Tag Archives: us soccer history
The cup-hoisting Bill McPherson
Until just five years ago, Bill McPherson was the all-time leader in games played in first-division American soccer, with the 370 games that he played in the original American Soccer League of the 1920s. In the 2008 MLS season, Steve Ralston passed him. Since then, McPherson has dropped to fifth …
A lot of what I’ve written about the U.S. men’s national team in this series of posts on historical matters has had to do with high points, like events in 1991 and 1995. It’s time to give a little attention to low points. The United States had a 40-year drought …
Among the unexpected things to be found in the Spalding soccer guides from the early part of the 20th century is a high school soccer league. That’s right. A public high school soccer league in the United States more than 100 years ago. The 1907 edition of the Spalding guide …
When Pele arrived in New York to play for the Cosmos in June 1975, his entourage (nothing like the massive crowds that some superstar athletes drag around today) included a 44-year-old man named Julio Mazzei, usually dubbed Professor Julio Mazzei because of his background as a fitness and physical-education instructor. …
—In 1921, the U.S. Soccer Federation (then called the U.S. Football Association) was thrown into turmoil when its secretary, James Scholefield, absconded with $1,200 of the organizations’ money, an amount that might not keep it supplied with paper clips for a year today. Scholefield’s predecessor, Thomas W. Cahill, was quickly …
When I started looking at soccer stories on microfilm of American newspapers years ago, I was briefly fooled into thinking that I had stumbled onto quite a startling discovery. There it was in the New York Times in 1919: England vs. Scotland in New York. Wow! But that was before …
About a year ago, I wrote about some American soccer stadiums of decades ago. Here are some more of those. The first group was concentrated in the northeast. With some of these, I’ve moved farther west, and included some that are larger than those in that first group. Thanks to …
The United States is a country subject to some extremes of weather and, as we all saw just a few hours ago, soccer is not a sport in which games get called off at the drop of a hat. The combination of those two facts can have some interesting results. …
The trend-setting Barney Kempton
Who is Barney Kempton? Not somebody very many Big Soccer readers are familiar with. Not somebody I’m especially familiar with, for that matter, although I have skimmed past his name on lists of Hall of Famers hundreds of times. He is not one of the more prominent Hall of Famers, …
In the fading years of the North American Soccer League, it used several strategies to try to resuscitate itself and regain its success of a few years before. One of those moves, which didn’t work any better than the others, was Team America, which played in the NASL in the …
