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    #46
    Did You Know?

    In the 1920s, soccer was big in America. Not big in the way that baseball was big (this was the era of Ruth and Gehrig) or college football was big (these were the days when Ivy League rivalries played out as violent eruptions in the mud), but at its height, the top American soccer league had tens of thousands of fans, featured some of the world's best players, and looked set to challenge the fledgling NFL in the competition to supply the nation with a post-October pastime. Along the way, this country's early soccer entrepreneurs also managed to alienate the United States from the international soccer community, lay the groundwork for America's greatest moment of World Cup glory, and generally create one of the most bizarre and fascinating might-have-beens in U.S. sports history.

    The story of American soccer in the 1920s is in large part the story of the American Soccer League, which was founded suavely, at Manhattan's Hotel Astor, in 1921. The ASL didn't cover the whole country—just a slice of the industrial Northeast—and it wasn't the only professional American soccer league. It was, however, the largest and most popular, and it was also the one that briefly threatened to disrupt the international order of the game.

    The ASL drew its teams from the metropolises (the Boston Wonder Workers, the Brooklyn Wanderers, New York Field Club) and from industrial towns (the Paterson Silk Sox, the New Bedford Whalers, the Bridgeport Bears). The team owners ranged from Charles Stoneham, a Tammany Hall character with strong ties to organized crime—his purchase of the New York Giants baseball team in 1919 was brokered by notorious World Series fixer Arnold Rothstein—to the Bethlehem Steel Corp., which absorbed its employees' recreational team in the mid-1910s and, using the same ruthless efficiency it brought to the forging of the Chrysler Building, quickly developed one of the era's outstanding dynasties.

    Steel wasn't the only industry represented in the ASL's ranks. The 1920s were a period of amazing economic expansion and, until the passage of 1924's Johnson-Reed Act, a welcoming immigration policy. Factories employed large numbers of European workers, who brought a love of soccer with them to their new country. In the ASL and elsewhere, businesses sponsored and ran their own teams, a practice that led to some fantastic box-score headings. (Indiana Flooring vs. J&P Coats!) America's soccer capital was probably Fall River, Mass., an industrial center whose factories employed large numbers of British immigrants. The Fall River Marksmen, owned by local impresario Sam Mark, attracted crowds in the five figures to Mark's Stadium, which was nestled just over the Rhode Island border to avoid Massachusetts blue laws. The Marksmen won seven ASL titles and eventually surpassed Bethlehem Steel as the period's dominant team.

    Clubs affiliated with American industry had a significant advantage over their rivals at home and abroad. With business booming in the United States, American clubs were able to pay much higher wages than their European counterparts. And at a time when almost no one made a living exclusively from playing soccer, clubs like Bethlehem Steel were also able to offer their players high-paying factory jobs. As soon as the ASL took off, American teams started luring players from some of the top clubs in Europe. Before long, there were 50 European internationals—players good enough to be included on their countries' national teams—playing in the American league.

    Some ASL owners, like Sam Mark, were out to make a fortune from soccer's rising popularity. Others were driven by philanthropy, obsession, or both. The Bethlehem Steel team was essentially the private fiefdom of a soccer-mad corporate executive named Horace Edgar Lewis, who became a company vice president in 1916. The year before, Charles M. Schwab had given the company's largely immigrant work force $25,000 to spend on sport. Lewis put many more dollars toward the task of building an elite soccer team and lured a number of top European professionals to Pennsylvania. He scouted, lobbied, and sometimes even played for Bethlehem Steel—his handball against Brooklyn Field Club knocked his team out of the 1914 National Challenge Cup. His brother Luther, also a Bethlehem executive, served as the ASL's first president.

    The American clubs' recruitment tactics frequently ran afoul of international contract protocols, provoking an outcry on the far side of the Atlantic. In 1925, the Scottish Football Association convened a special meeting in Glasgow to grumble over the "American menace." (According to the writer for the Fall River Globe, "They metaphorically grasped the Scottish equivalent to an Irish shillelagh with which to punch the heads of the rulers of the soccer game in U.S.A.") And in 1927, FIFA, then and now soccer's international governing body, compelled the secretary of the ASL to appear before its congress in Finland, where they demanded that American teams stop ignoring international contracts.

