And I thought the current USSF was incompetent.... If that is what really happened, that's simply stunning stupidity by all parties involved.
Ooof, Vox? No thanks, not gonna take that bait. I can basically guarantee that nothing in that video is going to be half as valuable as most of the discussions on these forums.
The gist is about the collapse of soccer in the United States in the 1930's. In brief, soccer is not a new sport in the United States - the American Football Association began in 1884, and the sport was popular in the 1910's and 20's, second only the Major League Baseball. But rivalries and disputes crippled the sport right as it was blossoming - the so-called "Soccer Wars". In 1933, the American Soccer League - which at its height had been drawing top European talent - collapsed, largely due to competition with the USFA. No replacement league emerged due to the Great Depression, and American soccer was dead and buried. Soccer was effectively dead in the country for decades, until it was revived in the 1960s and 70s on college campuses - which is why colleges remain such a big part of the soccer culture today. It's also why women's soccer is so big in the USA - due to Title IX in 1972, women's collegiate soccer teams appeared across the country. That's where modern US soccer was really born - the ASL and all that came before aren't truly part of our modern heritage. Here's a thing: The USFA played a significant role as a provocater in this drama. They appeared in 1911 as a competitor to the long-established AFA. They instituted a new tournament called the National Challenge Cup, designed specifically to kill the American Cup, the oldest and most prestigious trophy in the country - they succeeded in 1924, when the American Cup shut down after nearly 40 years of competition. And of course, later on, the USFA tried to kill the ASL, the country's top soccer league. They succeeded and in so doing, killed the entire sport dead. What happened to the USFA? Well, it managed to cling on for a little while. In 1945, when the game was mostly for amateurs and semi-pros, it changed its name to the spectacularly stupid-sounding "U.S. Soccer Football Association". It took a few more decades for them to rebrand as the "United States Soccer Federation" - or USSF. That's right - the organization largely responsible for destroying the sport in the country in the 30's is now the one still in charge of it all. Its "National Challenge Cup" - created as a cynical attempt to undermine and squeeze out a business rival - is currently still played, rebranded as the US Open. They've killed once already; will they kill again?
They've killed the USMNT for generations, imho. From a media standpoint, there's still access to other soccer leagues and national teams that USSF obviously can't touch. The bigger question is, though, why has USSF in all of its various previous forms been so badly mismanaged? Is it intentional, I wonder?
LA Galaxy vs the New York Cosmos for the 2048 U.S. Soccer Cup played in some strip mall parking lot. Special guest Freddy Adu.