Entry by Sanjana Chowdhury
Football has been whitewashed as an English game created by white Britons in the 19th century. But one of the major influences on football as we know it was Andrew Watson, a Black footballer who played for Scotland in the 1880s. Watson was born in Georgetown, Demerara, in British Guiana in 1856. His mother, Anna Rose, was a freed Black woman, and his father was a white Scottish solicitor and sugar planter. His family was also related to John Gladstone (father of William Gladstone), one of the largest British slave owners. Mark Al Nasir, Liverpudlian poet and a descendant of Watson, says: “This is a guy who lived the life of privilege. He had a Prime Minister for a cousin and his family owned a bank.” Descended from both enslaved and enslavers, Andrew Watson became the most important figure in 19th-century Scottish football when he moved to Glasgow in 1875.
Watson studied at Glasgow University, and played for the leading Glasgow club, Parkgrove FC. Later, he went on to play for Queen’s Park. He was the captain of the Scottish team that defeated England 6-1 at The Oval in March 1881. He again led his team to victory in the next two matches – 5-1 against Wales in Wrexham, and 5-1 against England at Glasgow. Watson was the pioneer of the Scottish “passing and running” game that was superior to and eventually replaced the English “individual dribbling” game. He was also the club secretary, an administrator, and a financial investor of Queen’s Park, as well as the player who won three Scottish Cups, in 1881, 1882, and 1886. After he retired from football, he became a maritime engineer. Richard McBrearty, curator at the Scottish Football Museum, states that Watson was “a champion of football, not just for his playing prowess but as a black man playing what was basically a white game at that time.” Llew Walker’s 2021 book A Straggling Life explores the life of Andrew Watson, the world’s first Black international footballer.
Sources
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/58841184
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-57520338