July 4, 2026

On this day each year, I read and reflect on a document created by courageous contrarians and dangerous dissenters. Regardless of your origin or the principles that guide you, the US Declaration of Independence is one of the most important documents ever written. This year, however, I want to hold that document next to a very different kind of stand; one taken not by Jefferson and others with quill pens, but by football fans in kilts and tartan scarves.

Yes, I am conflating an aspect of the World Cup with the Declaration of Independence. Bear with me; I think it works.

As I reflected in last year's article, the US Declaration of Independence is a 'stand' taken in 1776 by people who conceived of a very different future than most could have imagined. That stand made possible what was once thought impossible: a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, and a framework for self-governance that has inspired movements for independence, democracy, and human rights for centuries. It influenced the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 (Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen). At the same time, it drew inspiration from Scotland's own Declaration of Arbroath in 1320. Ideas, it turns out, travel. Stands taken in one time and place echo across centuries and continents.

It was not a perfect document. Jefferson's explicit condemnation of slavery was deleted before the ink was dry, an omission whose ramifications can still be felt today. We are often profoundly flawed as individuals, groups, organizations, and nations. But the Declaration was a starting point, a declared future that 'we the people' could strive toward and improve upon. What mattered was the stand itself: the act of imagining a different world and then taking actions in the present consistent with that imagined future.

Now consider the Tartan Army, who are enjoying being a viral sensation in this World Cup.

To put it mildly, Scottish football fans have not always enjoyed the best reputation. For decades, the story of Scottish football support was tangled up in hooliganism, sectarian rivalry, and the kind of tribal hostility that can make a stadium feel like a battlefield. Celtic and Rangers fans. Protestant v Catholic. Centuries of religious enmity condensed into ninety minutes of football. These divisions were, and remain, real and deep.

But at some point, driven in large part by the Scottish Football Supporters Association (SFSA), a group of Scottish fans asked a different kind of question. Not "how do we stop hooliganism?" but something more audacious: What would need to be true for us to be seen as incredible fans at any major tournament in the world? They stood in that imagined future and worked backward. They declared it. And then they started acting from it.

The Tartan Army's collective stand, like the Founders', was forged against a foil, in fact against the same foil. There was a feeling that because England was so associated with jingoism, Scotland thought, "We are going to be angels. Or just not wreck the place." That is a modest and humorous framing for what became something genuinely remarkable.

The result is the Tartan Army as it exists today: a collective of fans who set aside internal rivalries to show up for Scotland on the world stage with something remarkable: joy without menace, pride without arrogance, passion without destruction. And it goes considerably deeper than good behaviour in the stands.

Scotland's friendly against Ivory Coast in Liverpool in March was the 110th consecutive away match, stretching all the way back to Lithuania in 2003, at which a local children's charity received a £5,000 donation from the Tartan Army Sunshine Appeal. The roots of this tradition are worth understanding. In 1999, a group of Edinburgh Tartan Army members visited an orphanage in Sarajevo to meet children who had lost their parents to land mines during the war. One member had become a father just three months prior. The kids sang their national anthem; the Scots sang Flower of Scotland back to them. They donated a bundle of football tops, including shirts from Meadowbank Thistle, a small part-time Edinburgh club, and it became, in the words of Tartan Army Edinburgh chairman Martin Riddell, "the birth of the support's charitable side."

For this 2026 World Cup, The Sunshine Appeal partnered with an organization supporting homeless kids, and donated £10,000 to a children’s hospital in Rhode Island while serenading the patients from outside the hospital. As chairman Neil Forbes describes it: "We see ourselves as ambassadors for our country. The whole idea is to bring a ray of sunshine to kids' lives wherever Scotland play."

But the impact doesn't stop with charitable giving. The Tartan Army brings something harder to quantify but unmistakable in its effect: it transforms the cities it visits. Philanthropy, good humour, and integrating into the local culture are at the heart of what it means to travel with the Scotland national team. As Iain King, who reported on major tournaments for Scottish newspapers before moving to Canada, puts it: "The thing people here say most often is, 'No Scotland, No Party'. We bring the fun."

