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Abstract
The twentieth FIFA World Cup Finals, hosted by Brazil in 2014, provides perspective on the game’s global growth since the inaugural tournament held in Uruguay in 1930. The fifth such tournament since the United States hosted in 1994 and the tenth in which the United States has participated, the status of the sport there remains anomalous, with compromised if not marginalized status. Elite levels of the sport, especially the Men’s National Team, historically struggle for relevance in popular culture – despite widespread youth participation and the record of success achieved by the Women’s National Team. This essay seeks to identify the current state of the sport in the United States as characterized by amnesia and antagonism, a conflicted blend of cultural superiority and inferiority complexes played out every four years when the nation asks itself if soccer matters.
Notes
1. The Society for American Soccer History (SASH) was chartered in 1994. After a promising start, such as the SASH Historical Quarterly, SASH suffered from neglect, but was revived in 2014.
2. The USWNT has won the FIFA Women’s World Cup twice, 1991 and 1999, losing the 2011 Final to Japan on a penalty shoot-out. The United States has hosted the Women’s World Cup twice, 1999 and 2003.
3. When the USWNT gathered at the White House for the obligatory photo-op with the president, George Bush quipped, ‘Leave it to an American Women’s team to win our first world soccer championship … for the sake of male ego I hope the men start catching up’, qtd. Hopkins, Star Spangled Soccer, 194.
4. By the 1990s, 45% of an estimated 16 million youth soccer players in the United States were girls (ibid., 195).
5. When I gave the presentation that is the basis of this essay at the FIFA World Cup and the Nation conference at Oxford, several attendees conveyed the expectation that a paper on soccer in the States would focus on the women’s game and surprise that my talk would focus on the men’s game and its reception.
The question concerning soccer and gender and the United States is highly complex and doubtless worthy of careful consideration but is not my concern with this essay. Without exploring reasons why in this essay, I will simply note the failure of two leagues, Women’s United Soccer Association (2000–2003) and Women’s Professional Soccer (2007–2012) and the struggles of the National Women’s Soccer League (2012-present) to survive.
6. Cf. the Football 150 conference http://football150conference.wordpress.com and the subsequent special issue of Soccer & Society, Vol. 16, Nos. 2–3.
7. Henry Chadwick published the fifty-page Beadle’s Dime Book of Cricket and Football, being a Complete Guide to Players, and Containing All the Rules and Laws of the Ground and Game on 31 May Citation1866, on sale in New York on 2 June Citation1866, less than 14 months after General Lee surrendered his Confederate forces to General Grant and the Union and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
8. The organization currently marketed as US Soccer but known officially as the USSF has gone through several rebrandings since its inception. Formed as the United States of America Football Association, it quickly became known as the ‘USFA’, but changed its name to the United States Soccer Football Association in 1945 and then became the USSF in 1974, embracing the ‘US Soccer’ brand as part of the preparations for hosting the 1994 World Cup. Clubs and franchises have similarly undergone various iterations and rebrandings.
9. The AFA created the first quasi-national competition with the American Cup but the competition and the organization fell into ‘something of a hiatus’ in 1899, revived in 1906 after interest in the sport was rekindled with a tour featuring an English side known as the Pilgrims in 1905 (Allaway Citation2005, 47–50).
10. The negative tactics that plagued the 1990 tournament were another aesthetic concern, addressed by modifications to the Laws of the Game.
11. There were actually six teams, not four as Hurditch falsely recalls, competing in the ALPFC, backed by half of the clubs in baseball’s National League. The eastern clubs (Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, New York, Philadelphia and Washington) fielded sides while the western clubs (Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Louisville, Pittsburgh and St. Louis) abstained.