Celtic's Zheng Zhi and Dundee's Fan Zhiyi: Few Chinese footballers have left such an indelible mark on British football

It was early November 1933 when the Dundee-based Evening Telegraph became one of the few newspapers to take an interest in Frank Soo, the first person of Chinese descent to ever step onto a professional football pitch in the United Kingdom.

Their report, inauspiciously titled “Chinese player to turn out in England”, was typical of the coverage reserved for the man born in Buxton to an English mother and a father hailing from China’s southern province of Guangdong, as it relied heavily on details of his ethnic background to make the most normal of debuts into headline news.

The short piece didn’t ooze any racial hostility though; instead, it looked like an expression of genuine astonishment at what was perceived to be a huge novelty and something of a landmark for football on the British Isles.

The unusual headline must have drawn the attention of quite a few patrons of the pubs on and around Nethergate; perhaps some

of them, their curiosity piqued by an unexpected addition to a game still far from today’s cosmopolitanism, were even keen to find out that Soo’s Stoke City was bulldozed 6-1 by Middlesbrough on the following Saturday.

Certainly none of them imagined that, more than half a century down the line, their sons and grandsons would live to see Dundee itself become the gateway for Chinese players into the Scottish Premier League, the starting point of a story which may not be studded with glory or paved with unforgettable moments but is still intriguing nonetheless.

Much of what you need to know about Fan Zhiyi is superbly condensed into a 2021 commercial for the Vans China footwear company, where the former centre-back gets teleported back to 1981 after hitting his head on the ground, only to find out that a