not played all season. In fact he refereed but did not play again. Only in 1904, when the league was joined by a sixth team, Palmeiras, which finished in last place, was there an outright winner. But it was still SPAC, Charles Miller, now aged thirty, again scored the winning and only goal and with his fellow SPAC player, Herbert Boyes, once more top scorer. In fact it was only in 1905 that SPAC for the first time did not win the league. It finished a poor fourth, losing more games than it won in spite of Charles Miller playing in every one. Instead the title went to Paulistano by a margin of five points and it was clear it and the other clubs were learning the game.
And the decline of SPAC on the football field continued the following year. In 1906 it would seemingly finish last, not winning a single game. Miller, now thirty-two and perhaps because that year he married Antoinette Rudge, a Brazilian-born pianist and relative of his grandmother, played just two games, once at left-back, once in goal and then might have left the sport forever. On the other hand it might simply have been shame. His last game would be a week after he had played at inside-right for a Sao Paulo XI against a visiting South African team. Sao Paulo had been roundly beaten, 6:0 and perhaps this and then a nine-nil club defeat at the hands of Internacional seven days later was enough, it is said, to have prompted Miller's resignation not just from it football committee but from SPAC itself. It would explain his non-appearance for the rest of the season.
However, the resignation was seemingly to be short-lived. SPAC's blushes would be somewhat saved when Palmeiras was accused of financial irregularity in one game and had all it points annulled. Having topped the league it was placed last and the trophy awarded to Germania. However, for all its problems on the field off the field SPAC was both flourishing and knew the right people. Antonio Prado was still the city's mayor and his family now had a strong interest in the success of football not just as a sport but as a business. After all it owned the Velodromo and it had become the city's major venue for the new and booming game. And it was prepared to sell SPAC the Consolacao grounds with, incidentally, the Prado legal representative in the sale another member of the Rudge family.
In 1907 Palmeiras with no points due to its misdemeanor had been demoted from the league. However, two new teams joined, Americano and a second Internacional, both from Santos. And an Internacional would take the league, the Sao Paulo Internacional not the Santos newcomer. SPAC was again in penultimate place. Miller played five games early in the season. He was joined in the team by J. E. Steward, who had arrived from playing in Argentina, then he travelled to Britain, having in the meantime been appointed Sao Paulo's British Consul and his first child, also called Charles, would be born. However, at the end of the season attention was on Paulistano in second, having climbed a place but more importantly in terms of the way the game was going having done it under the coaching of a
Jock Hamilton. He was a Scotsman, an ex-professional player in Britain, a centre-half with home-town Ayr and seven Football League clubs. He was the first professional trainer to be employed by a Brazilian club, coming in April for the summer from a Southern League Fulham that had just been awarded a place in the Football League and returning back to the English club in July. This whilst Germania was fourth but as, almost unnoticed, for a few games in May and June there was a non-German name on its team-sheet. It was MacLean, or rather, McLean,
Archie McLean. He was a twenty-three year-old, working-class Scotsman, a semi-professional footballer starting at Ayr F,C., who would move to Galston. He had been sent to Sao Paulo for the off-season months in Scotland to work in a new factory that had been opened the previous year in the city suburb of Ipiranga by his employers, Coats, the cotton thread makers based in his home town, Paisley. Ipiranga's football team had been founded by the company the same year.
Archie Mclean would play four games on the right wing for Germania and in the first not only was the opposition SPAC, with Charles Miller at centre forward, the referee was Jock Hamilton. How much of an impression he made in those four appearances is unknown. Perhaps not much. He scored no goals. But certainly Sao Paulo made an impression on him. Work done he would like Hamilton return for the start of the new football season at home but he would be back to make such an impact that he would become known as The Gazelle and The Little Deer for his size and speed of foot, pass and thought. He would also introduce a style of play to Brazil that would change its football forever; but not quite yet.
In 1908 for SPAC Charles Miller again began the season in goal. The following game he was back at centre-forward but just for two appearances. It was then back into goal and then out of the team and finally refereeing. The club again finished in penultimate place with only two games won all year, this while the Jock Hamilton effect even without him seems to have carried over from the previous season. Paulistano took top-spot, Americano second. However, from the British perspective the Internacional team from Santos was perhaps the most interesting. There the Cross brothers were joined by Mitchell. And in July the Argentinians came to town with a team that included five of the
Brown brothers. Seven games were played, three in Sao Paulo, three in Rio and one in Santos. The visitors drew the first against the city's foreigners including Miller and Steward and won the rest.
