The Rise and Fall of American Soccer
How a Golden Age tore itself apart
It all started on Astor. Or in Astor, as a matter of fact. Hotel Astor, into the late hours of the night in Manhattan, where representatives of the eight premier soccer clubs in the United States met to embark upon a journey that would expose their sport to the light of the mainstream.
It was 1921 and New York was roaring. Out of the uncertain darkness of World War I stepped a nation on the cusp of a Golden Age.
The outward, upward expansion of America’s cities mirrored the attitudes of their inhabitants. Yearning for prosperity, outstretched arms raced high-rise buildings to the sky.
Across the Atlantic, people took notice of these developments and a steady stream of immigrants from across an ocean made their way through Ellis Island and into New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, bringing with them their Irish, Scottish, English, Polish, and German traditions that would shape America in the years to come.
So maybe it didn’t start in Hotel Astor. Like everything else in this great, vast country, soccer has its roots steeped in the waters of the Atlantic.
Humble Beginnings Before Prominence
The beginnings of the sport in the United States were humble. Near-exclusively amateur clubs competed in local leagues around the nation, founded by Irish and English immigrants who brought their then-new Victorian pastime to an America picking itself up after the Civil War in the final quarter of the 19th century.
As immigration increased in the 1870’s, working class communities in the industrial West Hudson region of New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia took to the game. Local pick-up games and informal competitions grew into established clubs on the back of organic community support, and the fever spread northward toward Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts. Before long, the corporations which employed many of the members of these early soccer-obsessed communities began to sponsor clubs, leading to the formalization of local and regional leagues.
By the 1880’s, this trend had spread outward to Rhode Island, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis as immigration proliferated westward and communities continued to develop; however this expansion was not without its obstacles. Soccer’s growth was competing with that of baseball, then — as now — seen as the ubiquitous American pastime. The colliding forces of immigrants wishing to “Americanize” and assimilate by way of baseball and the perception that soccer was a sport for foreigners hampered the growth of the sport, preventing it from continuing on its steep upward trajectory and cementing itself into Americana.
Consequently, soccer would retain its amateur status throughout the country until the early 20th century.
Turn of the Century
In 1895, the National Association Football League was formed as the premier national soccer league, drawing its teams mainly from New York City and New Jersey. Though the league had promise, infrastructure at the time prevented frequent cross-country travel, limiting the region in which the league could operate.
Unfortunately, the league found itself doomed by external causes before it could develop a foothold. The Spanish-American War brought with it a deep recession, forcing the NAFBL to suspend operations in 1899. It would not recover until 1906, when it was re-established and operated until 1921 as an amateur and semi-professional organization.
Thomas Cahill and the Beginnings of Professionalism
Thomas Cahill was born in New York City to Irish-American immigrants in 1864. Seven years later, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he would later attend St. Louis University and garner a reputation as one of America’s preeminent amateur athletes. Like many early generation immigrants, Cahill’s desire to be American led him to baseball and track and field sports. It wasn’t until 1897 that Cahill became interested in soccer after watching a match played between a St. Louis team and a visiting squad from Toronto.
From then on, the man who would later be honored as one of the founding fathers of American soccer began to grow the game in his adopted hometown. He founded the St. Louis Shamrocks, who competed in the local St. Louis Association Foot Ball League, winning titles in 1898 and 1899.
After ensuring St. Louis’ status as a soccer hotbed and taking the reigns of multiple clubs, Cahill moved back east. But the fire in Cahill didn’t stop burning when he left the hotbed he created. In fact, it started to spread, and he found himself at the helm of much more ambitious projects.
It was in Newark, New Jersey, where he settled in 1910, that he developed the foundation for soccer’s continued growth throughout the next 20 years by establishing a national governing body for the sport. After failing to secure recognition for the American Amateur Football Association during a 1912 FIFA conference in Stockholm, he returned stateside to formalize the organization, founding the United States Football Association in 1913.
As the reality of what needed to occur to establish the USFA as a true governing federation for the sport in the United States began to set in, conflict once again arose in the wake of progress. The dramatic shift in the direction of the sport’s structure worried those who wanted the game kept pure. St. Louis’ city-wide league — one of the only areas where American kids truly embraced the game as their own — as well as the North American Football League and several other pockets of resistance threatened the widespread adoption of the federation in its early stages.
Eventually, after plenty of thorough hand-wringing on both sides, FIFA and the USFA reached an agreement and the United States joined the FIFA monolith.
In addition to his role in orchestrating the foundation and adoption of the USFA, Cahill would become the first manager of the United States National Team in 1916, touring Scandinavia with his squad.
Such Great Heights
Despite almost single-handedly pushing American soccer to the level of prominence it had achieved at this point, Cahill still wasn’t done helping the United States carve a path to the top of the sport.
