Andrew Watson: The 'most influential' black footballer for decades lost to history

[Animous]

There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele.

Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised.

Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons.

And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one.

His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many different emotions: awe, pride, passion, and for one man in particular, discomfort.

When Watson moved to Glasgow in 1875, aged 18, he had hardly played football.

It was a time before professionalism, when the sport was still evolving and a single set of rules was yet to be universally adopted.

Within six years he'd established himself as one of the most talented and well-respected players, a trailblazer who helped popularise the Scottish 'passing and running' game - an early step in football's evolution towards what we recognise today.

Watson twice played against England, and on each occasion Scotland were convincing winners. The second victory, 5-1 at the original Hampden Park, was a pivotal result that convinced the English Football Association its approach needed to change.

They turned to Watson to show them the way as a new elite amateur team was formed; Corinthian FC would later be credited with popularising football around the world. Watson, a public school educated player who would have spoken with the upper class accent of his new team-mates, was among the first recruits.

He assumed the role of 'Scotch Professor' and taught his English peers - both at Corinthian and numerous other clubs and representative sides - "the science" of a more dynamic passing style.

He is seen as a conduit who helped modernise football during a period of great upheaval that signalled the "death" of the "individual, dribbling game" - characterised by a single player running with the ball at his feet surrounded by eight forwards - that had been favoured by the English.

"Pele was a genius footballer, but there are thousands of genius footballers whose influence dies with them the second they retire," says Ged O'Brien, founder of the Scottish Football Museum.

"You can look at any game of football being played anywhere in the world - by any person of any gender or ethnicity or culture - and the ghost of Andrew Watson will be looking down on you, because they are playing his game.

"Watson is the most influential black footballer of all time. There is nobody that comes close."

Watson (fourth from right in back row), with the Scotland team that beat England 5-1 in 1882

During his lifetime, Watson's influence was felt across the game. He was a captain, a national cup winner, an administrator, investor and match official, each achievement and contribution made as the first black man to do so.

Historians, researchers and academics have worked hard to bring his legacy to light. But unravelling his personal story has presented a different challenge.

Watson was born in 1856, in Georgetown, Demerara, a colonial trading post established by the Dutch, captured by the French, then re-named by British rulers who imported slaves from Africa to work on its plantations. Now it's the capital of Guyana - which has been a republic since 1970, four years after it declared independence from Britain. It borders Suriname, Venezuela and Brazil.

Watson moved to Britain aged around two. He was educated at some of the finest schools in England. His family boasted significant wealth and powerful family connections.

Liverpudlian poet Mark Al Nasir spent years researching Watson's background. After first "seeing himself" in images of a 19th-century footballer broadcast on a BBC TV documentary in 2002, he traced his own ancestry back to Watson's in Guyana.

"I saw a black guy from Guyana who was the world's first black footballer, who looked like me and has our family name. I thought: 'We have to be related,'" says Al Nasir, who changed his name from Mark Watson when he converted to Islam.

'Searching for my slave roots'

"I grew up to feel worthless, that I was nobody, that I was from nothing. There was nothing to give me pride or dignity in being black. So seeing someone like him, one of the very architects of the game, I needed to find out what our connection might be.

"I was looking for a sense of black pride, something in my history to be proud of."

What Al Nasir found were ancestors who were both slaves and slave traders.

"The blood of both courses through my veins and that is a dilemma that I have to reconcile within my own soul," he says.

"And Andrew Watson's family consisted of both."

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