Jim MacNee's wife got sick. So he taught pigeons to play football

A few hundred metres away from the Baroque pomp of the City Chambers, a man with a shock of white hair and a bushy moustache is puffing away on a fag, attending to a flapping flock of excitable pigeons. 

Many pedestrians walk by, oblivious, or do a quick double take before carrying on with their day. This is unfortunate; they’re missing out on a truly unique street scene. In this case, “it” refers to a game of five-a-side football the man is orchestrating with his avian companions.

The man’s name is Jim MacNee. He cuts a trim figure in a red t-shirt, tight pair of jeans and Merell shoes, the red and yellow colourway a nod to his football team, Partick Thistle. He asked us not to divulge how old he is, suffice it to say MacNee looks good for his age. Ray-Bans perch precariously towards the end of his nose, defying gravity. He’s energetic, friendly to all who walk by, and funny, in an absurd, Bob Mortimer sort of way. 

Behind him, the pigeons peck away at the ball enthusiastically, rolling it this way and that to disperse the seeds inside. With MacNee ushering it back into play from one side, and a glass wall on the other, the ball inevitably wends its way into one of the goals now and then. It is football, but not as you know it. “I’ve not managed to get them used to the concept of sides, so changing halves would be a step too far,” MacNee explains.

For the past year and half, twice every weekday lunchtime, MacNee has set up his pitch on Cochrane Street. Every morning on his way to his work as a printer, he turns the corner to find the birds there waiting for him, giving him an “escort” up the street. Some pigeons live in one of the towers at City Chambers. They spot him from at least 100 metres away, and fly straight to him. 

MacNee has become a bit of a viral hit, appearing on Heart FM and BBC Radio Scotland. Videos of him circulate on TikTok and Reddit. A few months ago, a YouTube short documentary, Pigeon Football: The Beautiful Game, showed MacNee in a leather aviator’s jacket, sunnies and chelsea boots introducing himself as the doos’ manager. 

MacNee loves their “wee dopey faces”. At home in Darnley, robins, coal and great tits eat out his hand while he’s having a smoke and drinking a cider in the evening, hopping around his feet. Deer also frequent his garden, seemingly unbothered by his presence. “Terrible bus route, but I wouldn’t swap that back garden for anything, except maybe Glencoe or something.”

Normally the lunchtime fixture is between Dookla Prague and Shakhtar Doonetsk. The day before, MacNee had been on Heart FM, and set up a game between Scotland and Iceland for a change. “The psychic pigeons predict it’s gonna be two-nil tonight,” he says with a grin. “Oop, is that another one?” he asks, before adding, “Aw, Dooffon’s saved it”.

The doo fitba concept emerged, as many great ideas do, while MacNee was on a fag break from his council job. He had a soft spot for one bird, which he’d always feed seeds to on his smoke breaks. Then a few others caught on, and before MacNee knew it, there was a veritable flock joining in for a feed. His pal would count them as they puffed away on their tabs. By the time there were ten, his pal said to him, “You could get a five aside going here,” MacNee recounts. His response? “I bet you I can.” 

He headed to Poundland, bought some mini goals and chalk, drew out the pitch and began to experiment with various ways of getting the bird to hit the ball. Preliminary trials found that an ordinary ball didn’t work, so he coated it in syrup before covering it in seeds. “But that didnae work, because the ball would just stick, it wouldn’t move,” MacNee says, deadpan. Eventually, he landed on a toy ball for cats, with holes in it. He’d fill it up with seeds, then tape it up, leaving one small hole so only a couple of seeds would come out at a time. He had his ball. Game on. 

Today, it’s a streamlined operation. The miniature chalk pitch has been drawn neatly onto the pavement, with the tiny goal posts at each end. There is branded signage velcroed onto the wall above the pitch: ‘Just Doo It’; ‘Adoodas’; ‘Pidgy Power’; ‘Burderweiser’; ‘Beak’s’. 

It’s supposed to be a five aside, but there are at least a dozen doos knocking about the modified cat toy, which duly dispenses the birdseed as they tap and roll it with their beaks. MacNee points out Una, a player with only one leg, and begins to reel off other names, before realising one of the pigeons has put the ball in the back of the plastic net. He walks over and hits the scoreboard display, which emits tinny sound effects of crowds cheering.

