The History of Football — Part II

This post is the second part of a series I’d like to call “A cricket fan’s guide to football”. Having realized that a lot of cricket fans in India, including me, are new to the game, I decided to pen down my findings about the game so as to overcome FOMO at social gatherings.

Rise of Football in Africa

Politics helped mould a distinct football culture in Africa. It was on the shores of Gold Coast (now Ghana) that the colonialists first landed and setup capital at Cape Coast. Ghana’s first club Excelsior was born here in 1903. The Excelsior no longer exists. Instead, The Hearts of Oak is the oldest surviving football club in Ghana.

The British founded the Gold Coast Football Association in 1922 and tournaments were restricted to Cape Coast. The Hearts of Oak, or the Phobia as the team was popularly referred to, dominated the City Championship Cup.

Football was very much a part of realizing the dreams of a united Africa. The Hearts played an important role in shaping the culture that makes football in Ghana so distinctive. By the late 1950s, President Nkrumah saw football as a political tool to galvanize the whole of Africa. He thought that if he could use football to get people together, it would help him spread his policy of the United States of Africa. Football was thought of as the means to express unity against the colonial power.

Ghanaian football might not have had the facilities and infrastructure to match that of their European counter parts, but in Ghana, club sides have the same dedicated following as elsewhere despite the huge exodus of players to Europe.

Rise of Football in USA

Money and economics have been critical to the rise of football in the United States of America. A lack of resources is hardly an issue among the growing number of devotees to the game. Soccer (as the locals call it) in the States, goes back a long way. America enjoyed a golden decade after the creation of the American Soccer League in 1921.

The Fall River team from Massachusetts, with their best players being American born, regularly drew 15,000 supporters to their games. By 1930, there were over 200 registered clubs in the US.

The golden period of the American Soccer took a blow during the Great depression in the 1930s. During these years, it was the American sports which began to flourish since Soccer began to be seen as an infiltration of communist thought into American youth.

The global audience of 400 million television viewers for the 1966 World Cup finals had helped convince corporate America to back professional soccer. The formation of the North American Soccer League(NASL) in 1968 sold Soccer to corporate America. The game became big business overnight. The NASL was built with the sole purpose of building a sustainable and profitable business.

While the Americans recognized player names of sports such as Gridiron Football and Rugby, they were unfamiliar with the top soccer players. In 1975, at a price tag of USD 7 million, Pele, the brazilian great signed for the New York Cosmos. The NASL started to flourish. In 1977, Pele lead Cosmos to the NASL Title.

The rise of Cosmos saw NASL expanding to 24 teams. The problem was that the owners of the new teams had ventured into NASL for a quick dollar. But by the early 1980s the NASL experiment began to falter and in 1984 the league folded. The legacy — a whole generation brought up on soccer.