    There were great American players to go along with all the stars from Europe. Actually, what happened was what so often happens in American life: Yesterday's cultural imports were transformed into today's native culture. Archie Stark, the great striker who scored 232 goals in 205 appearances for Bethlehem Steel, was born in Glasgow, emigrated to the United States at 13, played his first organized soccer in New Jersey for a team called the Scottish-Americans, and served with the U.S. Army in France during World War I. Two of the greatest players in American history, Bert Patenaude and Billy Gonsalves ("the Babe Ruth of American soccer"), grew up in Fall River, Gonsalves the son of Portuguese parents and Patenaude of French-Canadian ancestry. Alongside a gaggle of similarly hyphenated ASL players, Patenaude and Gonsalves played for the United States in the first World Cup, held in Uruguay in 1930. The team recorded the first shutout (and Patenaude the first hat trick) in World Cup history as Team USA finished in third place—still the best-ever finish for a team outside the South American and European confederations.

    The ASL was riding high until just before that first World Cup, when the league was done in by a bit of vicious and lavishly unnecessary political infighting. From the beginning, the league had maintained an uneasy relationship with the United States Football Association, the governing body of American soccer. The owners chafed against the restrictions the USFA imposed on rule changes and scheduling; the USFA saw the popular and profitable ASL as uncontrolled and rebellious. In the eyes of the ASL owners, the only thing keeping soccer from mainstream acceptance was a sense that it was too "foreign." They wanted to Americanize the game by introducing substitutions, determining league position by winning percentage rather than by the points system used in Europe, and adding playoffs to the end of the season. The league instituted a number of changes over USFA objections, and some of them turned out to be ahead of their time. The ASL allowed player substitutions as early as 1926; the World Cup finally came around in 1970.

    Everything fell to pieces in 1928. That's when Charles Stoneham, he of the mob ties and Tammany Hall connections, persuaded the ASL to boycott the USFA's annual Challenge Cup tournament, gate receipts from which provided a substantial chunk of the USFA's revenue. Three ASL teams entered anyway, including Bethlehem Steel. In response, the ASL banned the three teams for violating league rules. FIFA and the USFA came down on the side of the ASL's three outlaw clubs, declaring the league's actions out of bounds and excommunicating it from the order of international soccer. Disastrously, the USFA then formed a rival association, the Eastern Soccer League, to compete with the exiled ASL. There followed a period of Byzantine maneuvering, galvanic rhetoric, and brickbats. By the time the "soccer war" was resolved, the stock market had crashed, the fans were disillusioned and angry, and everyone was hideously confused. The Depression struck directly at the ASL's economic base by decimating American industry, and the dust cloud finally overwhelmed the league in 1932.


    That we know anything at all about the ASL today is largely thanks to the efforts of a few committed historians. David Wangerin's Soccer in a Football World, a history of the game in America, offers a concise and vivid portrait of the ASL years, particularly of the league's first secretary, Thomas Cahill, who spent much of his life trying to put soccer over in America and died in disappointment. But most of the credit for reviving the ASL's memory belongs to a soccer historian named Colin Jose, whose 1998 book American Soccer League: 1921-1931 is a meticulous and exhaustive reconstruction of all the league's lost records: match results, goal scorers, game rosters, league standings, player registers. The life of the league comes through in Jose's understated asides: an Egyptian-born player named Tewfik Abdallah was nicknamed "Toothpick" by the fans; ASL teams often traveled to away games not by bus or by train but by steamship, sailing up and down the East Coast.


    Well, a firm place in mainstream American culture isn't everything. The game flourished elsewhere, and—on account of the Web and satellite television—it's never been easier to follow elsewhere from America. Indeed, this could be the best time since the 1920s to be an American soccer fan. But as a new World Cup rolls around and the media prepares to make room for this curious foreign sport, it's worth remembering how easily elsewhere could have been here. In the 1920s, soccer—driven by wild economic growth, propelled by immigration, wrecked by a massive crash—might have been the most American sport of all.

    Comment


      #47
      World Cup

      SAMARA, Russia — There was little here to please the aesthetes, nothing much to arouse the adrenaline junkies.

