A young Scottish footballer, largely unknown beyond ancient chroniclers of the beautiful game, will step from the pages of history later this month and claim his rightful place in the sport’s rise to global popularity. Fergus Suter, a Glaswegian now regarded as the first full-time professional, will feature prominently in The English Game, a six-part Netflix series written by Downton Abbey creator, Julian Fellowes.
However, while there is delight that Suter is finally being introduced to a wider audience, there is also consternation north of the border at the show’s chosen title. “Perhaps this series really ought to be called ‘The Scottish Game’,” suggested Richard McBrearty, chief curator at the Scottish Football Museum, pointing out that Suter was one of several talented Scottish footballers from this era who lit up English football.
“These young players from Scotland’s working-class communities were in heavy demand by the major northern English clubs who were beginning to gain prominence south of the border,” he said. “The game was still fiercely amateur, but all manner of inducements would be offered to lure them out of their communities and into English football. Seven members of the all-conquering Preston North End side – the first team to win the English league and cup double in 1888-89 – were Scottish.
“They’d be given good jobs, decent homes, but it was all to ensure they turned out in the colours of Blackburn or Preston and the other great northern and Midlands clubs in England.”
These early footballers, who included Suter – who played for Partick in Glasgow’s West End before moving south to join Darwen in 1878 and Blackburn Rovers in 1880 – were known as “the Scotch Professors” in tribute to the sophisticated way they played. They were largely responsible for introducing a fast-moving, passing strategy to English football, making it more attractive to spectators, and owners who began to see its commercial potential.
“In its earliest years football in England was popular among the country’s elite, who favoured individual dribbling skills over teamwork,” said McBrearty. “This was reflected in the names of early FA Cup winners like Oxford University, Old Etonians and Old Carthusians. Their players were physically much bigger than the Scots they faced in the first internationals between both countries. Thus, the Scots had to evolve a quick-passing, team game to combat their larger opponents.”
As well as exploring the origins of modern football in north England, The English Game will track how it rapidly became the world’s most popular sport.
Fellowes said: “There’s this extraordinary anomaly that football, originally devised by public schoolboys at Eton, to be played by their own rules, becomes this game that dominates the world. As the game spread, it became less tenable that the Etonians could reserve football for themselves. The clubs that rose in the industrial Midlands and the north become the true representatives of the game.”
English clubs began sending agents north to entice these Scotch Professors, which didn’t go down well in their local communities. Word quickly spread whenever an English agent was snooping and often they’d be met by angry mobs and run back out of town.
Professor Sir Tom Devine, Scotland’s foremost historian, offers another insight into the nature of football in Scotland and why it produced so many talented players in the early days. “Football in Scotland became the working man’s game par excellence from the 1880s,” he said. “It was born out of the booming but impoverished industrial communities of the Victorian era. The Saturday matches offered a brief and thrilling escape from the unrelenting and monotonous demands of labour in the mines, factories, shipbuilding yards and steel mills. By 1900 football had become a national craze and it was reckoned one in four men in central Scotland aged 15 to 29 in that year belonged to a club.”
For a tiny elite of players with magic in their feet, football also offered a route to fame and unimagined fortune.
