This article is part of The Athletic’s series celebrating UK Black History Month. You can find the full series here.
Outside a cafe in Shawlands, Glasgow, there is a badly damaged mural of Pele on the wall of a poorly-lit walkway.
Opposite the Brazilian great is another piece of artwork, completed three years ago — by graffiti artist and illustrator Barry the Cat — but the player is less well known, with locals either unaware of its existence or walking past oblivious to the picture, which now has been partially built over and has chairs and tables stacked against it.
But former Aston Villa and Rangers winger Mark Walters knows exactly who it is.
“I was speaking to a friend last week and they mentioned Walter Tull, Arthur Wharton and Jack Leslie as the first prominent Black footballers in Britain. I had to correct them,” he tells The Athletic.
A pioneer himself as one of few Black players to have played in Scottish football when he signed for Rangers in 1987, Walters knew that more than a hundred years before him there was a man called Andrew Watson — a standout defender in the world’s first pre-eminent club, Queen’s Park.
He joined the club in 1880 and, over the next decade, was revered while performing for several of the top clubs on both sides of the border. Just as they run parallel today in a Glasgow alley, Watson could be described as the Pele of the 19th century.
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Watson was not the first Black footballer. That was a team-mate of his, Robert Walker, but Watson had a storied career and smashed so many ceilings for Black players: the first international footballer, first international captain, first to hold an administrative role, first to play in the FA Cup and first to officiate in the FA Cup.
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Walters can understand why Watson is a ghost for so many. Given the racist abuse he endured in Scotland, the idea a Black player could have operated at the elite level in an even less enlightened age seemed like a myth. Then, in 2021, the BBC told him about Watson and pitched the idea of filming his journey to illustrate why he was so significant.
The hour-long documentary, Mark Walters in the Footsteps of Andrew Watson, was aired three times. Despite the publicity, Watson’s name is still one that has been lost for so many.
It was only in the 1980s that Watson was rediscovered by football historians Ged O’Brien and Tommy Malcolm. With Watson having died 60 years earlier and having a complexion that did not immediately identify him as mixed race in grainy photos, his story was only brought to the wider public in a BBC documentary in 2002.
He was inducted into the Scottish FA hall of fame in 2012 and is the one Victorian player who has a section dedicated to him by the museum’s curator, Richard McBrearty. They are also assisting the National Library of Scotland’s project aimed at ‘encouraging underrepresented and minoritised young people to engage with cultural heritage through sporting figures’.
Watson has two murals in the southside of Glasgow, the second of which is at Hampden Bowling Club — the former site of the world’s first enclosed stadium where Watson played. It forms the starting point of the Square Mile open-air museum commemorating Scotland’s football heritage but, unlike fellow pioneers Tull, Wharton and Leslie, who each have a statue in a location close to their heart, Watson is yet to be lionised in the same manner.
OTD in 1882 at 330pm, Captain Charles Campbell, assisted by Andrew Watson, strode out onto #1stHampden.@ScotlandNT thumped @FA 5 goals to 1.
This genius mural by @ashleyrawson11 heralds this victory at @hampdenbowling in the heart of #FootballsSquareMile.
Go on. Visit. ⚽️ 🏴 pic.twitter.com/DMANrqbsDa
— 🌳🏴 ScotchProfessors 🌍⚽️ (@Hampdeners) March 11, 2023
In 2021, there were rumours of plans for a memorial outside Hampden Park, but no progress has been made.
While there are no statues yet outside the national stadium, he could be the natural person to start with to commemorate the life of a true trailblazer. “A statue or something visible like that is definitely warranted. In fact, it’s overdue,” Walters tells The Athletic.
“I hope I shed some light on him, but no one has contacted me about plans for a tribute. I would definitely back any campaign for one. The significance of the man in developing Scottish football, but also English and world football, is massive.”
Watson was born in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1856 to a Scottish father, Peter Miller Watson, and a local woman, Hannah Rose, before returning to England to receive an upper-class education.
He attended King’s College London and was left an inheritance of £6,000 (around £531,000 in today’s money) by his father. It was a fortune partly earned from the demerara sugar industry, which thrived on the slave trade until 1833.
That social status and financial security helped Watson transcend race and, when he moved to Glasgow aged 19 to study at Glasgow University, it enabled him to quickly drop out and become involved in the burgeoning sport of football.
His background had been in high jump and the English game of rugby, but he quickly adapted to football. After six years at the up-and-coming Parkgrove, he moved to Queen’s Park in 1880. In the 1870s, they were the first side to promote ‘combination play’ (where a team favours passing the ball over individuals dribbling), setting the basis for which the sport would be built on over the next 150 years.