The new season, 1909, looked as if it might be a sort of repeat of 1907. There would not be a Jock Hamilton but there would be an
Alex D. Hutchison. It is said he was another Scot, brought to Brazil not this time by Paulistano but Americano and had had experience in the English First Division, possibly as a goalkeeper. However, the evidence is scanty. There is no sign of him as a player but there is of his possible arrival; a husband, wife and child in 1907; and of travel back and forth to and from Santos, with wife, Mary, and two children, in 1910, 1914, 1915, 1923 and 1932, variously described as a traffic manager, suggesting the railway, and a businessman but nothing to do with professional football.
And Hutchison's input did not seem to have much effect, at least not immediately. At the end of the season Americano had dropped a place, finishing third from last. However, SPAC did worse still, propping up the league and winning just a single game as a re-included Palmeiras topped it. The same club would also finish in first place the following year, 1910. SPAC would meanwhile improve to third, Charles Miller in the team mainly in goal until mid-season, this whilst Alex Hutchison was active as referee and Americano at the end of the season, as runner-up, one place but considerably above SPAC, would feature a second and different J. Hamilton.
The new Hamilton had played at inside-left for the first game in May. He would feature at centre-forward against SPAC in June, at left-wing versus Paulistano and in every other game that season. He had arrived in 1909, J. G. Hamilton, a young clerk once more from Scotland and he was noticed. The following season, 1911, he moved to SPAC, making a first appearance in the club's second game and would make an immediate difference. He scored in his first game, and in his third, fourth, fifth and seventh. SPAC would lose only one game all year and in November 1911 after a five year slump top the table. They finished four points above Americano, whilst at the other end of it Palmeiras after three games had simply dropped out.
In 1912 Palmeiras was replaced by a rejuvenated Mackenzie. It had also been recruiting. Steward had moved to it from SPAC and from Germania had come a certain Arthur Friedenreich, who would go on to become the first, great Black footballing star. In July in a 3-6 defeat by a visiting Argentinian XI including Charles Wilson, Harry Hayes and three of the Brown brothers he would lead the line in a Sao Paulo team without a single SPAC player. It clearly had something of a problem in fielding a team, never mind providing internationalists. Alex Hutchison was called in at left-back for a single fixture and towards the end of the season there was a potentially more permanent, new name on the team-sheet. Hamilton did not play in the third-to-last match. The forward-line was re-jigged. MacLean, a returned Archie McLean, once more sent out by Coats for the summer and now about to play in the Scottish Second Division with Johnstone came in on the left-wing, was then gone as Hamilton returned for the penultimate fixture before in the season's last game both Hamilton, who scored, and McLean were in the team together.
Yet it was to be brief partnership. The end of 1912 saw SPAC only fifth of seven in a division topped once more by Americano but not without controversy. It was the same argument that would occur not just in Brazil but also in Argentina and Uruguay, that is the question of shamateurism. Americano, having moved in its entirety from Santos to Sao Paulo was intent on consolidation. It had for the last six games of the season acquired two brothers, the Bertones. They were top players but there was a problem. They were Uruguayan, both coming from Montevideo Wanderers, the runners-up in the Uruguayan league in 1911. Not only that Juan Carlos Bertone had between 1906 and 1911 played eleven times for the Uruguayan national side and even captained it. And they were not in Brazil for sightseeing. They were professional players in all but name and they were at Americano more for remuneration than the love of the game.
The other teams reacted and in different ways. SPAC, already havering after the poor performances of recent years and some members' preference for rugby, simply dropped out of league football. Paulistano, Maclenzie and Palmeiras formed their own league, the Sao Paulo Athletic Sports Association (SPASA). The others stayed put, reinforced by two newly-formed teams, Corinthians and Santos. Santos FC, the team that was to be Pele's, was created in the vacuum left by the demise in 1910 of Internacional, Cross, Mitchell et al, and the move in 1911 of Americano to Sao Paulo. Corinthians was founded by a group of non-British railway workers, who with no railway club of their own had in 1910 watched a game played against a Sao Paulo XI with again Charles Miller involved plus Hamilton and Steward by a team visiting for the first time from England. It was the team Miller had himself played for more than fifteen years earlier, Corinthian. Inspired, the local men decided to form their own club and at the suggestion of Miller adopted the Corinthian name as their own.
