So when and how did Hogan come to be be infected by the Scots football virus. The answer is probably fully in his mid-twenties and by paying attention. He is said to have been a bright boy, who his father wanted to become a priest. The family was strongly Catholic. He was even sent to a seminary in Manchester but on finishing there in 1900 returned to Burnley, where the family now stayed and like other members became a mill-worker. But meantime he had also shown talent on the football pitch as an inside-forward, started locally with Burnley Belvedere, stepped up to Nelson as it won the North-East Lancashire Combination League and Shield, before at twenty joining Rochdale as it was formed, from there in 1903 to be signed by Burnley in the Football League.

Initially it must have suited him well. In two seasons he made fifty starts, netting a dozen times. He may even have begun to absorb Scottish football there because of the presence at the club until 1899 of a certain Harry Bradshaw. That was before getting into an argument about money and in 1905 moving on to Fulham, now joining Bradshaw, who there was in the process of going fully Caledonian. Jock Hamilton, Scottish centre-half, had become Assistant Trainer to John Studdart, who had also come down from Burnley. Seven Scots had been recruited the previous season, making seventeen in a squad of twenty-nine, and, although by 1906-7 it was seven in twenty-three, one was the ageing but still excellent R.C. Hamilton. 

Fulham would win the Southern League title in 1906 and again in 1907, stepping up in 1907-8 to the Football League by when Hamilton had moved on, back to Rangers, and with, after just eighteen games and five goals in three campaigns, but including an FA Cup semi-final, in late 1908 Hogan dropping back, albeit briefly, into the Southern League with Swindon. But importantly on joining the Wiltshire club he did so having observed and been convinced by the technique, application and fitness training-routines of the Scots he had been coached by and played alongside at Craven Cottage. 

However, after just nine games but also nine goals at the County Ground Hogan was, aged twenty-five, on his way back into the Football League and also to Lancashire, this time to Bolton in the Second Division but with which he would see immediate promotion to the First. And it was there that he seems first to have had the idea of coaching following a pre-season tour, presumably in 1909, to Holland and especially Dordrecht and then seemingly consolidated by a leg-injury he had picked up and which would in 1913 eventually end his playing career.       

The Hogan coaching career that began for two years in 1910 with the Dutch club and lasted forty more is well documented. (See Wikipedia). It saw him taking the principle of disciplined training and technique over overt physicality, of footballing brains over brawn, onward to Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Germany, France, England and eventually even back to Scotland. He directly coached the Austrian team built around his own Bob Hamilton, Matthias Sindelar. He imparted the ideas at the core two decades later of the Magic Magyars and in doing so he helped to preserve the tactical principles that had for more than half a century made, when on a level playing field, the Scottish game of possession, passing and movement largely invincible. In Continental Europe and elsewhere directly or by proxy he would in great part shape Total Football and thus the modern game.