Remembering the ASL

I must admit, I shake my head every time every time someone suggests that the United States has no real history in professional soccer, or that the North American Soccer League was when the professional sport began in this country. And then I think of that picture – the picture shown above -- of 46,000 people watching players from the American Soccer League play a friendly against Hakoah of Vienna at the Polo Grounds in 1926.

A number of fans are vaguely familiar with the American Soccer League, but too often the league is either confused with its successor, the semi-professional American Soccer league that kept soccer alive for 50 years in this country on a very modest level, or simply dismissed as a modest league that amounted to very little.

But the first American Soccer League was anything but modest. It was a pioneering, quality league that mixed domestic and foreign talent when the football world was still relatively young, and for a short decade it ushered in the first golden age of professional soccer in this country.

The only reason we know much about it today is through the tireless work of Colin Jose, who wrote the definitive history of the league and collected – reconstructed would be a better term – much of the records. I am not connected to Mr. Jose in any way, but I highly recommend that his book “American Soccer League 1921-1931” find a place in your library.

Link:

http://www.scarecrowpress.com/Catal...Search&db=^DB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0810834294

The ASL survived from 1921 until the spring of 1933. It is no small feat that MLS has now outlasted it. As a tribute to the league that professionalized the game in the United States – the predecessor of the NASL and MLS – this thread is a bit different (and a note to the moderators, I placed it here because I didn’t know where else to put it). Part history, part a comparison to some of the same issues MLS now faces today, part tribute, I offer it in to remember those who started us down the path where we are today, with thanks to those who preserved the story.

It is worth telling.

In addition to Jose’s book, there are some excellent online materials that I have linked below, including Steve Holroyd’s history of the league, and Dan Morrison’s fine Bethlehem Steel website. Both are well worth your time.

What follows is my own, far less detailed telling the of story of the ASL, where I have tried to emphasize issues that continue to confront MLS to this day, and to further focus on what was occurring in other leagues, both abroad and in the United States, during this period to underscore how important I think the ASL really was. To suggest that the United States has never cared about professional soccer simply isn’t accurate, indeed, I think a fair reading of history suggests that professional soccer was developing in this country on a pace comparable with other countries in Europe (outside of Britain) until it short circuited.

It is time we reclaim that legacy.


Links:

http://www.sover.net/~spectrum/year/1922.html
http://www.geocities.com/bethlehem_soccer/
http://www.soccerhall.org/history/us_soccer_history.htm

 

The Soccer World in 1921

Professionalism was not sanctioned by the English Football Association until 1895, paving the way for the establishment of the English Football League in 1888 as the first truly professional football league in the world. The Scottish Football League was not far behind, formed two years later, in 1890.

It wasn’t until 1920, however, that Austria became the first country outside of Britain to sanction professionalism. Austria subsequently formed the first professional league in continental Europe in 1924, followed by Hungary in 1925 and Czechoslovakia in 1926. The Inter-War years were the golden age for central European clubs like Sparta Prague, Slavia Prague, Rapid Vienna, and MTK Hungária FC, but the first club to win the Austrian professional league in 1924-25 was Hakoah Vienna, a club which would later have a major impact on the American Soccer League.

It was against this background that the American Soccer League was formed in 1921.


Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Football_League
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_champions_(football)

 

A Professional American Soccer League

Three years before the first professional football league was formed in continental Europe and a year after the formation of what became the National Football League in the United States, the American Soccer League was founded on May 7, 1921. The ASL began play that fall with eight teams, all in the northeast, with most of the clubs drawn from the National Association Football League and the Southern New England Soccer League, many closely associated with factories which supported them. The season started the third weekend in September and continued through the winter until early May, although games were often cancelled because of bad weather conditions and not made up.

The league was a financial success during its early seasons, consolidating some teams and improving its quality, but it really took off with the expansion to 12 teams for the 1924-25 season, resulting in a 44 game schedule (the same as the English Football League at the time), with each team playing the others four times.