The withdrawal of SPAC meant its players were at a loose end but for several of them it would not be for long. By the start of the 1913 season Americano had moved in to snap up both McLean and Hamilton, as Alex Hutchison and after a gap of several years Casimiro da Costa refereed. Hamilton scored in the first game. McLean hit a hat-trick in the second and a brace in the third. Yet by then Hamilton was already gone. After a single match he had moved on two games later and obviously with a better offer to reappear at Internacional just as McLean would be seemingly be injured or even dropped. He would miss two club games, while two Sao Paulo selections including in the first six of his team-mates would twice face a Chilean XI and lose both fixtures.
McLean's Americano return would be to face Hamilton and International, in a drawn game. The recall had perhaps been rushed for he was then out once more. This time his replacement was a new face, a 17 year-old Bill Hopkins. A clerk, he had arrived from England the previous year, following his father, who had been working in the city since 1908. And he clearly impressed. A week later in the last game of the season McLean and Hopkins were in the team together, at left-wing and inside-right respectively.
McLean and Hopkins were to form one of Brazilian football's most important combinations ever. But they would not do it at Americano. In the 1913-14 off-season there was considerable manoeuvring between the two rival leagues. SPASA, just three strong the previous year bought in additional teams that accepted, at least on the face of it, the amateur code. Ipiranga had crossed over from the Sao Paulo League and two new teams joined. One was Sao Bento, based on a school in the centre of the city. The other was Scottish Wanderers. It was a British team that had risen out of the ashes of SPAC, where some members, a number of Scots, were not interested in playing newly-adopted rugby. Of the team that took the field for Scottish Wanderer's first game of the new season seven had previously played for the British club's team before disbandment and they were joined by four others, including both McLean and Hopkins, at inside- and outside right respectively. Alex Hutchison was also involved. He would play in goal in five games between June and September, refereeing one match in the same period before he and his family travelled to Britain on leave. This was whilst the other Sao Paulo League lost all but two of its teams, Corinthians and Germania, of the casualties Americano, the previous year's champions, by far the most noticeable, it had simply imploded, and four new clubs had been found and brought in.
At the end of the 1914 season Corinthians would top the now weakened Sao Paulo League winning every game, scoring thirty-four goals and letting in eight. Meanwhile in July for the first time a combined Sao Paulo/Rio team again led by Friedenreich would take the field for the first time. It was in Rio, the opposition was Exeter City and Brazil would win 2:0. And it would be followed in September by three matches against visiting Argentinian XIs, two wins and a draw. Meanwhile Sao Bento had taken the 1914 SPASA league. Scottish Wanderers would finish in penultimate place but in two ways that are important. Firstly Bradfield, a long-time stalwart of SPAC and on leave in Britain, was replaced at centre-forward in the last two games by a Scott, probably John, the eldest of the sons of Glasgow-born
Thomas Scott, railway worker and founder of football teams in Sao Paulo State in Campinas and Jundiai, teams that exist to this day. Secondly, the style of the team's play, particularly the combination play of McLean and Hopkins had drawn attention and no little admiration.
It would bring them both selection for the Sao Paulo state team to play Rio de Janeiro and is said to be the origin of A Tablinha, the short-passing, interchanging style of football on the floor that from Sao Paulo would spread and eventually be transmitted throughout the country,although not by McLean and Hopkins. They, as non-Brazilians, would never play for the national team but others, who had taken the field alongside and against them would. It was a Scottish-based style that over the next fifty years would be recognised in Brazilian conditions of heat and hard pitches as superior to the more English, long-ball one initially adopted in Rio and result, after the disaster of 1950, in the World Cup victories of 1958 and 1962.