      But after 90 straightforward, some might say dull, minutes of soccer on Saturday, England and its fans were awakened to this invigorating new reality: The team, young and until now unproven, is headed to its first World Cup semifinal since 1990.

      All it took was two headed goals and two strong saves for England to produce a competent, uncomplicated and sometimes uncompelling 2-0 victory over Sweden. Now the second-youngest team at the tournament — with an average age of 26 — is in striking distance of the final.

      Sweden 0 Final 2 England
      Quarterfinal
      Harry Maguire (30')
      Dele Alli (59')
      England will face Croatia, who beat Russia on penalty kicks, in a semifinal on Wednesday.

      “We’re not the finished article,” England’s manager, Gareth Southgate, said. “We don’t have renowned, world-class players yet, but we have lots of good, young players who are showing on a world stage that they’re prepared to be brave with the ball, try to play the right way and have showed some resilience over the last few weeks.”

      The England fan base in recent days has been rallying around a catchphrase — “It’s coming home” — that seemed at first to be cried out with a tinge of irony. It was the product of a perspective established and hardened through years of disappointment at the World Cup; now, increasingly, the slogan appears to harbor a sense of earnest expectation.

      Continue reading the main story
      More and more people have jumped on the bandwagon, succumbing to the team’s charms.

      The spiritual figurehead of the team in many ways has been Southgate, a former England player whose self-effacing enthusiasm has become central to the group’s appeal. With a subtle knack for storytelling, he has done as much as any columnist to build a narrative about his players as lovable underdogs.

      About their ambition to reach the final, rather than to play a third-place match after losing in the semifinals, Southgate said: “We spoke to the players today that none of us fancied going home. We’ve got to be here for another week, so it’s up to us the games we play in.”

      And asked about uniting their country during a period of political division, he said: “All these players come from different parts of the country, and there will be youngsters watching at home from the areas that they come from who they’ll be inspiring at this moment, and that is of course even more powerful than what we’re doing with our results.”

      The road to the final has looked surprisingly open for England for a while now, thanks at first to an easy group stage and now because of a series of fortuitous results in other games. England, with a different series of outcomes, could have faced Brazil or Germany in the quarterfinals and Spain in the next round.

      For all the perverse joy that neutral fans may have found in seeing the fall of the tournament’s traditional titans, it created the possibility for more games like the one on Saturday — a scrappy affair, with fewer dimensions. Neutral fans looking for an entertaining game here never stood a chance.

      The Swedes’ approach to this match threw a wet blanket over whatever possibility the occasion might have otherwise presented. On defense, they set up deeply and densely inside their own half, allowing England space to move outside on the wings but not much room to burrow through. The Swedes probed forward infrequently, and in straight lines.

      Sweden had advanced this far by playing this way, engineering soul-sucking, if ultimately praiseworthy, victories over South Korea and Mexico in the group stage and against Switzerland in the round of 16. “I respect Sweden’s style of play,” Mexico’s manager, Juan Carlos Osorio, had said after his team’s 3-0 loss, “but I don’t agree with it.”

      And England’s goals on Saturday, one in each half, seemed to do little to get Sweden to change its approach.

      The first goal came in the 30th minute, when Ashley Young floated a corner kick from the left side, spinning the ball toward the penalty spot, where Harry Maguire rose over the back of Sweden’s Emil Forsberg and thumped a header into the left corner of the goal. It was England’s 10th goal of the tournament, and its eighth from a set piece.

      England struck again in the 59th minute, when a looping cross from Jesse Lingard, and a lapse in defense from Sweden, released Dele Alli alone on the left post to deposit another header into the net.

      “They’re heavy, forceful, well organized,” Sweden’s manager, Janne Andersson, said of England. “It’s a good football team. I believe they are perfectly able to go all the way.”

      Comment


        #48
        A brief history of soccer in the US

        No, soccer is not going to displace baseball as America’s national pastime, or American football as the national game, or even basketball as the country’s third most popular professional team sport.

        But it’s starting to look like the “world game” might have finally found its feet in the world’s largest economy. And not just because the New York Times, in a much discussed article last month, says the sport has now become “a conversation topic you can no longer ignore.”

