Saltire City beat Nithsdale Wanderers 3-1 to progress to the next round of the Southern Counties Football Association Alba Cup, with the tie played at McKenna Park in Govan, Glasgow, on the site of the old Fifty Pitches.
The club is an unusual case in Scottish football. It plays in the South of Scotland League but is built around an ambition to become a Lanarkshire presence, training and competing far from the area it eventually hopes to represent.
The dressing room reflects that reach. Maksym Trush, 19, from Lviv, has lived in Britain for four years and is looking to build a football career in the country he has come to call home. Josh Dalton, 22, from Derby, moved north with his partner and wants to keep playing and see where the game takes him. Camryn Donald, 19, from Florida, arrives with spells at Fleetwood and Airdrie behind him and continues to study the business of football while doing some coaching.
The most travelled is Attahir Ali, 19, who was born in Chad, moved to France and has lived in Scotland for eight years. A winger, he has already drawn interest from his national selectors. "I sent them a video of my performances when I was at Dumbarton and last season they invited me over to Chad to have a look at me," Ali said. "They paid for the flights and hotel and it was a great experience."
Ali trained with the Chad squad and was particularly struck by Marius Mouandilmadji, the forward who plays for Samsunspor in Turkey and was selected for the European Conference League team of the season. "I learned a lot from him," Ali said. "He is an excellent player and a great pro. I want to go on and make a career for myself in football. I played for Dumbarton under-age teams for the past few seasons but this is my first campaign in men's football."
"It is very different. I am playing against men who are strong and fast and I must become accustomed to that. But I am enjoying it, 100 per cent. It is the most I have ever enjoyed football. I live in Glasgow, in Summerston, and I love this country, though the weather," Ali said.
A second chance for late developers
Not every player has travelled as far. Stephen Gemmell, 28, played Junior and amateur football before stepping away from the game while working in retail and unable to get weekends off. He returned after a conversation with manager Paul Davies, for whom he had played before. "It was an exciting project to be involved in something like this from the ground up," Gemmell said. "I had played for Paul Davies in the past and always been impressed by him. I bumped into him and had a long chat and here I am. I didn't take much convincing."
Gemmell said the dressing room mixed many nationalities without cliques forming. "This is a great set-up. There are a lot of cultures here and it is a great dressing-room. Attahir has even been involved in his national team and there are people from all over the world but there are no cliques," he said.
The captain is 18-year-old Jamie White, who played for Airdrie and made his debut in a Championship match against Livingston. "I have been enjoying every minute of this," White said. "I had a long chat with Paul before I came here. I took to him. I was definitely signing after speaking to him. My main thing was that I wanted to get back to enjoying football because there was a spell when I didn't. I love it here. There are different boys, different cultures so you have to be able to adapt when you are talking to team mates."
History at McKenna Park
McKenna Park stands on the site of the old Fifty Pitches in Govan, once the home of St Anthony's, and Bob Stevens, 80, briefly played for the club. He recalled training alongside a young Alex Ferguson at Third Lanark. "I once trained with him at Third Lanark when I think he was at St Johnstone and training in Glasgow," Stevens said. "He gave me a boot up the bahookie. But I do recall that I was just a lad and a senior player was bullying me. Sir Alex sorted that out immediately."
The plan to settle in Lanarkshire
Director of football operations Paul Dorrian, 43, said the club began as a joke with Davies about American sport. "Paul and I worked together at Glasgow Women and one day we were having a joke about American sport and why they were so passionate about it and how they named their teams and how they were formed," Dorrian said. "Later he came along to me and said: 'I have decided I am going to do it. I am going to form a team.'"
Dorrian said some rival clubs believed Saltire City joined the South of Scotland League to reach the Lowland League more quickly, but he dismissed the idea. "The truth is that West of Scotland league entry was closed when we were thinking about the formation of the team," he said. "The South of Scotland League, though, invited us in last season. We were simply not ready then. Spaces opened up in the West of Scotland but we decided to go with the South who had been welcoming us from the start."
The club wants to run Scottish Football Association programmes and charitable foundations in future. "Essentially, we are a Lanarkshire club and we want to find an area there where we can develop," Dorrian said. Talks on a permanent home have begun, with hopes of settling there by the 2028-29 season. Most home games are currently played at Carluke Rovers, with the Nithsdale Wanderers tie moved to Govan because of a fixture clash.
Dorrian said the club's business model relies on 25 per cent sponsorship and 75 per cent revenue from the programmes it runs, and that starting the club from scratch had been tiring but enjoyable. A railway executive by trade, he joked about retirement: "It would be great to see all this take off and in years to come I would be the old committee man at the side of the park with the free pie and Bovril."
Manager Paul Davies builds an AI recruitment tool
Manager Paul Davies, 49, has coached at Motherwell, worked in player recruitment at Chesterfield and Hartlepool, and led a successful Carluke amateur side before moving to Carluke Rovers. "First, we are a Lanarkshire-based club. That is important to us," Davies said. "Second, I noticed that many young players from academies and the like drop out of the game when they are about 20. Where do they go? I wanted to develop something that could cater for these guys."
Davies said recruitment mattered but helping players move on was central to the club's sustainability. He is also developing an artificial intelligence system to assess players. "We are taking player data and sending it to a company that can provide a personal portfolio on each player," he said. "We want to strip the emotions away. We are developing an ambitious AI system to provide information based on data that can be given to clubs who want to recruit our players. It is a work in progress and may be some years away from full fruition but we are already starting on it."
