Brian Phillips: The Secret History of American Soccer
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....
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....
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....
...[A]s 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.