Bank of Scotland Put McTominay’s Kick on 100 Notes

Bank of Scotland produced 100 legal-tender £20 notes bearing Scott McTominay’s overhead kick, then offered 50 of them through a charity auction and prize draw. Emma Noble, chair of the bank’s Scottish executive committee, later said the campaign had raised around £195,000 for Crisis.

The bank called the run collector-style and legal currency at the same time, and it sent the auction and prize-draw take to Crisis, its partner in a drive to end homelessness in Scotland by 2040. The sale closed two days after Scotland’s World Cup ended in Miami.

Only 50 of the 100 Notes Went Public

The unveiling came on Monday, 25 May 2026, under the bank’s own title Scott McTo-money. McTominay, the Napoli and Scotland midfielder, is on the note because of the overhead kick that opened a 4-2 win over Denmark at Hampden Park in November 2025, the result that sent Scotland to a first men’s World Cup since 1998.

The public route was narrower than the print run. The bank’s campaign page said only 50 are available to be won in a prize draw and an auction, 25 in each. The other 50 never went through those two channels.

HOW THE 100 NOTES WERE SPLIT

Two pop-up vaults gave fans another crack at a note if they could open a code, one day each in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The bank did not publish how many of the 100 sat in those boxes.

The Kick Is an Overprint on Everyday Polymer

Katie Smith, a Scottish illustrator, drew the kick with McTominay’s permission. The image sits on the familiar Bank of Scotland £20, with the Forth Bridge still in the design and the usual banknote furniture around it. McTominay’s name and a signature sit beside the figure.

Collectors who read the sale catalogue got a drier description than the press release. The notes are standard polymer twenties, dated 1 June 2019, with a later ink overprint, not a fresh commemorative printing protected with banknote inks after the press run. Serials sit in a mid-run block rather than a special prefix of the kind Bank of Scotland used on its Queensferry Crossing twenties.

They are still money. The bank told entrants the notes are meant as collectors’ items and remain legal currency, which is a polite way of saying nobody is expected to buy a pie with one.

Moments like that belong to everyone who follows the team, so seeing my goal featured on a Scottish banknote feels incredibly special.

Scott McTominay, Scotland midfielder, Bank of Scotland announcement

He also said the whole thing felt “a bit surreal.” The bank thanked SSC Napoli for helping with the campaign. Noble said football and banknotes are both part of Scotland’s story, and that the overhead kick was already regarded as one of the country’s greatest goals.

How Fans Could Get a Note

From 9am on 22 May 2026 until 11am on 26 June 2026, UK residents aged 18 or over could enter a prize draw or bid at Spink. The draw asked for a suggested £10 donation, with a free postal entry if you wrote to the Leith Agency in Edinburgh. Winners were to be emailed within 14 days, and the notes were to go in the post no later than 30 July 2026.

THREE WAYS IN

• Prize draw: 25 notes, £10 a go online, or one free postal entry per envelope.
• Spink auction: 25 lots, including 14 signed notes and one lot with boots.
• Vault shootout: Glasgow Queen Street Station on 30 May and Edinburgh’s St James Quarter on 17 June, 9am to 5pm, code required.

Spink hosted the 25-lot McTominay charity auction as a timed online sale closing from 10am BST on 26 June. The house charged a 22.5 percent buyer’s premium, with VAT on that premium for UK buyers, and no VAT on the hammer. Bank of Scotland said it would pass 100 percent of prize-draw and auction proceeds to Crisis UK and would not take production, distribution or marketing costs out of the pot.

THE SALE CALENDAR

1. 22 May 2026: Prize draw and auction open at 9am BST, three days before the public unveiling.
2. 25 May 2026: Bank of Scotland publishes the design and the Crisis tie-up.
3. 30 May 2026: Vault at Glasgow Queen Street Station, 9am to 5pm.
4. 17 June 2026: Vault at St James Quarter, Edinburgh, 9am to 5pm.
5. 26 June 2026: Draw and auction close at 11am BST.
6. 30 July 2026: Last date given for posting prize-draw notes.

The vault days sat inside the World Cup group. The auction bell rang after Brazil had already gone home with the points.

Crisis Received About £195,000

By July, Noble was citing around £195,000 for Crisis Scotland from the McTominay note. Maeve McGoldrick, Crisis Scotland’s head of policy and communications, had said in May that the auction and prize-draw money would help people rebuild their lives and pay for campaigning to end all forms of homelessness in Scotland by 2040.

The official housing picture that Crisis then had to answer was older than the notes. Scottish Government figures covering 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026, published on 22 September, recorded 41,443 homelessness applications in 2025-26, 197 more than the 41,246 of the year before. That year closed on 31 March, seven weeks before the note was unveiled, so the totals are the baseline Crisis was already facing, not a report card on the sale.

SCOTLAND’S HOUSING COUNT TO 31 MARCH 2026

• Temporary housing: 19,004 households on 31 March 2026, up 10 percent from 17,240, the highest since records began in 2002.
• Children: 10,715 children in temporary accommodation, up 5 percent from 10,180.
• Open cases: 34,964 households still waiting for a case to be resolved, up 10 percent from 31,873.
• Rough sleeping: 2,949 households said someone had slept rough the night before they asked for help, up from 2,464.

Crisis said 19,004 households in temporary accommodation was a record, and that 35,002 households were assessed as homeless or threatened with homelessness. McGoldrick called the figures stubbornly high and said prevention law had to be brought into practice if the 2040 aim was going to mean anything on the ground.

£195,000 is real money for a charity. It is also a first-sale premium on 50 pieces of polymer that will now trade, if they trade at all, among people who already have a home for a picture frame.

Scotland’s World Cup Ended in the Group

The note was sold as a souvenir of a return to the top table. The team then played three games in Group C and went home.

SCOTLAND AT THE 2026 WORLD CUP

John McGinn scored the Haiti winner. Morocco won with an early Ismael Saibari goal. Brazil scored through Vinicius Junior twice and Matheus Cunha once. McTominay started all three matches and did not add a World Cup goal. Against Brazil he met Kieran Tierney crosses with his head and put one effort over after Lawrence Shankland scuffed a shot.

Putting that Hampden kick on legal tender weeks before kick-off in the United States left the souvenir hanging once the group was done. The object still shows a goal that did send Scotland to the tournament. The tournament itself lasted three matches.

Note-Issuing Rights Made the Souvenir Possible

Bank of Scotland was founded on 17 July 1695 and in 1696 became the first bank in Europe to issue paper currency, a right it still holds. Sir Walter Scott stays on the everyday notes because of his 1826 fight to keep that Scottish privilege. The McTominay run is what that privilege looks like when a bank wants a football moment, a charity total and a collector object in the same product.

They have used scarce notes as a fundraising tool before. In 2022 the bank auctioned 186 limited Flora Murray £100 notes and said that sale raised £241,080 for Mental Health UK and the Royal Free charity where Murray trained. The Queensferry Crossing twenty, by contrast, was a true commemorative with its own QF and QC prefixes, not a stamp on a mid-run sheet.

McTominay’s kick is now a legal-tender overlay on a Forth Bridge twenty, in a run of 100, with 50 sold for Crisis and the rest kept off those two public tracks. By 30 July 2026 the prize-draw copies were due in the post. They will live in drawers and frames at face value of £20, while Crisis still has a 2040 target and a housing count that, for the year that ended in March, did not move the right way.