        Sure, more US kids play in organized soccer teams than play baseball, according to the Wall Street Journal (paywall), but its been that way for years.

        Participation-among-US-youths-aged-6-18-2012-2008_chartbuilder

        For real proof, look no further than that other great American passion: television. This year, NBC Universal has been airing English Premier League matches on its various channels (including its flagship broadcast network NBC) and ratings have been solid.

        In total, 30 million viewers have tuned in for Premier League matches this season, more than double the total last year when Fox Sports had the television rights. Nine of the 10 most watched Premier League games ever took place during the current season, and matches have, on average, drawn 440,000 viewers each, compared to 221,000 last year. This Sunday (May 11), for the season finale, NBC will air all 10 matches live across its various channels.

        Let’s stop to reflect on this. A foreign game, a foreign league, is being aired on US television, and people are actually watching it. This would have been unthinkable not that long ago in a nation that historically, has been very insular when it comes to its sport.

        This summer, from June 12 to July 13, soccer’s centerpiece event, the World Cup, is taking place in Brazil. For the first time since the US hosted it 20 years ago, the tournament will be held in a favorable time zone for American audiences. Arguably, it’s the best chance yet for soccer to really entrench itself into the American consciousness.

        A brief history of American soccer
        U.S. centre forward Joe Gaetjens is carried off by cheering fans after his team beat England 1-0 in the World Cup qualifier match at Belohorizonte, Brazil, June 28, 1950.
        US center-forward Joe Gaetjens is carried off by cheering fans after his team beat England 1-0 in the World Cup qualifier match at Belohorizonte, Brazil, June 28, 1950. (AP Photo)
        Soccer—or football as it’s known most everywhere else—has been played on American soil since at least the late 1800s. But the sport as we know it today had its first wave of popularity in the 1920s.

        This was outlined in a fascinating Slate piece four years ago in the run up to the last World Cup. In the 1920s, the US was in the midst of an enormous manufacturing boom. Waves of immigrants were arriving from Europe to work in factories, plants and mills, and they brought soccer with them. In 1921 the country’s first pro soccer competition of note, the American Soccer League (ASL), was formed; its foundation teams came from industrial towns like Fall River, Massachusetts and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

        Over the next decade, the league thrived. The Fall River Marksmen, for example, “drew five-figure” crowds, and (incredibly, given that soccer players earn millions today) teams were even able to lure top European talent with the promise of high-paying factory jobs. In 1930, at the inaugural World Cup in Uruguay (which was devoid of many top European teams) the US finished in third place. But by 1931, the ASL had collapsed amid bitter infighting between the league, its participant clubs, and the national federation.

        Soccer basically fell off the map in the US for the next four decades. Although the US scored a memorable victory over England in the 1950 World Cup, the last time it was held in Brazil (pictured above), the sport didn’t really feature prominently again until the late 1960s, when another ill-fated professional league was formed. After securing a TV contract from CBS (but without permission from FIFA, the sport’s world governing body), a group of entrepreneurs launched the National Professional Soccer League (NPSL) in 1967. It lasted just one season. “The stadiums were empty, which made it tough for us to generate much excitement,” Bill McPhail, the former head of CBS sports, told Sports Illustrated. “The players had foreign names, their faces were unfamiliar, their backgrounds undistinguished.”

        From the ashes of the NPSL emerged the North American Soccer League (NASL), which remained semi-pro for about a decade. Then, in 1975, Pelé, the three-time World Cup winner with Brazil and arguably the greatest player in the history of the game, came out of retirement to sign with the New York Cosmos, an expansion franchise owned by the media giant Warner Communications. His contract reportedly made him the world’s best paid athlete at the time. Pelé’s presence led to unprecedented interest in soccer in the US and catapulted the sport into the mainstream.

        AP7708010371
        Pelé, in one of his last games for the New York Cosmos, August 1977. (AP Photo/Ray Stubblebine)
        His first match, on June 15, 1975, was aired by CBS and drew 10 million viewers,”easily a record American TV audience for soccer,” according to Sports Illustrated. US broadcasters have always struggled to embrace a sport that doesn’t stop frequently for advertising breaks and replays, and those tuning in missed Pelé’s highlights: An ad was on when he assisted for a goal and an instant replay of earlier action was on the air when he actually scored. But the hype continued to build. “The Pele machine is in full motion. If soccer doesn’t make it in this country now, the game never will,” wrote the New York Times.