At his peak, Watson — a full-back — won three Scottish Cups with Queen’s Park and played for Scotland three times, captaining them on his debut in the record 6-1 victory over England at the Oval in 1881 (see lead image above, with Watson in the centre of the front row).
It would have been more had he not moved to London in 1882, where he became a ‘Scottish Professor’, spreading his knowledge of combination play to leading amateur teams Swifts and Corinthian FC.
The latter provided the bulk of England’s early teams, beat FA Cup and league holders despite being part-timers, played a leading role in popularising football around the world and even inspired a namesake club in Brazil and the all-white of Real Madrid.
“It’s very surprising how his story was suppressed for so long. A lot of Black inventors and pioneers haven’t had the vindication of being well-known figures,” says Walters.
“It doesn’t surprise me but you can’t destroy all history — and Andrew has got to be one of those people who is remembered as he is a very inspirational character. It’s something to be proud of for Scottish football.”
Watson was the only Black man to represent a European nation in the Victorian era. In contrast, it took England until 1978 to have a Black player when Viv Anderson made his debut, while a third of UEFA national teams have still not had a Black player represent them.
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Before playing for Queen’s Park, Watson was at Glasgow-based Parkgrove. In 1877, they had three players of colour in the team, making it a more multicultural line-up than any Scottish team boasted in 1977.
Watson’s race is not referenced in newspaper reports of his performances and he appears to have been a popular figure. When guesting for London club Pilgrims, he was hoisted on the shoulders of the opposition, Charterhouse, a bastion of upper-class Britishness, but there were later incidents of prejudice.
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“Although on more than one occasion subjected to vulgar insults by splenetic, ill-tempered players, he uniformly preserved that gentlemanly demeanour which endeared him to opponents as well as his club companions,” read a report in The Scottish Athletic Journal in 1885 reflecting on his career.
Watson captained many of his teams, including Scotland, but it was 122 years before the next Black player represented Scotland when midfielder Nigel Quashie made his bow in May 2004, the first of 14 caps.
Born to a Ghanaian father and English mother who met in London, it was through his grandfather, Andrew McFarlane — born in the Gorbals area of Glasgow — that Quashie qualified.
“I only became aware of Andrew a few days before my debut — through my grandfather,” Quashie tells The Athletic. “He explained I was going to be only the second Black player, which was quite an overwhelming feeling.”
“When he told me he (Watson) had been captain, it was surprising but I was so impressed by how popular he was back then. The interest in the storyline didn’t really start to kick in until I’d played a couple of games, though, and even then the press didn’t go too deep into it.”
Five years of forensic research by author Llew Walker took the baton on further, resulting in A Straggling Life, a 2021 biography that shines a light on so many hitherto unknown facets of Watson’s exploits on and off the pitch.
Watson had four children, two with each of his wives, but none went on to have children of their own, so there is no direct living descendent to pass on tales or memorabilia. The closest known relation is Malik Al-Nasir, an author and poet who found that he was a direct relation of Watson’s uncle in Guyana.
Watson’s later life remains unclear, but the timeline until his retirement at 31 is now solid. He spent his final years playing in Liverpool for Bootle, where he was one of the players investigated for alleged professionalism. At the time, this would have broken the rules given that only players who had resided in the local area for a number of years were allowed to be paid. If he was given a wage, it would make Watson — and not Wharton — the first Black professional, but no charges were ever made against him.
A GoFundMe page raised money to restore Watson’s dilapidated grave in Richmond Cemetery with £350 of leftover funds, enough to ensure annual maintenance for the next few years but, after 16 months without a donation, the page was deactivated.
“It’s a shame as the other Black players were pioneers, but what Watson achieved far surpassed them all. I find it baffling that he is not paraded outside Hampden,” says Walker.
“There is still so much to learn about his life after football. He virtually disappeared once he moved to Liverpool and we do not really know the motivations for his moves or the quality of life he lived in those final 30 years. Hopefully, over time, these mysteries will be resolved.”
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Watson spent the rest of his working life at sea as a marine engineer on ships that travelled to South America before living his final few years in London. He died aged 64 in a charming house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Kew, with a view of the Thames.
The current occupiers of the house had no idea their property was home to such an esteemed sporting figure until a National Archives exhibition day offered the public the chance to find out who had previously lived at their address.
“It’s incredible what he managed to bring to football,” says Quashie.
“Having something for the public to learn about Andrew Watson would be a proud moment for me as to follow in his footsteps is something I’m extremely grateful for. He gave me and so many Black players the platform.”
(Top photo credit: Scottish football museum)