Celtic were late. The notion of an immigrants’ team was already commonplace when the Glasgow club took the field for the first time in 1888. One account of the period groans about the ‘superfluity’ of teams in Scotland with an Irish identity. Celtic’s founders understood that there was not a moment to lose. These ruthless men ensured they would begin life with excellent players by pillaging their counterparts, Hibernian. The Edinburgh club came close to extinction then, but the Irish aspect never would be a guarantee of security: Dundee Harp went out of business in 1897 and Dundee Hibernian, chasing a broader appeal, renamed themselves Dundee United in 1923.

While Brother Walfrid, a member of the Marist order at work in the parish of St Mary’s, had the idea of forming Celtic, it was John Glass who set the club apart. He chaired the meeting at which Celtic came into existence and was the man whose efforts ensured it would not peter out. By 1894 Scottish Sport was referring to him as ‘the father of the club’. Glass was a Scot of Irish descent with a knack for persuasion that was indispensable to Celtic. He was committed to Home Rule for Ireland and remained active in the cause. A generation or two earlier, a person adopting such a stance would have cut themselves off from the mainstream. Times were changing and he was one of nine people of similar background who were made Justices of the Peace in 1902. The headline in one newspaper read: ‘Catholics added to the Glasgow magistracy.’

Much had altered since 1829, when the Home Secretary Robert Peel regarded it as a moral issue that Catholics be prevented from becoming MPs if possible. Only with reluctance did he and others accept that Daniel O’Connell must be allowed to take his seat in the House of Commons after twice winning a by-election in County Clare that Parliament had insisted on restaging. The Roman Catholic Relief Act allowing men of that faith to become MPs was passed during that period. Glass’s nomination as a Justice of the Peace was trifling by comparison, but it did confirm, as a single-minded Celtic had, that people of immigrant descent and their culture would have to be assimilated into society at large.

There was a greater, if informal, honour in the gratitude expressed to him for establishing Celtic so firmly. Willie Maley, player and then manager from the very first game until his forced retirement in 1940, wrote that Glass was ‘a working joiner to whom, in my estimation, the club owes its existence, as he never shirked from that time till the day of his death to further the project which to him appealed as his life work’. Glass did not bite his tongue after Celtic had lost the Glasgow Exhibition Cup final to Cowlairs in September 1888 before a crowd full of animosity. ‘Celtic will yet win to their proper position,’ he said at the post-match dinner, ‘and those who scoff today will one day have to applaud.’

Glass was entitled to such confidence since he had gone to great lengths in finding the type of footballers who would inevitably make their mark. Had he not accomplished a key task, Celtic might have been stifled at the very start. Virtually everything turned on the approach to James Kelly. Recruiting the Renton centre half was a challenge even for Glass, since other clubs had been rebuffed. Kelly had already won the Scottish Cup twice, and the latter victory in 1888 led to a challenge match with the FA Cup holders West Brom. Having beaten them, Renton, the team from the Dunbartonshire village, were deemed world champions, at least in the eye of the Scots. The player himself would still have appreciated that the era of smaller clubs such as his was coming to an end, as the economic forces in the well-populated cities generated far more money.

John O’Hara, the Celtic secretary, had been unable to lure Kelly. Glass, however, was indefatigable and said he had ‘camped on his doorstep’. The twenty-two-year-old was talked into taking part in Celtic’s first match, a 5–2 win over a Rangers XI. ‘No Kelly, no Keltic’ became a catchphrase summary of the centre half’s towering significance. ‘I knew that if I could get Kelly, the rest would follow,’ said Glass. That proved true, as the club signed other important players who accepted the credibility of Celtic once Kelly had joined them. The concept of an Old Firm had still to come into being and the first outing was simply a run-of-the-mill match, but the player remained thereafter. While football in Scotland was meant to be an amateur sport then, there were inducements. Considering that Kelly was soon the owner of a pub that would be worth around £150,000 nowadays, Glass had not depended solely on his silver tongue.

