Scottish Football Records

Football statistics have a peculiar magic. Mention that a club won 3–1 on a wet Saturday in November 1937 and most sensible people will wonder why anybody remembers. Mention it to the correct football supporter and you’ve just opened negotiations that may continue until closing time. Scottish Football Records by Gordon Smailes is for precisely those people: a magnificent repository of results, achievements, records and statistical ammunition from a footballing nation that has never regarded mere facts as any reason to stop arguing.

Published by Breedon Books in 1995, this substantial reference work gathers together the numbers behind Scottish football: championships, cups, clubs, players, goals, appearances and the assorted triumphs and disasters from which generations of supporters have constructed their identities. It is essentially several decades of terraces, muddy pitches, heroic victories and catastrophic defensive errors compressed into one extremely useful volume.

The beauty of a football record book is that it knows nothing of diplomacy. Memory may insist that your club once dominated Scottish football; the statistics are sitting there with a raised eyebrow and a different opinion. Conversely, should some reckless individual suggest that your team’s glorious season wasn’t actually all that impressive, Scottish Football Records provides the documentary evidence required to destroy their argument before they’ve finished ordering the next round.

Naturally, Scottish football provides particularly fertile territory. Celtic and Rangers loom large, because ignoring the Old Firm in a book about Scottish football would be roughly equivalent to writing a history of the Atlantic while tactfully avoiding water. But the real pleasure lies in the breadth of the story: Aberdeen, Hearts, Hibernian, Dundee, Dundee United, Motherwell, Kilmarnock and the great collection of clubs whose supporters know perfectly well that football existed outside Glasgow regardless of what television executives occasionally appeared to believe.

Then there are the glorious statistical oddities. Extraordinary scoring records. Astonishing sequences. Clubs enjoying brief golden eras before returning to the traditional Scottish football experience of hoping for the best and preparing emotionally for something rather worse. Records preserve all of it with perfect impartiality. A table does not care how unfair the referee was, how strong the wind became in the second half or whether your centre-forward was clearly fouled before the decisive goal. History can be cruel like that.

Gordon Smailes approaches the subject with the diligence required of anyone brave enough to compile football statistics, where one incorrect result from 1924 will inevitably be discovered by a retired railwayman in Falkirk who has kept every programme since childhood and would like a word. The sheer amount of information brought together makes this invaluable not only to dedicated supporters but to writers, researchers, historians and anyone who has ever found themselves wondering who actually finished fourth in the Scottish Second Division sixty years ago.

It is also a wonderful piece of social history. Football records quietly chart the rise and fall of clubs, towns and communities. Names that once dominated league tables have faded, grounds have disappeared, competitions have changed and generations of players have come and gone. Yet the results remain, stubborn little numerical fossils preserving Saturday afternoons that would otherwise have vanished entirely.

The 1995 publication date gives the book an additional charm. It captures Scottish football immediately before the internet transformed the way statistics were accessed. Today you can type a question into a search box and receive an answer within seconds. In 1995 you pulled a serious-looking reference book from the shelf, located the relevant section and emerged several hours later having discovered seventeen completely unrelated facts you hadn’t intended to look up. Progress has made us considerably more efficient and perhaps slightly less happy.

For collectors of football literature, Breedon Books publications have a reassuringly purposeful quality about them. These are books produced for readers who genuinely want information, rather than celebrity autobiographies explaining that the lads gave 110 per cent and took every game as it came. Scottish Football Records contains the evidence of what actually happened after all that 110 per cent had been administered.

This Very Good condition copy, offered by Crappy Old Books, has survived three decades rather better than many Scottish football managers managed three seasons. It remains a smart, solid and eminently usable reference copy, ready for statistics to be checked, arguments to be settled and obscure footballing achievements to be resurrected from deserved or undeserved obscurity. No referee’s decisions can be overturned, no league tables can be retrospectively adjusted, and purchasing it does not guarantee that your club’s historical record will suddenly improve—but at least you’ll finally have the figures necessary to explain precisely where everything went wrong.

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