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Soccer Frontiers: The Global Game in the United States, 1863–1913

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21558450.50.1.16

2155-8450

G. Edward White,

American Sports and Literature

In the introduction to Soccer Frontiers, Chris Bolsmann argues that “historians and scholars” of soccer “need to insert the United States into our analysis more generally and, by doing so, identify the particularities and specificities to American soccer that remain untapped and understudied” (11). This collection is an effort to identify some of those “particularities and specificities.” It covers the years between 1863 and 1913. The former date is when the rules for soccer, first issued in England, distinguished the sport from rugby. The latter date represents when the United States joined FIFA, the organization charged with administrating soccer around the globe. The editors’ choice of a time frame for the volume centers on a period where conventional accounts of American sports history have suggested that very little was going on with “socker football” in America, either as a participatory or spectator sport. One might see Soccer Frontiers as a collective effort to counter that suggestion.The collaborators draw largely on newspaper archives to establish that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in addition to Fall River, Massachusetts, Kearny, New Jersey, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia (Roger Allway, Rangers, Rovers and Spindlers, 2005; David Wangerin, Distant Corners, 2011), Chicago (Gabe Logan, The Early Years of Chicago Soccer, 2019), and St. Louis (Dave Lange and Bill McDermott, Soccer Made in St. Lous, 2011), soccer was also played in Atlanta, Birmingham, (Partick Sullivan, 135–60), Astoria, Portland (Zachary R. Bigalke, 201–220), San Francisco (Derek Van Rheeman, 222–42; Brian D. Bunk, 243–64), and Los Angeles (George N. Kioussis, 265–90).Although the documented emergence of soccer in several communities in the United States is a useful historiographical corrective, the more interesting features of Soccer Frontiers arguably lie in three other areas. One is the “founding history” of the sport in America. Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin offer a penetrating examination of the Oneida Football Club in Boston, the organization where American soccer supposedly originated. The authors demonstrate that the “founding myth” of the Oneida club was created many years after its formation by prominent Bostonians who saw the exercise not as an effort at accuracy but as a nostalgic recollection of their pastimes as young adults, culminating in the erection of a monument to the club on the Boston Common. Along the way, Marston and Cronin document the apparent need for founding myths in American professional sports.A second contribution of Soccer Frontiers is to reinforce an existing theme in histories of US soccer, but with a twist. The theme is the importance of immigrant communities in establishing and perpetuating the sport. The ramifications of soccer being perceived as an “immigrants’ game”—at a time when public high schools and colleges were beginning to integrate athletics into their offerings, with the sports principally chosen being “indigenous” to America, such as baseball, gridiron football, basketball, and volleyball—were considerable. Because soccer was identified with immigrants and because so few high school or college faculty members were qualified to coach the sport, it was largely left out when public schools and colleges began to control athletics in the early twentieth century. It was, at that time, perceived not only as an “immigrants’” sport but as a “working-class” sport, played by youths who were, on the whole, not extending their education beyond high school. But several contributors to Soccer Frontiers emphasize that ultimately soccer metamorphosed in America into a “middle” and “upper” class sport, shedding its “immigrant” and “working-class” character. It is now a sport played extensively in public high schools and colleges by persons of diverse backgrounds.A third provocative feature of Soccer Frontiers can be found in Eileen Narcotta-Welp's epilogue, where she calls for sport scholars to “negotiate the delicate balance between social and cultural histor[ies]” (298). Although many of the essays in the volume furnish useful historical information about the early years of American soccer, few go beyond that to speculate about why soccer took root, or failed to do so, in the United States at a time when it was generally flourishing around the globe. American “exceptionalism” has regularly been identified as somehow stifling soccer's development, but the term has remained elusive both as an analytical concept and a causal force in US history. Soccer Frontiers suggests that we need a closer and more complex treatment of the relationship between soccer and American culture over time.