Football in the United States was then outwith British control. The USFA was affiliated to FIFA but the British equivalents had chosen not to do the same. It meant that contracts entered into in any of the home nations had no validity across the pond and there was also no wage-cap so that when McNab is said to have been offered £12 a week by the Boston club he could simply walk away from Cappielow and never look back. 

Alex McNab was the eldest child of parents from Argyll, his father a seaman from Campbeltown and she from Kilfinan. And he, beginning with work as a Message Boy, was to learn his football on Kempock St. in Gourock. And it was essentially from there that he was to arrive in New England in early 1925 having in 1924 travelled first to Canada. And he came alone, albeit temporarily. In 1917, recorded as an engineer as he would be on arrival in Quebec, he had married Gourock-girl, Mary Knox, he twenty-two, she nineteen, and they would have a first son who died in infancy, then two more with she and they eventually joining him but two years later.

And once arrived the decision to stay was clearly taken quickly. In 1928 he naturalised, having completed four seasons at Boston, just won the American Soccer League, seen the birth of a daughter and with a move to Fall River Marksmen about to take place. There he would have what were theoretically three more campaigns, with two more league-wins and a U.S. Challenge Cup, but in fact four with the club in 1932 decamping to play in New York. However, this was the era, in which Eastern American soccer little by little imploded financially with McNab completing one more season again in New England at New Bedford Whalers before at thirty-nine and with distinctive, greyed hair moving to the one place, St. Louis, Missouri, where the game remained strong due to the support of its local brewster, Stix, Bear and Fuller.