It’s a sunny afternoon in Austin, Texas, where Pete Reid, a 49-year-old from Barrhead, Glasgow, is crafting a script for his social media alter-ego Allaster McKallaster.
For the uninitiated, McKallaster is currently Scotland’s greatest media export, a brutally biased no-nonsense commentator who revisits his nation’s finest footballing moments on YouTube and Instagram, amassing over two million views.
McKallaster thrills at the sight of Archie Gemmill, laughs at England’s failures since 1966 and, in a nod to his home for the last 20 years, also adds his Caledonian insight to Major League Soccer. Football and film greats like Zico and Edward Norton are fans. Kylie Minogue and Australian PM Anthony Albanese followed him after a recent excursion into Aussie Rules.
But today, Pete and McKallaster have turned their attention 5,850 miles away to the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona in Naples. Specifically to the opening 26 seconds of Napoli’s 3-1 win against Como in October, in which just seven passes lead to an opening goal from Scott McTominay.
“McTOMINAY, YA BEAUTY! THE JOLLY SCOT BANGS ONE IN FOR NAPOLI!” yells the volcanic McKallaster.
Those with only a casual interest in football, already having trouble with a Scotsman in Texas commentating on Serie A, might be bewildered to find a former Manchester United midfielder now plying his trade in the shadow of Vesuvius. He was allowed to leave without much fanfare on deadline day for £21m, but while United are languishing in the bottom half of the Premier League and have sacked Dutch manager Erik ten Hag, McTominay has helped 2022-23 champions Napoli back to the top of the league.
Some fans of Gli Azzurri (The Blues) are now saying McTominay’s arrival has reminded them of Maradona’s own transformative signing for the southern team in 1984. Perhaps the starkest reaction has come from former West Ham player Paolo Di Canio, who told Il Mattino: “I would go to Manchester United to arrest all the directors. How can you give McTominay away?” Then again Di Canio is a fan of Mussolini, so his judgment is questionable.
McTominay is the most high-profile of a growing band of Scottish footballers, both men and women, plying their trade in the upper echelons of Italian football – including Che Adams, Josh Doig, Lewis Ferguson and Liam Henderson in the men’s game and Lana Clelland in the women’s Serie A. She blazed a trail for the men, and has just started her 10th season in Italy, racking up almost 150 games for Bari, Tavagnacco, Fiorentina and Sassuolo.
McTominay was joined at Napoli this summer by former Chelsea starlet Billy Gilmour in a £12m move from Brighton. After starting the season on the bench, Gilmour has capitalised on an injury to Stanislav Lobotka and has put in three impressive performances, including in a 2-0 win over Inter Milan at the San Siro where he was warmly embraced by Napoli’s coach Antonio Conte after being subbed in injury time. The Italian papers say Conte – another Stamford Bridge old boy – has “gone wild” for Gilmour.
Before Naples went a little bit Tartan, Lewis Ferguson was attracting media attention and the affection of fans at Bologna. The Scotland international has banged in 13 goals from midfield in his first two seasons since a 2022 move from Aberdeen and has been the Rossoblu’s (Red-Blues) captain for the past year, also winning the Serie A midfielder of the season award along the way.
Although now out until the end of the year with a cruciate ligament injury, Ferguson has said of his time in Bologna: “when you’re happy off the park you can be relaxed on it and produce good performances… I found myself living in a beautiful city, good people, good weather, good food and a great club and I’ve played the best football of my career.”
Liam Henderson has been playing in Italy since leaving Celtic for Bari in 2018. He was the first Scottish men’s player to play there since Graeme Souness left Sampdoria in 1986. Henderson is now very much established as a fixture of the Italian game, having appeared for Hellas Verona, Lecce and Palermo. He’s an ever-present for current club Empoli this season.
In comparison, before his move in the 2018 winter transfer window he’d played just 23 minutes for Celtic in the previous six months. Henderson then played every game for Bari in the second half of the Italian season. Like his fellow countrymen, he’s delighted with how the move to Italy has shaped his life and now describes himself as being 40% Italian and 60% Scottish.
The players aren’t arriving in Italy by coincidence or pure word of mouth. Italian scouts see great value in the Scottish league, considering the players tough, fast, dynamic and seriously underpriced.
Andy Robertson’s successful progress from Queen’s Park, Dundee United and Hull City to becoming a Champions League winner with Liverpool sparked interest among clubs looking for value in smaller northern European leagues. The SPL is considered to be at a similar level to the bottom half of Serie A, and many of the players have featured in high-pressure games like domestic cup finals, European and international campaigns. They are likely to have far more first-team games under their belt than promising talent in the Under-23 squads of the English leagues.
“The Scottish Premiership is an incredibly underrated league,” Francesco Strozzi, a scout for Bologna between 2018 and 2021, now with Torino, told Sky Sports.
Strozzi and his colleagues turned their attention to in-depth video analysis of the Scottish and Scandinavian leagues during lockdown, when the Covid virus prevented games from taking place and scouts from travelling to watch Italian matches first-hand. In Ewen Ferguson they saw a player different to a typical Italian midfielder.
“He makes central runs and he scores important goals from midfield, which is something you don’t see so much here in Serie A,” said Strozzi.
The players not only offer value on the pitch for clubs like Bologna, but also in their sell-on potential. Left back Aaron Hickey joined Bologna from Hearts at the age of just 18 in 2020.
There, he played well enough in just 47 games to be sold on to Premier League Brentford, a club that prides itself on finding value players, for 10 times the fee the Italians paid for him. When Ferguson told him he’d been approached by Bologna, it was Hickey who gave the thumbs up and sang the praises of the city .
The current crop of Scots in Italy seem to be feeling more at home than did their legendary predecessor Denis Law, who spent a year with Torino from the summer of 1961 after joining from Manchester City. He scored 10 goals in 27 games and was voted overseas player of the year, but was also involved in a car crash that almost killed his English teammate Joe Baker.
Law was also infuriated by a controversial sending-off, in which the ref was apparently encouraged to give him the red card by Torino’s own coach, apparently for disobeying orders and taking a throw-in. He soon returned to Manchester with United, but Scots are once again scoring goals for Torino this season. New signing Adams banged in three goals as they opened the season strongly, and in a recent interview could be heard talking of his determination to visit Superga, the site of the air crash that wiped out the club’s great team of the late 1940s.
Twenty years after Law came to Italy, the combative former Leeds and Manchester United striker Joe Jordan attained cult status in just two seasons at AC Milan, where he was nicknamed Lo Squalo (The Shark). Jordan’s status had clearly escaped Milan’s Gennaro Gattuso when the pair squared up to one another following their loss to Spurs – where Joe was an assistant coach – in 2011.
Appraised of his reputation, the normally combative Gattuso quickly apologised, invited Jordan to be his guest at the club’s training ground and said in 2022 that his son still teases him about the time he tried to pick a fight with a San Siro legend. Like the current players, Jordan speaks fondly of his time in Italy. His daughter now lives there and he visits regularly.
The most successful of the original three Scottish stars to play in Italy was Souness, who joined Trevor Francis at Sampdoria in 1984. He immediately took to the Italian game. “I found the football easy… there wasn’t as much pressing, you could get in the ball much easier as they would retreat,” Souness has said. In his first season, Sampdoria finished fourth, their highest-ever position, and he scored against AC Milan to take the Coppa Italia.
But now memories of Law, Jordan and Souness are being replaced by new ones made by McTominay, Ferguson, Adams and co. And what does the great modern Scottish commentator think of it? He told me: “Ah, McKallaster loves it – it means he doesn’t have to watch English football to see Scots playing abroad.”