That fun, it should be said, is considerable. The Tartan Army are not abstemious visitors. Before Euro 2024 in Germany, the Sunshine Appeal chairman was invited to the German consulate in Edinburgh, and officials thought the estimate of 100,000 traveling Scots was a joke, until Munich, the beer capital of the world, was drunk dry before a ball had even been kicked. The estimate was conservative: it turned out to be 200,000 fans, or about 4% of Scotland’s population who traveled to Germany. In 1999, when Scotland fans congregated in Prague's old town square and the local bars ran out of alcohol, the riot police arrived expecting trouble. Instead, when the lorries arrived with more beer, the Scots hopped aboard and helped unload the kegs themselves. The police came for a riot and found a volunteer workforce.

What is extraordinary is that the revelry and the values coexist without contradiction. The party is real. So is the purpose. If anyone steps out of line, the fans self-police. It doesn't always work, but by and large it does, and that is how they have earned their respect. That balance of joy and responsibility, of pride and self-awareness, is perhaps the most instructive thing about the Tartan Army. They know who they are, and whom they want to be, and they hold both with a light touch. As David Duke, founder of Street Soccer Scotland, puts it: "We have this 'It's rubbish being Scottish' patter, and we moan about the weather, but you never feel prouder to be Scottish than when you leave it. People seem to feel at home with us because we don't take ourselves too seriously."

This is not a small thing. Changing a narrative, especially one rooted in sectarian history, in generational grievance, in identity itself, also requires elements of courage the Founders were writing about in Philadelphia in 1776. It requires the willingness to imagine a future that does not yet exist and to take actions in the present that feel slightly absurd until, one day, they don't.

We need that capacity urgently, right now.

We live in a moment of profound and accelerating polarization across six continents. In many democracies around the world, the center seems to be collapsing while the edges harden. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence arrives in a year when the principles it enshrines feel simultaneously more celebrated and more contested than at any point. Freedom of speech. Equal protection under the law. The right to dissent. These are not abstract values. They are load-bearing walls of healthy societies. And some of those walls are showing cracks.

And yet, crucially, the cracks are not the whole story. The cracks are where you are standing when you look backward from the present into the past. They are real. The grievances that produced them are real. But if you turn around, face forward, and instead take a leap to stand in the future you want to inhabit, something changes. Not the facts. Not the injustices. Not the work that remains. What changes is your relationship to action. Suddenly, the question is not "how did we get here?" but "what do I do now, in this moment, to pull the present toward that future?" And that question has answers.

This is what the SFSA understood when they reimagined what Scottish fans could be. They did not wait for the sectarian divisions to heal, or for hooliganism to disappear on its own, or for some perfect moment of readiness that would never arrive. They acted. A group of fans visited an orphanage in post-war Sarajevo in 1999, sang songs with grieving children, and handed over football shirts. That was the action. It was small. It was immediate. It was taken in the face of a history in a place synonymous with its own political violence, and it became the seed of something that has now touched 110 cities and hundreds of thousands of lives.

The Founders did the same, albeit with far greater risk and consequence. In the summer of 1776, with a war already underway, with no guarantee of victory, with every signer of the Declaration risking death for treason, they did not wait. They wrote it down. They declared the future. They signed their names. That act of commitment, taken not in safety but in the middle of the storm, or one of those ‘cracks’ in the wall, is what gave the idea its power. It is easy to articulate a vision when the outcome is certain. It means nothing then. Vision declared in the face of adversity and acted upon immediately is what moves the world.

This is the gift that the Founders offer us today. Not a roadmap. Not a guarantee. But proof, living, documented, still unfolding proof, that the act of declaring a better future and then taking one concrete step toward it, right now, not later, not when conditions improve, not when the other side comes around, now! That act creates hope. Not as a feeling that descends upon you, but as something you generate through motion. You do not find hope by looking at what is broken. You create it by building what comes next.