He gets back to the task of introducing the pigeons. “That’s Franz Beak-enbauer, there’s Gerard Beak-é, that’s Scrawnaldinio over there.” A group of Australian tourists walk past and ask the score. “I’m going to have to take a video,” the woman tells MacNee. “You’ll need to, because no one’s gonnae believe you if you don’t,” he replies. Two of them pull out their tablets and start to film the game. One of them narrates the play-by-play for the recording. “Go on son, go on,” MacNee shouts for the benefit of the camera. 

MacNee’s top-scoring match to date was an 8–4 game, but that was before he reduced the matches from 30 minutes to 15. Rather than concerns about match fitness, MacNee had to alter play duration because he was unable to keep up with the number of ball changes and quantity of seed the birds were getting through in half an hour. 

“That’s brilliant isn’t it,” a tradey says to his pal as they walk past with their bags of tools.

Pigeon football isn’t MacNee’s only pastime. He also plays the guitar and makes model kits. As well as this, he loves to paint, old Glasgow street scenes, mainly. He once did a project documenting the streets around Maryhill, with the final works displayed at the Burgh Halls. He pulls out his phone and shows me his impression of Firhill, the old green and orange Corporation trolleybus rolling by as Jags fans make their way home. The painting is hanging up in Firhill, he says excitedly. 

All of these pastimes were put on hold a few years ago, when his wife Carol had a major stroke. In turn, the stroke led to vascular dementia. Tragically, this occurred not long after his mum’s funeral, who’d died two days before Christmas. MacNee’s spare time was spent differently after Carol fell ill; in addition to a one hour 15 minute commute to work each morning, in the evening he would undertake a 90 minute trek to hospital to visit his wife, and then finish with a two hour journey home to Darnley. “There was no time for anything, and that went on for nearly two years,” he says. A pigeon sneaks up and tries to peck some seeds out of the paper box. MacNee shoos it away. “This at lunchtime, for a year, that was all I had”. 

It was the interactions from passersby that spurred him on to hold multiple pigeon fixtures a week, rare times to talk to others. “People stop and have conversations and laugh at it. It's not like laughing at somebody or about somebody, it’s just sheer joy.” 

Sometimes people tell him they’ve been having a terrible time, but the football matches make them laugh and bring them a little bit of relief. That’s MacNee’s favourite thing to hear. Another highlight is when self-important business people march past, speaking on their phones about upcoming meetings, then do a double take. They stop to take the scene in and tell their colleagues about it, sometimes taking a photo to prove they’re not making it up. “It cheers me up that I cheer other people up. Some of the reactions are priceless.” 

One time, a guy stopped to ask if MacNee could get the birds to dance in formation, as the man said he ran an animal talent show. He claimed to have a breakdancing hedgehog and a yodelling cockatiel. “We had to cut the last one short, because an alpaca bit my aunt’s finger off,” he told MacNee.“This is like something from the opening credits of Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” MacNee thought. 

Halfway through MacNee’s new venture as manager of the buzziest new doos on the block, Carol had another stroke, this time fatal.

MacNee first met Carol when he was 19. He was designing posters for local bands’ shows at the time, and hanging out at a mutual acquaintance’s house, a printer. Carol was a friend of the printer’s wife. The pair would go to concerts together, particularly the ones that the boys would do the posters for. “I was stoned out my nut, wearing a cowboy hat, playing a guitar”. He was singing into a carpet fitter’s knee kicker for comic effect, as he thought it looked like an old 1940s microphone. The song Carol heard him singing as she walked into the room? ‘Lili Marlene’, sung in MacNee’s rudimentary German. 

They were together for 40 years. The story of their meet-cute was recounted by the celebrant at her funeral last October. As if to illustrate the physical impact of her death, MacNee pulls the belt loop on his jeans. “These are my son’s trousers, because during those two years, I lost about three and a half stone.” The day after her death, MacNee posted a picture of her in her graduation gown. “My beautiful Carol has slipped away from me,” he wrote.  

Eight months on, MacNee is still bereft, but his humour and mad verve is intact. He tells me he’s smartened up his image, and that “there are a lot of women who love the pigeon football”, although he’s not ready for dating yet. He has had a haircut though, and trimmed the moustache into a neat handlebar. In fact, he’s almost unrecognisable from a photo I see of him from 2017. He’s not taken the painting back up again yet, but he does have a guitar in the office. When he loads a big printing job that takes hours, he takes it out and plays between loading reams of paper. Meantime, he’s out every lunchtime with his team of doos, trying to coax a smile from strangers as they go about their day.