The Men Who Made Argentine Football

It is a list, in date-of-birth order only for convenience, that, if, like me, you know the history of early Argentine football, did not take long to compile. There are fifteen names in all, all Scots, be it native-born or Diasporan and they are the ones, as players, administrators and enthusiasts, who created Argentine football and passed on their legacy to that whole football-crazy country. It began with Alex Watson Hutton. It provided brains and organisation. Then, through Sir Thomas Lipton, a man who in his youth might well have played fitba on Glasgow Green, it added the spice of competition for a trophy. And it also, in the form of the sons of Scots or Scots-Irish, supplied the limbs, the feet, the sinew and the skill to demonstrate, to plant the notion of playing in the minds of the vast numbers of equally first-generation sons of mainly Spanish and Italian immigrants, their fathers knowing nothing of the game, who took to it like, well, Scots and have never looked back.