History of Soccer in the United States

This might be a little bit "dinosaurs survived and turned into birds," but the ASL did carry on as a semipro league, or at least the name did, for decades. But I think the question was, what if the ASL kept going at the pro level it had in the 1920's.

The parallels, and contrasting fates, of the ASL and NFL are fascinating. Some early NFL teams were also company sponsored - helping to explain names like Columbus Panhandles and Dayton Triangles. Like the ASL, the early NFL coalesced around the sport's Ohio and Pennsylvania base. By 1929, though, the NFL had spread from Boston to Chicago, while the pro soccer leagues pretty much remained Boston to Bethlehem. By 1934, all but one of the little villages of the early NFL had been replaced by larger cities - and not coincidentally, games started being broadcast on the radio. The ASL lived and died in New England, New York, and Bethlehem.

Bailey also mentioned the talent issue, despite many great American players of the time. Once FIFA closed off the easy raiding of British teams, that left the ASL with a much tinier talent pool. The NFL wouldn't consistently draw college stars to turn pro until after World War II, but enough joined to draw significant media interest. And there was certainly no shortage of rank and file players to recruit.

College football's relationship to the pro game was adversarial in a lot of ways, but it trained spectators to watch gridiron football. And college powers in the East, by and large, weren't directly in the major metropolitan areas. The University of Chicago gave up football, but the Bears and Cardinals didn't; Columbia and Penn wouldn't offer athletic scholarships, but the Giants and Eagles would pay for talent. The exception - Boston - ran its pro team off to comparatively college football-free Washington.

So you had soccer's direct competitor marketing thousands of players and hundreds of thousands of new fans every year, then releasing them into the wild after four years - while at the same time leaving the nation's biggest markets effectively empty. That was much more of a boost than pro soccer ever got. Even in the worst days of the Depression and World War II, there was never a question of the entire league going under, even if individual teams struggled.

And, of course, the NFL didn't have a Cahill or a USFA breathing down their necks.

If you want to go back in time and make the ASL a top soccer league for decades, I think you have to go back to 1908 and get college gridiron banned. Even then, we might be a rugby nation today, instead of merely a rugby variant nation.

 

The article linked to by the OP does overstate the strength of the original ASL of the 1920s in one way, when it says that "crowds over 10,000 were not at all uncommon."

Here is a quote on the matter from Colin Jose, who researched that league in exhaustive detail for a 1998 book and who knows that league better than anyone else alive: "Attendances varied, with league games in New York City drawing around 6,000; however, in the soccer hotspots of New England the average was over 8,000. Certain games, such as the bitterly fought local contests between Fall River and New Bedford, always drew in excess of 10,000."

So there were "certain games" that drew crowds of over 10,000. But they were not common.

 

Which is still way ahead of where hockey was at the time.

It doesnt matter. Becoming big against the odds now is all the more sweeter.

 

Or, if the apocrypha is correct, the Harvard-McGill series.

 

Comparatively though 6, 8, or 10 thousand back then would be much higher numbers today. I would guess, I have no evidence to back this up, those numbers would be between 15 and 20 thousand in today's world. Also there is a difference between calling something not uncommon, and calling something common. I would say if your could regularly predict when a 10k game was going to occur the phrase, "not at all uncommon" is not an incorrect phrase. It is a vague phrase, and therefore I would agree it is a poor way to communicate what the writer meant.

 

Do you think crowds are like currency, and you adjust for inflation to see what an ASL game would draw today?

We know what high-level men's outdoor soccer draws today. We know what everything draws today and it's far higher than in the twenties because of a multitude of societal factors.

The limited data I have on ASL attendance in that time period and the slightly-more-abundant-but-still-somewhat-nebulous NFL numbers of that time are comparable, but a bigger sample size of ASL games would be needed to really have a better handle on it.

All that said, one of Tinfoil Ted's tropes - that "pro soccer" was far more popular than pro football in the twenties - is not really well-supported by extant data. (Not that facts matter to Ted.)

 

Derby's old ground used to be called the "Baseball Ground" because their chairmen back in the 19th century visited America and saw how popular baseball was and decided that was the future. Wonder if there is an inverse Ted in England railing against the FA, and the ECB complaining that there is a conspiracy to hold back baseball?

 

I can now confidently refute it.

The NFL has an annoying habit of wiping history at certain milestones. NFL championships before the Super Bowl (or Super Bowl V, depending on how hairsplittery you want to get) are given the shortest of shrift. Sure, the Colts and Vikings '68 and '69 NFL championships are utterly meaningless now, and were then. And sure, the Packers like to double-dip when they count their championships, counting NFL titles and Super Bowl wins separately in '66 and '67.

Likewise, pro football history outside the NFL is not exactly celebrated, and that league's preservation of competitors' records in the 1920's and 1930's, and other leagues' existence before 1920, is understandably not a priority.

But the records are there. The first entirely professional gridiron team took the field in 1897, the now-Arizona Cardinals were formed in Chicago in 1899, an early NFL started in 1902, and the Ohio League (the direct forerunner of the NFL) was fielding legendary teams in Canton and Massillon (well, legendary to pro football history geeks), and it's probably not a coincidence that the 1920 American Professional Football Association was formed in response to "rising salaries." All this was before the first ASL was formed.

The upshot of all this is, Ted is so full of shit he squishes when he walks.

 

Just for one small sample:

I have (mostly estimated, obviously, because newspaper reports are the only data points from back in the day) attendance figures for 19 ASL games from 1924-25. Fall River's average of 8,214 was tops and Brooklyn's 2,314 the bottom (of the six teams for which I have ANY data). Those 19 games averaged 4,510. Fall River had a 10,143 crowd for Bethlehem on 2/8/1925 and supposedly drew 12k for a Cup quarterfinal a week later. But there just is not enough data to draw too fine a conclusion.

I have 61 data points from the NFL's 1924 season, the average of which was 4,783. Frankford averaged 8,333 to lead everybody and Kenosha averaged 600. I have seven crowds of 10,000 or more (all in Chicago and Frankford).

That isn't the be-all, end-all, but we obviously don't have TV ratings and clicks and merchandise sales to go on, either. It is safe to say that in the nascent sports sections of the time, college football and boxing and horse racing got a lot of coverage, pro football slightly less (except in cities with teams) and pro soccer slightly less than that. (The Providence paper actually did a pretty good job covering the ASL.)