        The Cosmos would regularly draw capacity crowds at Giants Stadium and large crowds elsewhere around the country. The team was even forced to demand more security for Pelé after he was injured by swarming fans. “We had superstars in the United States but nothing at the level of Pele,”John O’Reilly, the Cosmos’ media spokesman, told the Guardian. “Everyone wanted to touch him, shake his hand, get a photo with him.”

        Pelé retired in 1977. Then, interest in the league began to wane, just as the economy fell into a deep recession. By 1984 the NASL had folded. But 10 years later, the sport would again be back in focus when, in an inspired decision, FIFA decided to host the 1994 World Cup in the US. The tournament broke attendance records (which it still holds to this day) although many Americans remained skeptical. (“People of influence in America long believed soccer was the chosen sport of communists,” novelist Dave Eggers wrote a few years ago.)

        A slow and determined effort to convince Americans to like soccer followed. After the tournament, Major League Soccer was formed. Unlike its predecessors, the league has has endured. This season’s TV ratings have been encouraging and the league’s teams look like they are finally on a stable financial footing.

        In 1999, the women’s World Cup was hosted in, and won by, the US. At the 2002 tournament in South Korea and Japan, the men’s team progressed to the quarter-finals, but its matches were played in the early hours of the US morning.

        In 2010 in South Africa, the US again made it through to the knockout stages, after a heart-stopping late goal by Landon Donovan in the team’s final group match against Algeria. Finally, the tournament that captures the world’s imagination every four years was beginning to get attention in America.

        Peering into the future
        AP13061816190
        The US team poses before a World Cup qualifier match in June 2013. (AP Images/Rick Bowmer)
        The Brazil World Cup will carry considerable political and economic significance. Brazil, the world’s seventh-largest economy, a rising power, and a nation obsessed with futebol, will be the centre of the world’s attention.

        ESPN, which—together with its sister network ABC—will broadcast the World Cup this summer to American audiences, is going all-out for the event. It will generate 290 hours of original programming across its TV channels and online, including coverage of all 64 matches, and various pre- and post-match shows. ABC, meanwhile, is sending its veteran award-winning reporter, Bob Woodruff, to cover it.

        According to ESPN’s market research, 41% of Americans now identify as pro soccer fans, its marketing director, Seth Adler, said at a media event last week. More tickets have been sold for the World Cup in the US than in any other nation besides Brazil. “We can now say that the US is truly a soccer nation,” he said. “That’s not something we could have said 12 years ago.”

        The network is describing its coverage of the World Cup as its “most comprehensive to date” (and “the most complex production we have ever done at this company, bar none”). It’s not clear what to expect ratings-wise, but the press materials say it is “expected to be record-breaking.”

        There is one small hitch. The US national team has been drawn in the “group of death” alongside European heavyweights Germany, Portugal (whose side features arguably the world’s best player, Cristiano Ronaldo) and Ghana, the side that knocked the US out four years ago. Progressing to the elimination stages looks almost impossible.

        That means there’s a risk American audiences will lose interest quickly. But ESPN’s president, John Skipper, doesn’t think they will. “We don’t sit around with clenched fists going ‘oh my goodness, if the US doesn’t win we have a problem,'” he told reporters at the media event.

        That might sound disastrous for people hoping the tournament will cement soccer’s status in the US. But it can also be taken as a sign of maturity. If America is truly going to embrace the “world game”, it must accept that it won’t always be involved.

        Comment


          #49
          What I love is that the game of soccer allows for independent countries to have nationalism but also a connectedness in a truly global world. Nations today aren’t really independent because they depend on global markets, international laws, global environmental policies, and shared information in science, etc.. Human rights and the interests of the entire human population are more important than ever in the 21st century. It will take the world to overcome such problems as global warming.