Economic realities of the game began to set in for a federation trying to legitimize itself among regional, organizationally diverse, and disjointed leagues. Those who saw the potential draw of the sport grew frustrated with the shackles of semi-professionalism placed upon them by the NAFBL and SNYSA, wishing instead to fulfill the economic potential of a game thriving in America’s growing sporting market.
This growing disdain over the largely amateur status of these two early 20th century leagues led to several of the NAFBL’s top teams breaking away and joining clubs from the Southern New England Soccer League in their quest to create a fully professional league.
Of course, there was never going to be a clean break away from these two leagues, because it wasn’t just their ambitions that set the top teams apart from the rest. Resources and interest in the game varied from state to state, even county to county. Like many European leagues still find themselves today, the NAFBL and SNESL were made up of haves and have-nots. The “haves” felt as though they were subsidizing the “have-nots” to their detriment and thus holding themselves, their players, and the sport of soccer back.
That desire for a full-fledged professional league is what led to that meeting in Hotel Astor and the founding of the American Soccer League. Soon, squads under the ownership of Tammany Hall impresarios in deep with Arnold Rothstein and the New York Baseball Giants were facing off against those fielded by industrial titans like the Bethlehem Steel Corporation and visionaries by the name of Sam Marks.
In it’s inaugural 1921 season, the ASL fielded eight teams: Bethlehem Steel FC, the Fall River Marksmen, Harrison Field Club, Holyoke Falcons, Jersey City Celtics, New York Field Club, J&P Coats, and Todd Shipyards. American stars would soon emerge such as electric forward Archie Stark, and goalkeepers Peter Renzulli, Findlay Kerr, and Bobby Geudart. The rise of compelling American names in the game all playing together in a top-flight league helped to increase the profile of the sport, and attendances topping 10,000 were not at all uncommon.
This high level of relevancy, coupled with the largely corporate-driven ownership structure of many of the league’s teams, allowed many ASL clubs to recruit top players from England and Scotland by offering them a full-time job at the club’s parent company, excellent wages to play for the club, and a high level of competition rivaling the best in the world. The standard enticed American teams to tour Europe and vice versa, with attendances topping thirty, even forty thousand when the world’s teams came to the United States. Sparta Prague and Vienna Hakoah, European footballing powers of the day, tested their mettle against American sides in 1926, with Hakoah’s match at the New York Polo Grounds drawing 46,000 spectators. That number set a soccer attendance record which would stand until the arrival of Pele over a half-century later.
Push and Pull
The shock waves sent by the ASL through the American soccer community did not stop when they reached the Atlantic, but instead threatened to shake the foundations of Europe’s FIFA contingents, angering those who simply could not compete financially with the burgeoning American soccer machine. The USFA risked expulsion from FIFA over their transfer practices, leading to a resolution to help both stem the tide of internationals heading to the United States and keep the ASL and USFA in the good graces of soccer’s governing body. But these resolutions did not keep the ASL and USFA in the good graces of each other. FIFA and the American bodies would not reach a resolution until the sixteenth FIFA Congress in 1927. These years of bargaining and bending created a certain level of resentment between the two most powerful forces in American soccer.
However, the problems facing the ASL were not only arising from abroad. Tensions began to arise between the league and the sport’s American governing body over the logistics and economics of the National Challenge Cup. The National Challenge Cup was the main moneymaker for the USFA, but drew the ire of the ASL for its unrewarded monetary commitment and travel requirements in an age when traveling from Fall River, Massachusetts to a place like St. Louis, Missouri was much more taxing than it is in this day and age. At the time, the National Challenge Cup was held during the ASL season, creating burdens with which smaller clubs simply could not cope.
In protest, the ASL boycotted the 1924 National Challenge Cup, kicking off a series of disputes that would threaten to tear American soccer apart over the next few years. For a league at the height of its popularity to push back against the federation on such a large and exposure-heavy scale was unprecedented. Not only were the ASL’s teams the main attractions of the competition, but the revenue they helped create for non-ASL teams around the country, as well as the USFA itself, helped drive the subsistence of the sport in areas beyond the industrial northeast. That the ASL was willing to boycott the tournament — which, prior to the league’s rise was the country’s preeminent competition — signaled a shift in power, or at least the perception of where power was located in the sport. The notion that a league could outgrow the authority of the federation emboldened the ASL’s ownership groups, but at the expense of trust between the two organizations.
The ASL reentered the National Challenge Cup in 1925 after the USFA agreed to reduce their take of the revenue from just over 33% to 15%, thereby significantly reducing the financial strain placed on clubs. For the league, this proved lucrative. 1925 saw Archie Stark set the record for goals in a first division league season with 67 in 42 matches. The league’s financial success allowed it to establish the short-lived International Soccer League in 1926, which brought Canadian clubs into the fold, but was dissolved after one season.