The “twin titans” of the ASL, Bethlehem Steel FC and the Fall River Marksmen, had been joined by the Boston Wonder Workers, Brooklyn Wanders, New York Giants, New York Nationals (Indiana Flooring), Newark Seekters, New Bedford Whalers, Pawtucket’s J&P Coats, Providence Clamdiggers and Philadelphia FC -- teams that would form the nucleus of the league for the next five years. Scottish and Irish players had been imported by the league since its inception, but with expansion of new, aggressive teams in 1924 the quality of those players began to increase dramatically, lured by the prospect of making significantly more money playing in the ASL.

According to Jose, New York crowds averaged about 6,000 spectators a game, with crowds in New England averaging over 8,000. Fall River, which had built its own stadium that could seat 15,000, typically lead the league in attendance, and the fierce Fall River/New Bedford rivalry would draw some of the leagues largest crowds over 10,000.

Before you dismiss the size of the ASL crowds, consider that in 1924 the NFL’s Chicago Bears averaged 9,800 per game (which appears to have been the best in the league), while the Chicago Cardinals averaged 4,200, and the Green Bay Packers 3,500. In all, ASL attendance was good enough in the early years for ASL Vice President Thomas Cahill to boast that "soccer is making great progress and in the not too distant future will rank second only to baseball as the leading pro game."

Links:
http://www.sover.net/~spectrum/year/1925.html

PDF:
http://faculty1.coloradocollege.edu...tendance in Sports/data & stats/NFLAttend.xls.


By 1926, the league had in fact attracted a significant following. On April 11th, Bethlehem Steel won the National Open Challenge Cup (now the US Open Cup) over the St. Louis Ben Millers 7-2 before a record U.S. soccer crowd 18,000 at Ebbets Field.

Later that summer, two of Europe’s emerging club powers also toured the United States to enthusiastic crowds. Sparta Prague, which would win the first Mitropa Cup a year later, and the aforementioned SC Hakoah Vienna, which featured some of the best Jewish players in Europe (several who had also played with MTK Hungária FC.) The Hakoah games in particular were watershed events, drawing the largest crowds to ever watch professional soccer in the United States to date, including gates of 25,000, 30,000 and 36,000 (although many fans apparently received free tickets). The May 1, 1926 game against an ASL all star team largely comprised of New York Giants and Indiana Flooring Company players drew 46,000 to the Polo Grounds, the ASL winning 3-0.

So impressed were many of the Hakoah players with the league and the comparative lack of anti-Semitism they experienced in the United States, that several elected to remain in the U.S. and joined ASL teams, particularly the New York Giants and Brooklyn Wanderers. (The most notable Hokoah Vienna player to join the ASL was Béla Guttmann, the Hungarian star who spent three years with the New York Giants before helping form New York Hakoah in 1929; he would later have a celbrated career as a manager at clubs including AC Milan and Benfica.)

The ASL was also incredibly innovative. In 1927, the league introduced a split season and a playoff format to determine its chamption, and was one of the first to allow substitutions and use assistant referees as goal judges, one posted at either end of the field.

During the 1927-28 season, the ASL contracted two clubs, much as MLS would do with its own troubled Florida teams. Although the ASL didn’t have promotion and relegation in the strict sense, the twelfth team in the league had traditionally been something of a problem for years, with the slot usually occupied by a top amutur team that had difficulty making the transition to the professional ASL. When Philadelphia’s new owners got into financial trouble and ceased operations, the league also contracted its new, but thinly supported team in Hartford to balance the schedule, to some grumbling. Even so, the ASL finshed its 1927/28 season in good shape, with ten competitive clubs and with Fall River defending the league’s honor in a draw with touring Rangers before a sell out crowd of 15,000.

Seemingly in the early years of a successful venture, the league was in fact already on borrowed time.

Links:

http://www.sover.net/~spectrum/year/192.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SC_Hakoah_Wien
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Guttmann
http://www.geocities.com/bethlehem_soccer/

 

The Soccer War

Seemingly flush with success, the American Soccer League self-destructed.