In 1915 the parallel leagues would continue. Scott would retain his forward place for the season. The returned Bradfield would slot in as right-half instead. Scottish Wanderers would again finish second from bottom but there would be problems off the field. It became clear that money was being paid to Wanderers players in contravention of amateur rules. From this distance in time it hardly seems surprising. Crowds were growing, up to 10,000 watching a game. They came to see McLean and Hopkins. Shamateurism was rife, not just in the alternative league, and had not Archie McLean been semi-professional in Scotland. There he had been used to having his weekly wage from Coats openly topped up his weekend activity on the pitch. Why should it be different in Brazil?
But different it was. At the very least discretion was in order. However, the Wanderers had clearly not been discrete enough. Envelopes of cash were seen to be exchanged. The league had to be seen to act. The club was punished, relegated in 1916 to the Second Division and eventually into dissolution. Some of players were, however, curiously unaffected. Any mention of Scott disappeared, a least for the moment, whilst McLean and Hopkins were perhaps considered too valuable at the gate. They were allowed simply to move club, to join Sao Bento, remain playing in the top division and take it to runners-up spot.
By then Brazil
had played abroad for the first time. The initial, official South American Championship was played in Argentina. It would be won by Uruguay, with Argentina second, Chile fourth and Brazil between them with two draws and defeat to the eventual champions. Yet there was to be measure of revenge. Brazil would on the way home win a friendly in Montevideo against a Uruguayan XI that would even include John Harley at centre-half. It was a precursor of the 1967 England-Scotland moment. As Scotland was said for a brief instant, just four weeks, to have been unofficial World Champions so Brazil, as whole not Rio and Sao Paulo as uncooperative entities, might have seen itself, if circuitously, as atop the South America tree.
Perhaps too this feeling of cooperation also permeated Sao Paulo football. Whether or not by the beginning of the 1917 season the two rival leagues had come together in a top division that included just eight of the total of twenty teams participating the previous year, all six from SPASA and just two, Corinthians and Internacional, from the old Sao Paulo League. Sao Bento fared less well in the new set-up, finishing third from last. Results were inconsistent perhaps at least in part explained by the absence on several occasions in the first half of the season of Bill Hopkins and his total absence, on leave, from July until the last game in October. Then in 1918 only McLean, now aged thirty-two, would play. There is no mention of Hopkins either at Sao Bento or any other club. However, the reason was simple. The twenty-two year old had been called up, travelling to his home-town, Portsmouth, to enlist. He would return in 1919 and back to Sao Bento but now he would not be alone. On 22nd June in the first game of the season the club would field a Hopkins on both wings, Bill on the left and on the right his brother, Fred. Three years younger Fred had in 1913, aged just fourteen and with all the rest of the family, three more brothers and two sisters plus their mother, joined his father and elder brother in Brazil. There presumably he had been playing his football at a lower level until at the age of eighteen he too had returned to Britain to enlist. Now back and at the age of twenty he was ready to step up and, as Bill seemed to drop out again in July, he played until September.
Meanwhile, Archie Mclean had too returned home, on leave. He would be back in Sao Paulo by mid-September and back also into the Sao Bento team. And in the background there had also been another development. A new club, F. C. Britannia, had been formed, playing at a lower level in the Amateur League. Nor was its timing coincidence. The end of the Great War saw the return of some of the British who had worked in Brazil and survived the conflict reinforced by new recruits. It was they who with the remnants of SPAC and Scottish Wanderers formed the constituency not of a “Scottish” but more a “British” club. And it became clear that there was a close relationship and movement between it and Sao Bento in both directions. Bill and Fred Hopkins may have decided to play for the new club at times and in Sao Bento's game on the 16th November alongside McLean was another player with a British name. The name was Scott, another of Thomas Scott's six boys.
The 1920 season would see McLean and the Hopkins boys in the Sao Bento team, although never all together and with McLean in goal for several games and Bill Hopkins dropping back into the half-backs. An era was clearly coming to an end. Indeed in 1921 none would play a game, yet Sao Bento would continue to introduce players. In September a Hamilton, perhaps stepping up from Britannia, perhaps even J.G. Hamilton, would make two successive appearances and a third in October at inside-right and in three of the last five games of the season at centre-forward once again there would be a Scott. And Scott at centre-forward and right-wing still for Sao Bento would be there once more in November and December 1922 as a Scott would also again be on the right-wing for a single game in October the following season and then would play in all but one of the games in 1924. Yet in 1925 there would not be a sign of one.