1927 was a year of change in the American Soccer League. Modifications including substitutions, hockey-style goal-line judges, and a “penalty box” style foul system were instituted, while South American teams toured the country and clubs were purchased and relocated, with deep-pocketed owners looking to get their hands on the money that was flowing through the American incarnation of the sport. This year was also the year that saw the league change their international player transfer practices because of FIFA’s distaste for the mass exodus of European stars to the United States. In a deal that was largely brokered between the USFA and the sport’s European-based international governing body, the ASL was limited in its ability to recruit foreign talent.
While the result of this was a shift in focus towards the American player, the decreased proliferation of top players from England and Scotland resulted in the absence of some of the top talent around which the league was built. As soccer historian Stephen Holroyd put it, “St. Louis natives couldn’t fill every roster spot.”
Do the Collapse
The other, far more substantive result of this Pan-Atlantic brokerage was a permanently damaged relationship between the USFA and the ASL. The ASL took the USFA’s cooperation with FIFA as a stab in the back, while the USFA operated with the knowledge that a continuation of the league’s transfer policies would result in harsh and long-standing consequences enacted upon American soccer.
Matters came to an explosive head during the 1928 season, in which the ASL lobbied for the National Challenge Cup to be moved to the end of the league season. The USFA refused, leading to the ASL ordering their clubs not to participate. Despite this, Bethlehem Steel, the Newark Skeeters, and New York Giants competed anyway. The ASL responded by suspending them, but the clubs appealed the suspension to the USFA, who ordered the ASL to reverse the decision. The volatility of this situation escalated until it erupted into the collapse of one of the world’s strongest soccer leagues.
Dubbed the “Soccer War,” the conflict between the United States Football Association and the American Soccer League spelled the end of a golden age of soccer in this country; one that remains the pinnacle of the sport's popularity in this country.
Though the ultimate result was the retreat of the sport into a six-decade dark age, the reasons for American soccer’s collapse were wide-ranging. At its core, the eroding relationship between the USFA and the ASL proved to be the basis for their downfalls. The 1924 National Challenge Cup boycott set everything in motion, opening a wound that would prove irreparable in the coming years. An unwillingness to cooperate led to a power struggle, setting the organizations' agendas against each other.
After the 1928 National Challenge Cup fiasco, the ASL refused to overturn the suspension of the clubs who had participated in the tournament, leading the USFA to suspend the league, and create a competing league under their jurisdiction. The ASL continued to operate as an “outlaw” league, but the presence of USFA-sanctioned competitors severely damaged their financial stability, causing corporate owners to pull out and clubs to fold.
While soccer’s leading organizations were busy tearing themselves apart, the American public was losing their faith in the sport in large part due to their perception that foreign influence was ruining the sport. 1927’s transfer embargo played an influential role in tarnishing the reputation of the USFA and chipping the egos of Americans who followed the sport. At a time where political instability was always just around the corner in many parts of the world — and soon in the United States as well — American exceptionalism, as well as the xenophobia which can come along with it, fostered distrust of foreign influence affecting what was on its way towards becoming a cultural icon in the country.
That the USFA collaborated with FIFA at the expense of the ASL to an end which ultimately diluted the product of the league, while simultaneously stemming the flow of those who wanted a shot at playing and working in the land of opportunity, unnerved mainstream America. No matter the intricacies of the negotiations in which FIFA and the USFA were involved, the result was that fans felt betrayed, the USFA felt betrayed, and ASL owners felt betrayed — the end was nigh.
While disputes within the soccer community were what crippled the footballing landscape in the United States, they weren’t what landed the final blow. The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 was the death knell that exposed the fatal flaw of the ASL’s corporate-owned club model. Though they had become wildly successful, teams like Bethlehem Steel, J&P Coats, the New Bedford Whalers, and other clubs with direct ownership ties to the industrial and manufacturing companies for which they were named, soccer teams were essentially company initiatives to boost employee morale, build brand awareness, and engage the community outside of business affairs. However, these clubs cost money to run. Managing stadiums, paying players, financing travel, and paying league dues meant that companies were spending heavily. When the Great Depression hit, it hit manufacturers and industrial producers hard. In an effort to preserve their companies, owners folded their soccer clubs, and by 1931 soccer icons Bethlehem Steel and the Fall River Marksmen had both succumb to the ravages of the worst economic crisis in the history of the United States.
Though players such as the legendary Bert Patenaude and Billy Gonsalves did their best to continue competing in minor leagues such as the Atlantic Coast League and with the United States National Team, the damage was done. Soccer had been relegated to a spot in a forgotten portion of the American sports lexicon.
The golden age of American soccer fell victim to the power struggles of an emerging landscape and a volatile global economy. Upturned by its own might, the sport grew far too quickly to an unsustainable size — it collapsed under the weight of its own ambition like a young star, flushed into the vacuum by a world-wide economic implosion.