          Comment


            #50
            A Football Timeline
            5000-300 B.C. There is evidence in China that military forces around 2nd and 3rd century BC (Han Dynasty) played a game, originally named "Tsu Chu", that involved kicking a leather ball stuffed with fur into a small hole. Like Soccer, no hands were permitted during the play of the game.
            2500 B.C There was possibly a version of a type of ball game played by young women in Egypt during the age of Baqet III, as images of this sport were depicted on his tomb, though there is not much known of this sport except that it was played with a ball.
            1000 B.C. The Japanese version of 'soccer' was called Kemari, a game much like modern hackysacks, played with two to twelve players, and played a larger ball stuffed with sawdust. There was also a field designated by four trees (cherry, maple, pine and willow).
            B.C. In ancient Greece, they played a game called Episkyros, in which two equal numbered teams would try to throw the ball over the heads of the other team. There was a white line between the teams and another white line behind each team. Teams would change the ball often until one of the team was forced behind the line at their end.
            50 B.C. China's Tsu Chu players and Japan's Kemari players were the first to have an "International" game of their versions of soccer, believed to have occurred roughly 50 B.C.. There is a definite date of such a game occurring in 611 A.D.
            600 - 1600 A.D. In Mexico & Central America the rubber ball was created, and used in a game on a recessed court 40-50 feet long shaped like a capital "I". In the middle of each wall, was a mounted stone or wooden ring and the object was to project the hard rubber ball through the ring.
            700s The first Football games played in Britain was between the locals of east of England, starting after a 'legendary' game that involved kicking around the severed head of a Danish prince that they had defeated in a war. These games were violent, where injury and death were not uncommon
            1331 Despite the violence of these celebratory games, they were still popular. This led King Edward III of England to pass laws in 1331 to stop the game
            1424 King James I of Scotland also passed a law banning the game
            1500 In Italy they played a game called "calcio" with teams of 27+ people. The game involved kicking, carrying or passing a ball across a goal line. In 1580, Giovanni Bardi published a set of rules of the game of calcio.
            1572 Queen Elizabeth I of England, enacted laws that could sentence a football player to jail for a week followed by penance in a church.
            1600 In Alaska and Canada the native Eskimos played a game called aqsaqtuk on ice, using balls stuffed with grass, caribou hair, and moss. One legend tells of two villages playing against each other with goals 10 miles apart.
            1605 Football became legal again in England
            1620 In North America, native American Indians in the original Jamestown settlement played a game called pasuckuakohowog, meaning "they gather to play ball with the foot." It was a rough game, played the beach, the field a half-mile wide with goals 1 mile apart, with as many as 1000 players at a time.
            1815 Eton College of England established a set of rules for the games.
            1820 In the USA, football was played among the Northeastern universities and colleges of Harvard, Princeton, Amherst and Brown.
            1848 The rules were further standardized and a new version was adopted by all the schools, college and universities, known as the Cambridge Rules.
            1862 The first soccer club formed anywhere outside of England was the Oneida Football Club, Boston USA.
            1863 October 26 of 1863, the Football Association was formed when eleven London schools and clubs came together at the Freemason's Tavern to establish a single set of rules to administer any football match that were to be played among them. On December 8 1863, Association Football and Rugby Football finally split onto two different organizations. Later in the year, the first ever soccer match was played on Barnes common at Mortlake, London on 19th December 1863 between Barnes Football Club and Richmond Football Club. The game ended in a 0-0 draw.
            1869 The Football Association rules were further amended to exclude any handling of the ball.
            1872 The first official international football match was played, between the national teams of Scotland and England, played in Glasgow Scotland. The game was played on 30 November 1872, and finished with a 0-0 draw.
            1883 The four British associations agreed on a uniform code and formed the International Football Association Board.
            1885 The first international match played by teams outside of Great Britain was between USA and Canada, played in Newark and ended with Canada winning 1-0.
            1888 Introduction of the penalty kick.
            1900 Soccer played at the Olympic Games for the first time
            1904 Establishment of FIFA by delegates from France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland at a meeting in Paris on the 21st of May.
            1930 In 1930, The Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) held soccer's first World Cup tournament in Montevideo, Uruguay, with 13 teams.
            1932 Soccer was taken off the program for the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, due to a controversy between FIFA and the IOC over the definition of amateur and the reluctance of many strong soccer countries to travel the US because of the expense involved.
            1991 The inaugural Women's World Cup in 1991 in China was won by the United States
            1996 The American women's team won the first-ever women's soccer event at the Olympics.

