THERE was a touch of class from Ajax this week when they tweeted a tribute to East Kilbride FC on the occasion of their 26th win in a row. As impressive as the form of Martin Lauchlan's side has been since a win over Whitehill Welfare back in March - they certainly roared back to record a 4-2 win against Vale of Leithen at the weekend - those sticklers and spoilsports at the Guinness Book of Records insist that the inferior standard of competition they have been facing each week in the Scottish Lowland League means they don't quite measure up to the official mark set by a famous Ajax side including Johan Cruff and Johan Neeskens between October 1971 and March 1972. "Great job guys! Well done! 26 wins in a row!" read the Ajax tweet, which tellingly didn't exactly admit parity between the two achievements either.

Some clever PR is clearly at work here but in truth football has always been built on a network of unlikely correspondences between clubs, long before social media got involved. Like most walks of life, success isn't just a matter of what you know - it is about who you know. The most successful teams thrive on a network of personal contacts, which are cultivated year in year out. Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United was a master of this, deploying a personal touch to send out official club Christmas cards and such like each year, which nonetheless also served to project the soft power of the club as an institution. If there was ever likely to be a spin-off in terms of first refusal on a talented young player coming through the ranks, rest assured they wanted to get it.

There is no suggestion of Kilby becoming a feeder club for the Dutch giants - now that would be a way to smash a few further records in the lowland league - but special relationships between clubs arise all the time, whether organically or due to the involvement of one well-placed individual or another. When Italian giants Juventus were looking for a glamour friendly to christen their state-of-the-art new stadium a few years back, who else but Notts County? The old lady of Italian football received some replacement Notts County shirts from an English-born-player called John Savage back in 1903, and have worn black-and-white stripes ever since.

The late Jan Stepek, of Glens Hutchisons Robertsons and Stepek fame, ended up in Lanarkshire after his family was torn asunder by World War II. Invited onto the Hamilton Accies board, where he served as chairman and owner between 1969 and 1987 and 2000 and 2003, it wasn't long until a few favours were being called in. Suddenly the Accies were ahead of the rest of the world when it came to importing players from beyond the Iron curtain in the form of Polish internationals Alfred Olek and Witold Szygula, with glamour friendlies taking place with the likes of Legia Warsaw, as rumour would have it in return for secret consignments of white goods being sneaked back into Eastern Europe.

Hamilton are still, of course, reaping the benefits of the decision to sell the two Jameses, McCarthy and McArthur, to Wigan in 2009. It certainly didn't help smooth the transfer's progress that Roberto Martinez had been a player at Motherwell previously in his career, while Hamilton was Graeme Jones's last club. Danny Redmond and Jon Routledge are a couple who moved in the opposite direction.

Sometimes the link is formalised on the business sheet. East Kilbride's new friends at Ajax have an off-shoot in Cape Town, as do Feyenoord in Ghana, a handy mechanism to hoover up the best native talent on the continent. Likewise, who could forget the bewildering array of mainly Lithuanian footballers being trafficked between Hearts, FBK Kaunas and MTZ Ripo-Minsk of Belarus under the mystifying reign of Vladimir Romanov? Or perhaps, a more successful recent example in Watford FC, who currently sit seventh in the Barclays Premier League table.

Watford are owned by the Pozzo family, which also owns Udinese in Italy, and up until this season owned Granada in Spain. Players such as Almen Abdi, Matej Vydra and our own Ikechi Anya have all benefited by this relationship, being shipped from one part of the Pozzo empire to another.

Celtic play friendlies from time to time with St Pauli, and have a link-up with Mexican outfit Santos Laguna, and still bear the fruits of their close working relationship with Manchester City, even though Ronny Deila - who spent time studying and working at the Etihad before joining the Parkhead side - has long gone. Jason Denayer, John Guidetti and now Patrick Roberts have all been borrowed Blues, while the English side get the benefit of getting their young players some playing in time in front of a big club. Rangers' friendship with Linfield is well-known, while one of the things Mark Warburton brings to the table is close relationships with London sides Tottenham and Arsenal. Scottish football may usually be the junior partner in these relationships but it always helps to have friends in high places.