So: what future are you declaring? And what is the one thing you can do today, not someday, today, to begin living from it?

What the Tartan Army understood, and what the Founders understood, imperfectly but courageously, is that you cannot build a different future by relitigating the past. You can acknowledge the past. You must. You can hold it with honesty, and grief, and appropriate anger. But at some point, the question must shift from "who wronged whom?" to "what future are we declaring?" The stand comes first. The actions follow.

The 56 signers of the Declaration were hardly saints. Many were slaveholders. Most were privileged men of property whose initial vision of 'all men are created equal' was embarrassingly narrow. And yet the stand they took, the declared future they articulated, became a container into which subsequent generations could pour their struggles, expanding and reinterpreting its meaning in ways the original signers could not have foreseen and might not have endorsed. That is not a failure of the document. That is evidence of its power.

So, as we mark the 250th year of that declaration, here are the lessons I carry with me, drawn from Philadelphia in 1776 and from the Tartan Army:

Declare the future first. The Founders did not wait until they had won to articulate what they stood for. The SFSA and the Tartan Army did not wait until they had fixed Scottish football culture to describe the fans they intended to become. The declaration precedes the reality. This is not wishful thinking; it is the structure of all meaningful change.

Set aside the rivalries that diminish you. Celtic and Rangers fans standing together for Scotland. Colonists from thirteen distinct colonies with competing interests signing a single document. Neither was easy, and both required choosing a larger identity over a smaller one. In a polarized world, this is perhaps the hardest and most necessary thing we can do.

Lead with impact, not with grievance. Grievance is real. Injustice is real. But movements that lead only with what they are against tend to hollow out over time. The Tartan Army leads with what they are for: for Scotland, for football, for the communities they visit, for the simple human pleasure of being somewhere together. The Declaration leads with what it is for: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Start there.

Pride without supremacy. The Tartan Army's genius is that their pride is not hierarchical. They are not better than you. They are as good as you, and want to learn from you. This is a different kind of pride: one that does not require the diminishment of others to sustain itself. It is the kind of pride that can share a stadium, share a city, share a planet.

Leave every place better than you found it. This goes far beyond cleaning up after yourself. The Tartan Army's model, sustained and organized largely through the SFSA, is one of genuine, structured community investment, but it is not merely financial. The Tartan Army integrates into local communities, connects with local people, makes friends with fans from other nations, and leaves behind not just clean streets but real human connections. They don't just pass through: they arrive. And the cities they visit are richer for it, in spirit, in solidarity, and sometimes in sobriety (briefly!). That is what it means to Lead with Impact.

Endure. Neither the Declaration nor the Tartan Army produced their results overnight. The work is hard, the setbacks are real, and the temptation to abandon the declared future in favour of immediate, tribal satisfaction is always present. Resilience is not stubbornness. It is the discipline to return, again and again, to the stand you have taken.

Reading the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights (and the Declaration of Arbroath) is a small gift I give myself each year. It forces me to ask what is essential, and why. This year, stories and video clips of the Tartan Army join that reflection, and they all make me smile, inside and out.

We are living through hard moments. The polarization is real. The threats to democratic institutions are real. The temptation to retreat into smaller and smaller circles of trust, to decide that only people who look like us, vote like us, think like us, or support the same team deserve our solidarity, is powerful and understandable. And it is highly corrosive.

But the antidote is not waiting. It is not analysis. It is not awaiting the perfect conditions that never quite arrive. The antidote is the next action, taken now, in the direction of the future you have declared. Turn around. Face forward. Take the step. Taking those steps means, as the Tartan Army sings, “Even when we lose, we win, win, win!”

We can all Lead with Impact. We can all take a Stand.

Happy Fourth of July. And yes, No Scotland, No Party!

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This article heavily references an article by Jordan Campbell entitled "No Scotland, No Party: Meet the Tartan Army and their 110-game run of unheralded altruism," The Athletic, June 3, 2026. Read it!

It was also inspired by a great friend, Jay Greenspan, co-founder of JMJ Associates, who embodies the best of all these elements.