Ironically, it was a baseball owner who triggered the conflict. For years, the ASL and the USFA had a running dispute about the timing of the USFA’s National Challenge [US Open] Cup, because ASL teams were required to travel significant distances by train or bus in order to play cup games during the league season. The league wanted the Cup competition moved to a period after the ASL season ended in May. The USFA wouldn’t budge, and in the summer of 1928, Charles Stoneham, the Owner of the New York Giants National League baseball club as well as the ASL New York Nationals, persuaded the league to boycott the 1928 cup. Three teams, Bethlehem Steel, the New York Giants and Newark Skeeters, defied the league and entered the competition anyway, at which point they were expelled from the ASL. The USFA ordered the three clubs reinstated, and when the ASL refused the Association declared the ASL an outlaw league and helped organize a rival professional league, the Eastern Professional Soccer League, to compete with it.

In order to field sufficient teams beyond the three that had been expelled from the ASL, the ESL extended membership to a number of teams from the Southern New York State Soccer Association, so weakening that amateur league it allied itself with the ASL. New Bedford was persuaded to change allegiances mid-season, moving from the ASL to the ESL. Finally, Maurice Vandeweghe, who owned the expelled Giants, also took a 75% ownership interest in New York Hakoah, a new club (formed with many players from the old Hakoah Vienna) which competed in the ESL, giving him control of two ESL teams. Likewise, Sam Mark now owned both Fall River and Boston in the ASL.

By all accounts, the financial losses suffered during the soccer war were terrible for all of the parties involved. The ASL effectively capitulated in during the Fall season in 1929 and recognized the supremacy of the USFA, but the Association’s victory had come at a horrible cost. The ASL was again sanctioned by the USFA as the nation’s top domestic league on October 9, 1929, just over two weeks before the stock market crashed on October 24th marking the start of the Great Depression. Undaunted, the ASL merged with the ESL on November 9, 1929 to begin the Spring, 1930 season as the Atlantic Coast League (the USFA insisting as part of the truce that the two leagues be merged under a new name). Bethlehem Steel and the New York Giants rejoined the league, but the Newark Skeeters did not survive to reunification.

Financially drained, most teams were in no financial condition to weather the Depression. To make matters worse, with the reunification of the league, owners who held financial interests in more than one club were ordered to divest and retain only one team, forcing them to sell just as the economy was seriously weakening. The league finished the Spring season of 1930 and restored the ASL name, but its keystone clubs were already in serious trouble.

The first to fall was Bethlehem Steel. Having usually enjoyed more success on the field than at the gate, as the Depression deepened the company gave up on soccer and disbanded the great team before the Fall 1930 season.

Meanwhile Sam Mark had problems of his own. Unable to find a buyer for his Boston club, he had dissolved it four games into Spring, 1930 season. With attendance at Fall River dropping, on February 16, 1931, Mark moved the club to New York, where the Marksmen always enjoyed a solid following, merging his club with the New York Soccer Club (essentially the remnants of what had been the Giants franchise which had changed hands a year earlier), and renaming the combined team the New York Yankees. (The sale of the original ASL Giants before the Fall, 1930 season had freed up the name for Charles Stoneham, who quickly renamed his Nationals the “Giants” to match his National League baseball club, thus creating considerable confusion for fans and historians alike.) When Mark failed to make a go of it in New York either, having already leased his Fall River stadium to another team, he quickly moved his club to New Bedford, now resurrecting the name of the old (and since failed) New Bedford Whalers. Having gone through three clubs, four cities and countless name changes in only two years, Mark finally gave up and folded New Bedford after the Spring, 1932 season.