There was an explanation. The Scotts were back playing for Britannia, lifting the club to the level where in 1926 it accepted, as internecine war broke out in the game once more, an invitation to join the new rival to SPASA, the Amateur Football League. The first game was played on 9th June. There were three Scotts in the team plus Bradfield from Scottish Wanderers a decade earlier. However, it would prove insufficient. Britannia would finish bottom of the division at the end of the season and drop out. It seemed British presence in Sao Paulo football might after over thirty years be at an end but it was not to be, at least not quite yet.
In the second game of the 1927 season at inside-left and scoring twice now for Palmeiras was once more a Scott. He would play in six of nine fixtures that season and be top-scorer with six goals, The next season, 1928, it would be fifteen appearances in twenty-two but with less success. There would be just four goals, still a top scorer nevertheless, but in a team that would finishbottomof the table. Once more it seemed specifically Scots influence in the city's game had been snuffed out, yet again it proved not to be the case. Palmeiras was not relegated and, although no Scott played until the eighth game of the 1929 season, he then was back, played six games in a row but this time without a single goal before dropping out once more. Furthermore, there was more not Scottish but British presence too. In the club's sixth game of the season now at centre-half was Hopkins, whether Bill or Fred or even younger brothers, Harold or Leslie, now twenty-one and twenty respectively, is unknown.
At the end of that 1929 season Palmeiras would finish eighth of twelve, in the year Britannia was dissolved. Paulistano would be champions, winning fourteen of seventeen matches, yet, like SPAC a decade and a half earlier and with the same reservations about increasing professionalism but greater repercussions, it too decided to withdraw from football altogether. Its action precipitated the collapse of the Amateur Football League, leaving just one competition, which several of the clubs, now finding themselves fixture-less joined, but not Palmeiras, at least not directly. It and the footballers of Paulistano effectively amalgamated to form Sao Paulo FC, and it was the new club, which then also joined what was now the only show in town.
Sao Paulo FC played its first game on 16th March 1930, a 0:0 draw with Ipiranga. In its fifth game on the left-wing there was a Scott. In the sixth game he was there again and scored. He was there once more in the seventh and eighth games and then gone. Almost twenty years after the death of Thomas, their father, the last of the Scotts had kicked his final ball in top flight, Brazilian football but it was not quite the last of the last hurrahs. In 1938 in a confrontation that was redolent of the early, Brazilian game Sao Paulo Athletic Club played Rio Cricket and in the SPAC team were J. and R. McLean, Archie McLean's two sons, John and Robert, John born in Scotland in 1912 and Robert in Brazil in 1916.
Archie Mclean would remain in Sao Paulo a life-time member of SPAC until on retirement he finally returned to Scotland. In the meantime he and his family had travelled back and forth regularly every four years. They maintained a house in hometown Paisley and there he died in 1971 aged eighty-five. Charles Miller had died in Sao Paulo in 1953, having been a frequent traveller to and from Britain between the Wars and returning for the last time in 1950. Hans Nobiling died the following year still in Brazil but in Rio de Janeiro. Antonio Casimiro da Costa outlived them all. He died in 1973. Meanwhile Jock Hamilton had died in Keynsham between Bath and Bristol in 1931. Between 1910 and 1915 he had been the reserve team trainer of Bristol City and then its manager until 1919. Of Alex Hutchison nothing is known after 1932, when he and his wife, Mary, returned to Britain for seemingly the last time. The same applies to J.G. Hamilton, who may have stayed in Brazil for a single, four-year contact.
As for the Scotts most would remain in Brazil, travelling back and forth to Britain until after the Second World War. Only Colin also known as David would return to Scotland. Perhaps there are descendents in both countries. However, the Hopkins are more problematic. Their mother returned to England and died back in Hampshire in 1939. Of her two daughters, one married in Brazil in the 1930s, the other travelled from England to Brazil as late as 1928. Of the boys Leslie married in Brazil and remained, dying there in 1983, but of William and Fred, indeed Harold, there is little or nothing beyond their footballing days.