First Touch ’26 - Scotland

In this World Cup Capsule, David Gass celebrates the return of a nation that helped invent modern football, exported the passing game around the globe, and produced managerial legends from Bill Shankly to Sir Alex Ferguson. We walk through Scotland’s long, chaotic history: the first ever international match in 1872, early World Cups, and two decades of “glorious failure” where qualification heartbreak became a nation