Distant Corners: American Soccer's History of Missed Opportunities and Lost Causes

Sporting

by David Wangerin

From bestselling author David Wangerin, a history of America's curious relationship with the "beautiful game"

Genres: Soccer, Sports, History, Football, Nonfiction

264 pages, Hardcover

First published April 11, 2011

Reviews

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trying to find the history of soccer in the United States is not an easy task. Even though the sport has been played in the United States since the 19th Century, its past has been poorly documented. Growing to popularity in the rest of the world at the same time football (American style) was becoming popular in the U.S., few newspapers would take note of any matches played in the U.S. Further complicating matters is that there are two major repositories of American soccer history: one is the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame, which is presently homeless, the other is an archive of a prominent soccer organizer in the country, Tom Cahill, and it's at the University of Southern Illinois' Edwardsville campus.

David Wangerin was born in the U.S., but now lives in Scotland. Nevertheless, he has done a remarkable job of documenting the fragmentary history of the world's most popular sport in the world's richest nation. Wangerin believes that Americans, when presented with the choice of continuing to follow the brutal, and sometimes deadly, sport of American football in the early 20th Century, or switching over to soccer (Association football), American sporting fans really enjoyed the violence more.

Tours between English sides and American teams demonstrated the difference between the way the sport was perceived on either side of the Atlantic. The English teams would play a crisp, technical, ball possession game, while American teams would just love to run all over the place and kick the ball as hard as they can. American teams would try to shrink the field to reduce the need for passing and increase the value of bashing your opponent in the face. This was not a long term success strategy.

Wangerin introduces us to Tom Cahill, who helped to start what is now known as the United States Soccer Federation, back in 1912. Prior to that, the only governing body for soccer in the United States was an affiliate of England's Football Association. (To this day, England has no geographic descriptor for that group, just like the country's name not appearing on its stamps.) Cahill was the most influential man in American soccer for the first half of the 20th Century and hardly anybody knows who he is.

There are different attempts to start professional leagues in the U.S., but none of them succeed. From around World War I through the late 1930s, St. Louis became the center of American soccer, but the sport eventually was drowned out by other sports.

In the 1970s, the North American Soccer League tried to move into the conversation about sports in America. The Cosmos, which featured star players like Pele and Franz Beckenbauer, would draw crowds of 70,000 to the Meadowlands in New Jersey. But the league could not survive in other cities, even in places where one would expect soccer to be popular, such as Los Angeles. Ultimately, the league depended too much on foreign players and used too few American players, making the NASL more of a curiosity than an actual integral part of the American sports world.

Throughout the 20th Century, people tried to make soccer an American game. But no one could agree what that meant. Faced with a field full of people with names that looked "foreign", sports fans in the U.S. fell back on the sports they were familiar with. Baseball had a more nationalistic feel and football let people enjoy their violence. Soccer could not match either of those. The best soccer could do is what it has done now, which is settle for being one of many somewhat popular sports in an increasingly multicultural country.

This book is somewhat like soccer. If you are interested in the sport and its history, you will enjoy the work that Wangerin did in unearthing the history of the game. But if you think soccer is something that ESPN just forces on to you to keep you from watching discussion of Brett Favre all the time, then you may want to give it a pass

[Ian Plenderleith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long is the history of failed football ventures in the US, and short is the list of writers who have been prepared to document them for the benefit of a doubtless unsuspecting world. In this follow-up to his excellent history of US football, the WSC-published Soccer In A Football World, David Wangerin focuses on a handful of the key characters and eras that were central to some of the game's false dawns in a country whose footballing possibilites have always loomed over the world game like a potential new age. Or potential apocalypse, depending on your view of US hegemony.

Wangerin has a stoical but cheerful approach to US football history, and clearly enjoys unearthing people, games and anecdotes long since confined to the pages of yellowing local newspapers. This comes out well in the opening chapters on early 20th century touring teams from Europe, the birth of the US Open Cup (the second oldest surviving cup competition in the world after the FA Cup) and the possibly visionary but ultimately thwarted administrator Tom Cahill. In 1946 Cahill pronounced: "I've known, everyone in soccer has known, that until there are adequate stadium facilities, the game will never be a financial success." It took another 50 years before MLS came along and realised the same truth.

His chapter on college team Penn State's coach Bill Jeffrey also treads previously uncovered territory, including fascinating stories of tours to Scotland in the 1930s and Iran in 1951. From there it is on to the leagues and teams of St Louis, the US city most likely to boast the cliche of "footballing hotbed", and Wangerin rattles off numerous tales of pre-war foul play, crowd violence, player-poaching, widespread flaunting of rules and shameless intimidation of referees. The city also hosted a team with one of the best names ever, the St Louis Screw.

