By then too he had played a season with Vale Wanderers before, at inside-forward, stepping up to Vale of Leven in the season after the club had lost in final of the Scottish Cup and the decline began. James McMillan, Dan Paton, Jimmy McLachlan, James Sharp, Archie Osborne, John Murray and Andy Whitelaw had gone south or were about to go and once in the first team it did not take long for McVean to follow. At the end of his first season he too was on his way with the result that, unlike several of the others, he would because of the then rules never be capped. 

He stayed first in Scotland with the 1891-92 season spent at Third Lanark. But in 1892 at twenty-one he too went south, recruited by newly formed Liverpool. There he netted the club's first goal in competitive football, as he captained the Team of all the Macs, which included several players, he would have known well, Renton's Andrew Hannah, Duncan McLean, James McBride, James Kelso and Jonathan Cameron, Dumbarton's John Miller. And when it won a place in the Football League he was again first on the score-sheet. Furthermore in two more years at the club he would see it into the First Division. 

Meantime he had returned to Alexandria in 1892 to marry Margaret Millar. They were to have five children, three daughters and two sons, all born in Alexandria despite from five years on Merseyside Malcolm moving for a season at Burnley, a return to Scotland but to Dundee, a season at Bedminster in Bristol and time in Clydebank to 1900. Then by 1901 he had returned to live in Alexandria and was working in the print-fields. 

But back in Scotland his health would go downhill. He would die in 1907 at the age of just thirty-six and at his grand-mother's home in Bonhill. He would be survived by Margaret, who would die probably in 1952 in Dunblane.