Today's Southampton F.C. began in 1885 as the team of the then town's main Anglican Church. It is therefore unlikely to have had much in the way of Scottish influence. It's main claims to fame in the early days were that Charles Miller, at school in the town and later to be one of the founders football in Brazil played for it before returning to Sao Paulo in 1894 and even from the Southern League it twice reached the FA Cup final. The first occasion was in 1900 by when it had imported three Scots but, but with a centre-half who was not up to it, was beaten 4-0 by Bury with its four. Jasper McLuckie, from Glasgow, the Bury centre-forward, scored a brace within the first twenty-three minutes. The second time was in 1902 and a much narrower affair only won this time by Sheffield United by the best of three and after a replay.

However, the repeated mention of Scots at the turn of the century is because almost a decade before St. Mary's Y.M.A., the original name of Southampton F.C., existed round-ball football had already been introduced into what was until then an oval-ball preserve. And it was done through the Southampton Rangers club founded in 1878 and based on the Oswald, Mordaunt & Co. shipyard at Woolston, a short way down the Itchen. The company had been opened in 1876 by a shipbuilder originally from Sunderland and is said to have recruited workers from "the north of England and Scotland who had previously played football in their home towns".

However, the problem with that statement is that in the ship-building towns of England's north-east there was at the time little or no football. Middlesbrough F.C. had only just been founded in 1876, Newcastle East End would not be formed until 1881, West End a year later and Sunderland A.F.C. in 1879. Moreover the working men of the English North-West were weavers not riveters and platers. Furthermore, writing in 1936, William Pickford, who had helped found the Hampshire F.A. in 1887 before going on to become president of The Football Association, said:

"The effect of this galaxy of Scotsmen on the game in Hampshire was electrifying. Up to then, few local people knew anything about the fine points of the game, and the public troubled little about it as a spectacle. The opening of the Woolston Shipyard turned Southampton into an association (football) hot-bed, and it woke up with a start."

He makes no reference to English but firmly the places the arrival of the game with Scots, and this time with historical back-up. Football in the ship-building centres North of the Border, like Glasgow, of course, but also Dumbarton, was already established. Footballers also working in the yards already existed and at the highest level of the game. J.J. Lang, of Clydesdale, Third Lanark and already Scotland was the most obvious example, before in that same year, 1878, he became one the three World's first professional players.

But here there was a problem. It was known where Southampton Rangers and its later renaming, Woolston Works F.C., initially played its games - on Southampton Common - and later at the Antelope Ground in St. Mary's. Yet there was little or no insight into the make-up of the teams; so much for local football historians. But a simple search of the local papers of the time rapidly reveals results. In a game reported on 22nd November 1879 in the Southampton Times and and Hampshire Advertiser Southampton "Rangers" played a new club, Ringwood "Hornets" only established that very year. The Hornets team was Russell in goal, Head and Sidford the half-backs, Chilcott and Tilly the backs and Kingsbury, Roop, Smith Ayles Tuck and Waters the forwards. As for the Rangers it was Brown, Grey and Mackay, Phillips and McCann, Gilchrist, Robertson, Kelly, Cameron, Pacey and McLean. The names speak for themselves. A number of them, Scottish-born, can be seen, probably, living in the St. Mary's area in the 1881 census. Both teams played the Scottish 2-2-6 and the Rangers won 7-0. And the following year in a fixture in Basingstoke against the Mechanical Engineers the line-up would be Pratt, Annan and McCann, Woods and Shearer, Pacey, Cameron, Frost, Wayman, Hunter and Brown, somewhat diluted but still with a Scots core. Rangers won 1-0 with, the game by now on its way to implantation amongst the local population and nearby towns too and with the Woolston club surviving until dissolution in 1889, when, quite simply, the yard, on which it was based, closed.