That Charles Miller introduced Association Football to São Paulo AC, and thereby to Brazil, has not been heavily contested. On the contrary:

Brazilians date the introduction of football to their country from the moment that Miller disembarked from the SS Magdalena, in November 1894, with luggage that included – legend insists – a copy of the Hampshire FA rulebook, a couple of football uniforms, a pair of football boots, two deflated footballs and a pump.

The son of a Scottish father and an Anglo-Brazilian mother, nine year-old Master Miller came to Southampton from his native São Paulo, in July 1884, to attend Banister Court School. The school’s reputable cricket and football clubs were built around the “muscular Christian” staff.

Such was the quality of their football that, when the Hampshire FA was formed in 1887, the school was obliged to enter the Senior Cup, whereas the Saints – still the St Mary’s Young Men’s Association at that juncture – played in the Junior competition (albeit as winners) for its first three seasons.

Despite his slight build, Miller developed into an outstanding athlete, graduating to the school football team in 1890, aged 15. At the start of the 1891-92 season, he took part in a trial match between two St Mary’s XIs.

Playing at outside-left for the losing side, Charles opened the scoring in the first minute and had a good press. Even so, it would be April 1892 before he played in a friendly for St Mary’s, scoring in a 3-1 win against an army-select XI. Two days later, he turned out for the Corinthians, who had arrived a forward short, to play the Hampshire FA.

The visitors won 1-0, but a partisan local press applauded the manner in which the 17 year-old Miller acquitted himself in the company of some of the game’s leading amateurs – notably CB Fry.

For the following two seasons, Charles was a regular in the Hants FA XI and played in several friendlies for the Saints. His competitive career for St Mary’s consisted of four games in the Cricket Club Charity Cup: a winning Final in 1893 and the three games that it took to win the Cup again in 1894.

Although by now a centre-forward for Banister Court, Miller was on the wing in all four of these matches. Having left school, he enjoyed an eventful cricket season in the summer of 1894. Then, on Friday 5 October, the very eve of the Saints’ inaugural match in the Southern League, Charles Miller sailed down Southampton Water and into legend. He left behind a considerable, if short-lived, reputation, one that can be traced in the sporting columns of Southampton’s five newspapers, but which was well-captured in his school magazine, where he was dubbed their “best player: wonderfully quick; might work harder; scores goals with great consistency.”

In March 1904, almost 10 years after his return home, Charles submitted a progress report to that magazine – on how he had assembled Brazil’s first football club, from among the cricketing ex-patriots of the São Paulo Athletic Club; how they had won the first two championships of the “League” he’d helped to form; and how no fewer than 2,000 footballs had been sold in his city in the last 12 months. Yet that was only the beginning. Charles Miller would become synonymous, in his homeland, with the introduction of football and is immortalised by having a kick named after him: when a player kicked a ball from behind him, over his own head, this became known as a “Charles Miller”, later shortened to “chaleira”, a corrupted form of “Charles”.

His contribution has been less honoured in Southampton than in São Paulo. In 1904, by which time he had been appointed to the honorary position of Acting British Vice-Consul in Santos, while running his uncle’s travel business, Charles travelled to Rio, to meet the Southampton players when they docked en route to a tour of Argentina and Uruguay. It would be another 44 years, however, before Southampton came to São Paulo. They incurred their third defeat in three games, as they struggled to adjust to the “entirely different game” that had by then developed as Miller’s legacy – to quote the reaction (as explained in Ted Ballard’s profile) of one of the many bemused tourists.