Resistance to a rather crass newcomer was to be expected, and Celtic were checked for a while. The club felt itself to be an outsider and encountered highly motivated opponents during the loss to Cowlairs that so irked Glass. The victors were said to have bolstered the line-up with guest players, but Celtic themselves were merciless. If they were treated as the enemy, it may have been for the ruthlessness with which financial muscle had been flexed in the search for immediate success. A hardened team had been put together in a hurry, but Celtic fans, free of any sense of irony, took exception to the opposition reinforcing its own side.

It was the losers that day who still had impetus. Those in charge did not pause. Glass barely missed a meeting in the years when the club was run by a committee, but Celtic was bound to become a limited company as the complexities and sums involved in football increased. In one newspaper report of the 5,000 £1 shares that were issued in 1897 the list is headed by Glass, who is termed a ‘builder’s manager’. He had been presented with a hundred of them and also an honorarium of £100. Glass gave up the presidency, although he still served as a director. He was the builder who laid the foundations of the club.

Celtic were not uniformly admired, and by 1890 there was indignation over the fact that in addition to Kelly several other players had pubs. ‘On the one hand’, declared Scottish Sport, ‘the club dispenses with the lily hand of charity succour to the sick and portion to the poor; on the other hand it watches indifferently, if it does not encourage, its young men throwing themselves recklessly into a business of which every tendency is towards moral ruin.’ Celtic, though, would have regarded it as essential to make the players financially secure if the club was not to wither. Amateurism became an absurdity once professionalism had been legalised south of the border in 1885, yet it took another eight years before Scottish football followed suit.

It had been a period in which individual ambition was entwined with a resolve to see Celtic thrive, and Glass had colleagues with the same outlook. There was a fluidity to the life of O’Hara. He had been little more than an infant when, in 1847, his family left County Derry during the famine. O’Hara grew up to be a shoemaker, but soon committed himself to being a trade union organiser and was to become secretary of the Operative Shoemakers’ Society. Willie Maley, with a good turn of phrase, numbered O’Hara among the ‘knowing novices’, because these men were quick to show an aptitude for whatever they undertook. The immigrant’s realisation that a chance may never come again underpinned the keen desire to embark on new projects.

The reproaches of publications like Scottish Sport were no deterrent. As with Glass and several others associated with Celtic, O’Hara was successful in the drinks trade and eventually bought himself an estate in Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute. He was to the fore among the business-minded people who went to considerable expense when piecing together a potent team. The club’s rapid move to so nakedly materialistic a footing outraged idealists, but when the sport was already being commercialised it would have been incongruous to go on operating in a homely manner. Even so, there was selflessness in the remarkable efforts of the volunteers largely responsible for building Celtic’s original ground over the course of the winter. Just two months after the club’s formation, a general meeting heard in January 1888 that ‘the pitch is finished, the paling well nigh up, and the grand stand – capable of accommodating from 800 to 1000 – would be begun in the course of the ensuing week’.

The completion of that project was impressive, but a far wider struggle for the betterment of the community has been sustained for centuries. St Mary’s contains the bodies of some who fell in that cause. ‘In 1847,’ according to the church’s website, ‘the crypt was opened no less than four or five times to receive the remains of assistant priests in the parish who had died in the fever epidemic of that year. There are fifteen coffins there. Typhus was known (somewhat unkindly) as Irish Fever. Several of the priests who died in Saint Mary’s in the 1847 outbreak had come here from Ireland to serve the people of Glasgow.’

Monsignor Peter Smith, the current parish priest, puts it even more poignantly: ‘We lost four priests during one of the epidemics. There was a wee fellow, Father Bradley, who’s down in the crypt here, and he was twenty-three when he died. Now, the youngest you could be ordained was twenty-three, so he arrived in the middle of a cholera epidemic and was dead from it within two or three months. That sort of cheapness of human life is beyond our thinking now. It’s something we might see in Africa or after a flood in another part of the world. We once had three or four baptisms a...