Links:

http://www.sover.net/~spectrum/year/1929.html
http://www.geocities.com/bethlehem_soccer/gl091728.html
http://www.geocities.com/bethlehem_soccer/gl092928b.html
http://www.geocities.com/bethlehem_soccer/gl100428.html
http://www.geocities.com/bethlehem_soccer/gl110429b.html

 

The End of the ASL

With the leagues two strongest owners and many of its oldest teams -- Bethlehem Steel, Fall River Marksmen, Brooklyn Wanders, Newark Skeeters, Boston Wonder Workers, the original New York Giants and Philadelphia Field Club now all gone -- the ASL limped on for a bit towards its final demise.

Not all of the news was bad. New York Hakoah merged with the fledgling ASL Brooklyn Hakoah to form the Hakoah All Stars, reuniting many of the former Hakoah Vienna players, and Hakoah became one of the reconstituted league’s better clubs, even touring South American in 1930 and Central American in 1931. ASL players also formed the backbone of the first United States World Cup team in 1930 which reached the semi-finals, a testimony to the quality of the league.

But it was not enough.

Jose contends that the league ended for all practical purposes with the final game of the 1931 season between the New Bedford Whalers and the New York Giants. What was left of the league, now a collection of unfamiliar teams, finally collapsed after the Spring season in 1933. A reorganized ASL was formed, far less ambitious and far less professional, that continued on for 50 years, its final years in the shadow of the North American Soccer League.

The ASL had a regular season champion and also had a separate cup competition of its own, and during its first eleven years 7 different franchises shared the honors. Of the eleven league titles between 1924 and 1931, Fall River won six of them, Bethlehem Steel two (one as Philadelphia FC), with the Giants, J&P Coats and Boston one each. Boston captured two of the ASL’s Lewis Cups, with New Bedford, Boston, Bethlehem Steel, the New York Nationals and Fall River one each. With that, the ASL closed the books.

The first golden age of professional soccer in the United States was over.

Still, it is interesting to think about what might have been. In 1928, before the Soccer War and the Great Depression, the NFL, like the ASL, had ten teams. Unlike the ASL, however, four NFL teams – the Giants, Bears, Packers and Cardinals – met the challenges of a rival league (the AFL of 1926) and the Depression and survived to the modern era, admittedly accompanied by a turnstile of other clubs through the 1930s that moved, consolidated, and often quickly folded.

Had even a handful of the strongest ASL teams been able to hang on, as their counterparts did in the NFL, including the likes of Fall River, Bethlehem Steel and some of the New York teams, professional soccer in the US would have been forever changed. It was a topic that had some consideration even at the time, with the Bethlehem Globe reporting when the original Giants had been dissolved that the move was designed to decrease the number of teams in the New York area and “leave Brooklyn, Hakoah and New York Nationals [soon to be renamed the Giants] as the three big New York clubs.” Just imagine the derbys in New York as the Gaints, Hakoah, and the Wanderers battled for annual supremacy.

From its northeastern base, it isn’t too hard to imagine that the league could have re-established itself in Philadelphia (just as the NFL did with the Philadelphia Eagles after Frankford failed) and perhaps Boston, thereafter following the path of the NFL and expanding into Chicago, Detroit and St. Louis, where soccer was well established on an amateur and semi-professional level, evidenced by the success of clubs from these areas in the US Open Cup.

It never happened.

We are only left with photos, including several that Jose has collected in his book, which even today look surprisingly modern. My favorite is a shot of two hoop shirted Fall River defenders challenging Archie Stark, the most prolific goal scorer in American soccer history who played for Bethlehem Steel, in front of a crowd of over 17,000 at the Polo Grounds for the 1930 US Open Cup game. Here, in the competition that created all the fuss, the two great teams of the ASL are facing off, and every seat in the distant, towering grandstand appears full at a time when the game was young and there was still a glimmer of hope for the ASL.

Instead, professional soccer leagues continued to expand in Europe and Latin America, with the formation of La Liga in 1928, Serie A in 1929, the fully professional Argentinean league in 1931, the Ligue de Football Professionnel in France in 1932, and the Bundesliga in 1962.

But the ASL predated them all.

If only . . .