            Comment


              #51
              In the 1920s, soccer was big in America. Not big in the way that baseball was big (this was the era of Ruth and Gehrig) or college football was big (these were the days when Ivy League rivalries played out as violent eruptions in the mud), but at its height, the top American soccer league had tens of thousands of fans, featured some of the world's best players, and looked set to challenge the fledgling NFL in the competition to supply the nation with a post-October pastime. Along the way, this country's early soccer entrepreneurs also managed to alienate the United States from the international soccer community, lay the groundwork for America's greatest moment of World Cup glory, and generally create one of the most bizarre and fascinating might-have-beens in U.S. sports history.

              The story of American soccer in the 1920s is in large part the story of the American Soccer League, which was founded suavely, at Manhattan's Hotel Astor, in 1921. The ASL didn't cover the whole country—just a slice of the industrial Northeast—and it wasn't the only professional American soccer league. It was, however, the largest and most popular, and it was also the one that briefly threatened to disrupt the international order of the game.

              The ASL drew its teams from the metropolises (the Boston Wonder Workers, the Brooklyn Wanderers, New York Field Club) and from industrial towns (the Paterson Silk Sox, the New Bedford Whalers, the Bridgeport Bears). The team owners ranged from Charles Stoneham, a Tammany Hall character with strong ties to organized crime—his purchase of the New York Giants baseball team in 1919 was brokered by notorious World Series fixer Arnold Rothstein—to the Bethlehem Steel Corp., which absorbed its employees' recreational team in the mid-1910s and, using the same ruthless efficiency it brought to the forging of the Chrysler Building, quickly developed one of the era's outstanding dynasties.

              Steel wasn't the only industry represented in the ASL's ranks. The 1920s were a period of amazing economic expansion and, until the passage of 1924's Johnson-Reed Act, a welcoming immigration policy. Factories employed large numbers of European workers, who brought a love of soccer with them to their new country. In the ASL and elsewhere, businesses sponsored and ran their own teams, a practice that led to some fantastic box-score headings. (Indiana Flooring vs. J&P Coats!) America's soccer capital was probably Fall River, Mass., an industrial center whose factories employed large numbers of British immigrants. The Fall River Marksmen, owned by local impresario Sam Mark, attracted crowds in the five figures to Mark's Stadium, which was nestled just over the Rhode Island border to avoid Massachusetts blue laws. The Marksmen won seven ASL titles and eventually surpassed Bethlehem Steel as the period's dominant team.

              Clubs affiliated with American industry had a significant advantage over their rivals at home and abroad. With business booming in the United States, American clubs were able to pay much higher wages than their European counterparts. And at a time when almost no one made a living exclusively from playing soccer, clubs like Bethlehem Steel were also able to offer their players high-paying factory jobs. As soon as the ASL took off, American teams started luring players from some of the top clubs in Europe. Before long, there were 50 European internationals—players good enough to be included on their countries' national teams—playing in the American league.

              Some ASL owners, like Sam Mark, were out to make a fortune from soccer's rising popularity. Others were driven by philanthropy, obsession, or both. The Bethlehem Steel team was essentially the private fiefdom of a soccer-mad corporate executive named Horace Edgar Lewis, who became a company vice president in 1916. The year before, Charles M. Schwab had given the company's largely immigrant work force $25,000 to spend on sport. Lewis put many more dollars toward the task of building an elite soccer team and lured a number of top European professionals to Pennsylvania. He scouted, lobbied, and sometimes even played for Bethlehem Steel—his handball against Brooklyn Field Club knocked his team out of the 1914 National Challenge Cup. His brother Luther, also a Bethlehem executive, served as the ASL's first president.

              The American clubs' recruitment tactics frequently ran afoul of international contract protocols, provoking an outcry on the far side of the Atlantic. In 1925, the Scottish Football Association convened a special meeting in Glasgow to grumble over the "American menace." (According to the writer for the Fall River Globe, "They metaphorically grasped the Scottish equivalent to an Irish shillelagh with which to punch the heads of the rulers of the soccer game in U.S.A.") And in 1927, FIFA, then and now soccer's international governing body, compelled the secretary of the ASL to appear before its congress in Finland, where they demanded that American teams stop ignoring international contracts.