The final two chapters, however, really make this book sing. Prior to the modern era, research necessarily relies on dry documentation, while the fragmented, stop-start nature of the early US game makes a strong narrative arc difficult. This all changes come the late 1960s and teams like Oakland's California Clippers, a briefly successful NASL club founded by businessmen looking to cash in on football, and made up almost entirely of Yugoslavs and Costa Ricans. Their story has a beginning, middle and end, and many of the people who were there are still around to tell the tale.

The last chapter, Shot Out In Jersey, covers the New York Cosmos, and this is my only quibble with this book. The first five chapters were interesting enough, and should be read by all US fans scrambling for a sense of tradition. The final two chapters, though, left me wanting more. The flops, failures, flukes and flashes of the bust-boom-bust NASL are a largely unmined treasure of football stories, and many of its protagonists must be at just the right age to talk about it with the necessary perspective. If we're in luck, it's a project-in-waiting for the fluid, meticulous Wangerin.

(first published in When Saturday Comes magazine)

[LAPL Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trying to find information on the history of soccer in the United States is not an easy task. Even though the sport has been played here since the 19th century, its past has been poorly documented. However, David Wangerin (who was born in the U.S., but now lives in Scotland) does a remarkable job of piecing together the fragmented history of the world's most popular sport in the world's richest nation.

Wangerin introduces us to the archive of Tom Cahill, who helped to start what is now known as the United States Soccer Federation in 1912. Prior to that, the only governing body for soccer in the United States was an affiliate of England's Football Association. Cahill was the most influential man in American soccer for the first half of the 20th Century, yet hardly anybody knows who he is.

From around World War I through the late 1930s, St. Louis became the center of American soccer, but the sport eventually was drowned out by other sports. Wangerin believes that, when presented with the choice between the brutal sport of American football versus switching over to soccer, early 20th century American sporting fans apparently enjoyed the violence more. Still, there were some attempts to start professional leagues in the U.S., though none of them succeeded.

In the 1970s, the North American Soccer League tried to move into the conversation. The Cosmos, which featured star players like Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer, would draw crowds of 70,000 to the Meadowlands in New Jersey. But the league could not survive in other cities - even in cities where one would expect soccer to be popular, such as Los Angeles. Ultimately, the league depended too much on foreign players and used too few American players, making the NASL more of a curiosity than an actual integral part of the American sports world.

Throughout the 20th Century, people tried to make soccer an American game, but no one could agree what that meant. Faced with a field full of people with names that looked "foreign," sports fans in the U.S. fell back on the sports they were familiar with. Baseball had a more nationalistic feel and football let people enjoy their violence. Soccer could not match either of those. The best soccer could do then is what it does now - which is settle for being one of many somewhat popular sports in an increasingly multicultural country.

This book is somewhat like soccer. If you are interested in the sport and its history, you will enjoy the work that Wangerin did in unearthing the history of the game. But if you think soccer is something that ESPN airs just to keep you from watching 24-hour discussions of Brett Favre, then you may want to give it a pass.

Reviewed by Bob Timmermann, Senior Librarian, Science, Technology & Patents Dept.

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist George Santayana famously said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." In Distant Corners, David Wangerin meticulously documents several false starts in the history of soccer in America, going back to the late 19th century. In subsequent eras, the organizers of soccer leagues and associations appeared to be incapable of learning from the predecessor's mistakes and thus soccer failed several times to "catch on" in the United States. The success that Major League Soccer has had since it's first match in 1996 seems in part due to their avoidance of many past mistakes. I won't spoil the book by telling you those mistakes; you'll have to read it for yourself.

Wangerin does an excellent job unearthing the history behind the "missed opportunities and lost causes" but his work as an historian is not matched by the beauty of his prose. Large sections of the book reads like a series of quotes lifted from old newspaper clippings. The history is interesting (to a soccer fan like me) but the writing style made it less enjoyable than it could have been.

[Gay Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Distant Corners presents American soccer history and includes detailed stories of events. Important facts, opinions, and statistics support the soccer issues discussed and reveal how these events shaped and formed American soccer. Through the narrative writing style of the passionate soccer historian, David Wangerin, one learns of the struggles facing soccer popularity. Through his storytelling about his experiences in and around soccer the reader expands his knowledge of little known soccer history, like unique information about Tom Cahill’s role in establishing soccer in the USA and descriptions of college and professional soccer from its roots. Even soccer fans will learn new things about soccer history.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall a good read. I learned a ton about the really all but forgotten history of soccer in America. It dates back much further than probably anyone suspects. And the history is pretty fascinating. It was a bit of a slow read at times but I'm glad I stuck with it. Knowing the history of a thing generally makes ones appreciation of it that much richer.

[Frank · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thoroughly researched, but suffering from the inescapable fact that the history of American soccer is just not that exciting, at least compared to the anecdote filled past of baseball.

[Derrick Schultz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview of soccer in the United States

Lovely and deep overview of soccer in the U.S. Focuses a lot on the early part of the 20th century, with a cursory chapter on the NASL.