Is it possible that Brazilian art football or the “beautiful game”, a popular expression abroad, was created by a Scottish engineer?
Plaque at the Scottish Football Museum, inside Glasgow’s Hampden Park stadium, pays tribute to the man who was a pioneer for the five-time world champion country.
“My grandfather is in the history books of Brazilian football”, says Malcolm McLean.
He refers to Archie McLean (1894-1971), an employee of the textile company J&P Coates, sent to Brazil in 1912 to supervise employees at the factory in Rio de Janeiro. The plan was for it to remain between four and six months. He stayed 40 years.
When assembling an immigrant team, the Scottish Wanderers, they introduced a style of short touches at speed and movements to occupy empty spaces. This would be the DNA, pride of national football for the following decades.
McLean is also credited with creating the table. If he is not a pioneer in the position, he was one of the first wingers to play in the country. In his homeland, he was a “winger”.
Grandson Malcolm traveled to Brazil for the start of this year’s World Cup. This Wednesday (24), the two teams face each other in Miami, in the final round of the group stage.
The last time the Brazilian team did not finish in first place in their group was in 1978. Scotland needs to at least draw to guarantee an unprecedented qualification for the knockout stage.
It will be the fifth clash between them in the tournament. The South Americans are undefeated. They tied in 1974. They won in 1982, 1990 and 1998.
Different from Charles Miller
McLean can be seen as the father of the “beautiful game” because he made popular a style different from that brought by Charles Miller, the “inventor” of football in Brazil. He presented the English way he learned in Southampton, of kicks, in which everyone ran to where the ball was.
It was a reflection of what was happening, at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, in a United Kingdom that dominated sport. In England, football was a version of rugby, where you kicked away and ran. The principle was to keep the ball as far from your goal as possible.
In the first friendly between national teams, played in 1872, the Scottish, smaller and less physical, nullified the English with hitherto unimaginable short passes.
It was the legacy of the country’s main team, Queen’s Park, which came to be called, in more recent times, Barcelona in the 19th century.
McLean had experience. He had played for Ayr United and St Johnstone, first division teams, before heading to Brazil and earning, because of his quick and elegant manner on the field, the nickname “veadinho”.
“There were great players [no Brasil]but they were terribly undisciplined. The style would not have been tolerated in Scotland. In the middle of the match, two players were trying to see who could kick the ball higher. I ended that”, said McLean, in a statement published in 2002 in the book “Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life”, by Alex Bellos.
“He was an artist, an exponent of Scottish football”, defined the Italian journalist based in Brazil, Thomaz Mazzoni, in the 1950s.
McLean’s contribution to the beauty of the Brazilian game may be overvalued, authors believe. One of them, Bellos himself.
“Brazil only developed its style of football in the 1930s, and I think one of the reasons was the arrival of some very good British players. It’s plausible that McLean showed a new way of doing things and may have influenced Brazilian football, but I’m not sure we can call him the father of anything,” he countered to Edinburgh daily The Scotsman.
Even after retiring and returning to Scotland, McLean traveled to Brazil several times. It was a time when his contribution was unknown to most.
He died anonymously in 1971 of throat cancer. He was 77 years old.
