I’m American and I’m Scottish by descent. The Tartan Army is a clan and it’s something I want to be a part of. I have a legitimate connection, but I still feel like an imposter sometimes. But here’s the thing — Scotland doesn’t care. They welcome you right into the fold. As long as you’re not their enemy, you are their friend.
I’ve been enamoured by Scotland’s visit to the United States for the World Cup. Especially to my hometown Boston. These are my people. And my people are loved — by a lot more than just me.
My grandfather carried the Stewart name from Renfrewshire, Scotland to America. He served as British Vice Consul in Baltimore for over two decades and received an MBE from Queen Elizabeth II in 1967. Through my mother’s line I’ve earned and claimed British citizenship by birthright. I am American to my core and Scottish in my blood. Both. Fully. And I wear that proudly. But here’s what’s interesting — you don’t need a drop of Scottish blood to fall completely in love with these people. All over Boston, all over America, people with zero connection to Scotland are absolutely losing it for the Tartan Army. So what is it about them?
Let’s start with what just happened in Boston, because it tells you everything.
Forty thousand Scots descended on this city. They drank the bars dry — literally. The Sam Adams Boston Taproom ran out of its flagship Boston Lager after the Tartan Army drank four times what the bar normally sells in a weekend. The White Bull Tavern ran out of everything. A Scottish brewery had to fly in emergency reinforcements. Fans drank the beer supply on the planes coming over too — it was water or wine by the time they landed.
And then they cleaned up after themselves.
That’s the part that stopped people cold. In every space the Tartan Army occupied — fan marches, parks, public squares — they gathered every piece of litter. When the trash cans overflowed, they stacked it neatly beside them. Boston’s own Mayor specifically called it out, marveling that tens of thousands of people who had been partying that hard left places cleaner than they found them. It impressed her so much that she announced Boston and Glasgow are officially becoming sister cities. The formal agreement follows next April during Tartan Week.
Oh, and the cones. The Scots have a 40 year old tradition back home — the Duke of Wellington statue outside Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art has had a traffic cone on its head since the 1980s. The city tried removing it repeatedly. The public kept putting it back. Eventually Glasgow gave up and the cone became an unofficial symbol of the city’s irreverence. They brought that tradition to Boston and went to work. Seventeen statues got coned. Bill Russell, George Washington, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, Bobby Orr, even the Make Way for Ducklings ducks in the Public Garden. Julian Edelman put on a kilt and physically boosted a Scot up to get the cone onto George Washington. Mayor Wu coned Bill Russell herself outside City Hall and called it “joyful.” Rob Gronkowski was partying alongside them. Not one complaint. Not one arrest. Just Boston laughing right along with them. “It’s a little mark, it’s a little bit of fun,” one Scottish fan said. “It now defines a culture, almost.” Boston didn’t just tolerate it — Boston joined in.
A Boston resident woke up at 6:30 in the morning to bagpipes. A group of Scots had rented the house across the street and were out front, kilted up and playing at full volume. His reaction? He invited them over for a barbecue. That story went viral and a woman tracked him down and got him a ticket to the Scotland match. The Red Sox hosted the whole delegation on Sunday.
They marched to Fenway Park in a sea of kilts. They raised money for local charities. They embraced Boston as genuinely as Boston embraced them.
“I think this has been on a different level to anything I’ve witnessed,” said one Scottish journalist who’d covered them at Euro 2024 in Germany. And a local onlooker watching 8,000 of them parade through Miami’s Little Havana this week put it simply: “World peace, I feel, is inevitable with the Tartan Army.”
So where does this come from? You don’t get a people like this by accident.
Think about what Scotland has been through. Rome couldn’t conquer them — Hadrian’s Wall was the admission of that. They fought their Wars of Independence against a neighbor ten times their size and held on long enough to win. The Highland Clearances forced entire communities off their ancestral land, scattered them to the four winds, and still couldn’t break them. Generation after generation outvoted, underestimated, written off. And yet here they are. Louder than ever. Buying everyone a round.
What comes out of that kind of history isn’t bitterness. It’s something that’s a lot more fun to be around. A communal toughness. A humor that runs bone deep because if you don’t laugh you break. A loyalty to the circle that’s absolute. And an absence of the aggression that so often poisons the party elsewhere — because in clan culture, turning on your own was the one unforgivable thing. You could be hard as nails on the outside and still be the warmest person in the room.
I recognize that. I’ve lived that. Back in my partying days I could keep up with the best of them — all night Cabana parties, ski trip binges, Florida getaways with a crowd fueled by things I wasn’t. And I was always friendly, always fun, never once felt the rage or the machismo surface. I never thought much about why until now. Maybe it was just who I am. Maybe it’s who we are.
The Tartan Army has won multiple FIFA Fair Play awards. The sport’s own governing body recognizing, officially, that these are the best supporters on earth. Not the loudest. Not the most passionate. The best. Because those things aren’t mutually exclusive with being decent human beings — for the Scots, they’re the same thing.
Scotland has qualified for nine World Cups. They have never once made it past the group stage. Not once in their entire history. And yet “28 years since we were here,” one fan said this week, eyes full. “This is what we bring everywhere we come. We’re missed when we’re not here.”
That right there is the lesson. Not the football. The attitude.
Think about what it takes to show up like that. To travel across an ocean, spend money you’ve saved, wear your kilt in the Miami heat, sing your songs at full volume — for a team that has never once made it past the first round. Most people would have stopped caring decades ago. Most fanbases would have quietly drifted away, protecting themselves from the heartbreak. The Scots never did. They kept showing up because showing up is who they are. The scoreboard has never been the point. The point is that you come, you give everything, you make the party worth having, and you never — not for one single second — stop believing something extraordinary could happen.
There’s a lesson in that for all of us. In sports, in life, in how you treat the people around you. You don’t have to be winning to bring joy into a room. You don’t have to be the favorite to be worth cheering for. And you never know — if you hold on long enough, if you refuse to fold when the math looks ugly — sometimes the miracle shows up.
I’ve seen it. The 2004 Red Sox were down 3-0 to the Yankees in the ALCS. No team in baseball history had ever come back from that. Ever. And they won four straight and swept the World Series. The Patriots were down 28-3 in the Super Bowl with the game statistically over and they won in overtime. I play competitive pool and I’ve been on both sides of a comeback that nobody saw coming. That feeling — when you held on and the miracle landed — there is nothing else like it in the world. Nothing. And the only way to ever feel it is to never stop believing it’s possible while there’s still time on the clock.
The Scots live that every single day. Not just at a World Cup. In everything. They’ve been knocked down by history more times than most nations could survive and they got back up every single time, laughing, buying a round, putting a cone on something. There is no self-pity in them. There is no quit. There’s just a profound and unshakeable belief that today might be the day, and even if it isn’t, we’re going to have one hell of a time finding out.
That’s what I want people to take away from this. Not just that the Scots are fun — though they absolutely are. But that the way they live is something worth paying attention to. Be warm. Be loyal. Clean up your mess. Make friends with strangers. Laugh at yourself. Fight hard. Never quit. And hold out hope right up until the final whistle because you have absolutely no idea what’s about to happen.
They play Brazil today in Miami. After beating Haiti and losing to Morocco they need a result to have any chance of making history — advancing past the group stage for the very first time. The odds aren’t comfortable. They rarely are for Scotland.
I’ll be watching. Every single minute. Because this is my people on that pitch today, and we don’t change the channel. We never change the channel.
Come on, Scotland. Show them what we’re made of!
No Scotland! No Party!