              There were great American players to go along with all the stars from Europe. Actually, what happened was what so often happens in American life: Yesterday's cultural imports were transformed into today's native culture. Archie Stark, the great striker who scored 232 goals in 205 appearances for Bethlehem Steel, was born in Glasgow, emigrated to the United States at 13, played his first organized soccer in New Jersey for a team called the Scottish-Americans, and served with the U.S. Army in France during World War I. Two of the greatest players in American history, Bert Patenaude and Billy Gonsalves ("the Babe Ruth of American soccer"), grew up in Fall River, Gonsalves the son of Portuguese parents and Patenaude of French-Canadian ancestry. Alongside a gaggle of similarly hyphenated ASL players, Patenaude and Gonsalves played for the United States in the first World Cup, held in Uruguay in 1930. The team recorded the first shutout (and Patenaude the first hat trick) in World Cup history as Team USA finished in third place—still the best-ever finish for a team outside the South American and European confederations.

              The ASL was riding high until just before that first World Cup, when the league was done in by a bit of vicious and lavishly unnecessary political infighting. From the beginning, the league had maintained an uneasy relationship with the United States Football Association, the governing body of American soccer. The owners chafed against the restrictions the USFA imposed on rule changes and scheduling; the USFA saw the popular and profitable ASL as uncontrolled and rebellious. In the eyes of the ASL owners, the only thing keeping soccer from mainstream acceptance was a sense that it was too "foreign." They wanted to Americanize the game by introducing substitutions, determining league position by winning percentage rather than by the points system used in Europe, and adding playoffs to the end of the season. The league instituted a number of changes over USFA objections, and some of them turned out to be ahead of their time. The ASL allowed player substitutions as early as 1926; the World Cup finally came around in 1970.

              Everything fell to pieces in 1928. That's when Charles Stoneham, he of the mob ties and Tammany Hall connections, persuaded the ASL to boycott the USFA's annual Challenge Cup tournament, gate receipts from which provided a substantial chunk of the USFA's revenue. Three ASL teams entered anyway, including Bethlehem Steel. In response, the ASL banned the three teams for violating league rules. FIFA and the USFA came down on the side of the ASL's three outlaw clubs, declaring the league's actions out of bounds and excommunicating it from the order of international soccer. Disastrously, the USFA then formed a rival association, the Eastern Soccer League, to compete with the exiled ASL. There followed a period of Byzantine maneuvering, galvanic rhetoric, and brickbats. By the time the "soccer war" was resolved, the stock market had crashed, the fans were disillusioned and angry, and everyone was hideously confused. The Depression struck directly at the ASL's economic base by decimating American industry, and the dust cloud finally overwhelmed the league in 1932.


              That we know anything at all about the ASL today is largely thanks to the efforts of a few committed historians. David Wangerin's Soccer in a Football World, a history of the game in America, offers a concise and vivid portrait of the ASL years, particularly of the league's first secretary, Thomas Cahill, who spent much of his life trying to put soccer over in America and died in disappointment. But most of the credit for reviving the ASL's memory belongs to a soccer historian named Colin Jose, whose 1998 book American Soccer League: 1921-1931 is a meticulous and exhaustive reconstruction of all the league's lost records: match results, goal scorers, game rosters, league standings, player registers. The life of the league comes through in Jose's understated asides: an Egyptian-born player named Tewfik Abdallah was nicknamed "Toothpick" by the fans; ASL teams often traveled to away games not by bus or by train but by steamship, sailing up and down the East Coast.


              Well, a firm place in mainstream American culture isn't everything. The game flourished elsewhere, and—on account of the Web and satellite television—it's never been easier to follow elsewhere from America. Indeed, this could be the best time since the 1920s to be an American soccer fan. But as a new World Cup rolls around and the media prepares to make room for this curious foreign sport, it's worth remembering how easily elsewhere could have been here. In the 1920s, soccer—driven by wild economic growth, propelled by immigration, wrecked by a massive crash—might have been the most American sport of all.

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