Have you ever wanted to know if your town is punching above its weight with international footballers? Do you want to put an official number on exactly how great your city’s players are? Are you interested in when your region’s greatest international football glory days were? Or have you maybe been looking for ammunition to indicate that the SFA has had a west coast bias?
I got so curious about this sort of thing that I wheeled out a big spreadsheet and crunched the where-Scotland-players-were-born numbers. And here’s what I found out…
A game of numbers
Let’s start with one big headline figure: Glasgow has provided a whopping 28% of Scotland caps, even though it (currently) has just 11.5% of the Scottish population. But before I treat you to more facts – and explore them in more detail – here’s some of my methodology.
The numbers that I crunched are from October 2024. My main sources of info on caps and dates are the official SFA site and Wikipedia. And to find out where players are from, I used Wikipedia and various other sources (online, and sometimes players’ biographies) when more detail was needed because, for example, I’m interested in which town players initially lived in, rather than the location of the hospital where they were born. For simplicity and consistency, I stuck to where players spent their initial years, rather than the bulk of their childhood (so, for example, Scott Brown comes from Dunfermline, rather than a few miles away in Hill of Beath). This extends to players who were born abroad but grew up in Scotland (sorry Wishaw, but I’m letting the Isle of Man take credit for Kieran Tierney).
I’ve only included players with four or more caps, to avoid doubling the research for minimal benefit. I’ve counted substitute appearances as equal to players who’ve played a full 90 minutes. This simply increases our data set, which in turn makes our results more statistically significant, while there’s no reason to suspect that including those figures would give anywhere any unfair advantages or disadvantages.
Unless otherwise stated, my percentages are a percentage of Scottish-born players (i.e. not a percentage of Scotland players including those born in England or abroad) because this allows direct comparison with regions’ percentages of the Scottish population. While we’re on that subject, in case you’re wondering, 7.1% of Scotland caps have gone to players from England, and 2.3% for those born abroad, and the recent figures are significantly higher than that, at a combined 26% in this decade so far.
And this exercise is purely focused on the men’s team. There’s surely another valuable analysis of the women’s team to be done, which may throw up significantly different results.
It’s not just a Glasgow story
So we already have the stats to show that Glaswegians are pretty handy on the pitch – and, of course, that’s without even considering Glaswegian footballers who’ve played for Ireland, like James McCarthy, Tommy Coyne and Ray Houghton.
What are the rest of our instant gratification simple headlines? Who else should be feeling good about themselves?
Stirlingshire (including Falkirk), Ayrshire and Lanarkshire are all overrepresented. Stirlingshire does best, with a headline figure of 6% of caps, compared to a current 4.6% share of the population; followed by Ayrshire, with equivalent figures of 8.2% of caps and 6.7% of the population; with 13.8% compared to 12.3% for Lanarkshire.
Edinburgh has….
This is a preview of Mark Poole’s full article, published in Issue 35 of Nutmeg. Read in full to find out about:
- Glasgow’s overrepresentation
- Ayrshire’s early dominance
- Stirlingshire’s 1940s boom
- Edinburgh’s consistent overperformance
- Lanarkshire’s footballing strength
- Renfrewshire’s underperformance
- Dundee and Aberdeen’s mixed fortunes
- The goalkeeping hotspots
- West vs. East Coast bias analysed
- Rural and Highland underrepresentation
You can order your copy now, or take out a subscription to also gain full access to Nutmeg’s entire back catalogue.