Soccer Frontiers: The Global Game in the United States, 1863–1913: Sports & Popular Culture
Editat de Prof. Chris Bolsmann, Dr. George Kioussisen Limba Engleză Hardback – 17 sep 2021
The early history of soccer in the United States has received relatively little scholarly attention. While the sport’s failure to make cultural inroads has been the source of much reflection and retrospection, other pastimes such as baseball, basketball, and American football have been covered far more extensively. Soccer Frontiers helps to fill this gap and correct the widespread notion that soccer was unfamiliar in the United States before thelate twentieth century.
Editors Chris Bolsmann and George N. Kioussis’s collection sheds light on America’s little-known soccer history by focusing on the game’s presence in major American cities between 1863 and 1913. As waves of immigrants arrived and American cities began to industrialize and become sizable cultural hubs, soccer, too, began to flourish. With essays focused on the years between the Civil War and World War I—a period which saw the creation of both the English Football Association and the US Soccer Federation—this volume also offers diverse regional representation, moving from New England to the South to the West Coast.
Soccer Frontiers seeks to identify the distinctive yet understudied traits of American soccer, thereby contributing an important missing piece to the broader puzzle of American sport history.
CHRIS BOLSMANN is a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, Northridge. He is coauthor, with Dilwyn Porter, English Gentlemen and World Soccer: Corinthians, Amateurism and the Global Game and coeditor of two books with Peter Alegi: Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space and South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid and Beyond.
GEORGE N. KIOUSSIS is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, Northridge. His work has appeared in the Journal of Sport History, Sport in History, the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, and Soccer & Society. He currently serves as an editor for Sport in History.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781621906124
ISBN-10: 1621906124
Pagini: 360
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 43 mm
Greutate: 0.68 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: University of Tennessee Press
Colecția Univ Tennessee Press
Seria Sports & Popular Culture
ISBN-10: 1621906124
Pagini: 360
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 43 mm
Greutate: 0.68 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: University of Tennessee Press
Colecția Univ Tennessee Press
Seria Sports & Popular Culture
Notă biografică
CHRIS BOLSMANN is a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, Northridge. He is coauthor, with Dilwyn Porter, English Gentlemen and World Soccer: Corinthians, Amateurism and the Global Game and coeditor of two books with Peter Alegi: Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space and South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid and Beyond.
GEORGE N. KIOUSSIS is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, Northridge. His work has appeared in the Journal of Sport History, Sport in History, the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, and Soccer & Society. He currently serves as an editor for Sport in History.
GEORGE N. KIOUSSIS is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, Northridge. His work has appeared in the Journal of Sport History, Sport in History, the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, and Soccer & Society. He currently serves as an editor for Sport in History.
Extras
On 26 June 2010, the Ghanaian men’s national soccer team defeated the United States in a round of sixteen match at the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup in Rustenburg, two hours west of South Africa’s industrial metropolis Johannesburg. The U.S. team had topped its group after credible draws against England and Slovenia and a victory over Algeria. In extra time, the Ghanaians, with overwhelming local support, eliminated the United States from the World Cup. After the exit of the Americans, the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post scoffed, “This Sport Is Stupid Anyway,” and in so doing suggested baseball and American football, the two quintessential and uniquely male American sports, were more serious than soccer, the global game. While the New York Post may not have the same gravitas as other American newspapers, the disdain expressed in its headline captured a broader popular and scholarly apathy for soccer. While the U.S. men lag well behind their female counterparts, who consistently top the world rankings and have won the World Cup on four occasions (1991, 1999, 2015, and 2019), their own World Cup history is more impressive than usually credited. The U.S. men’s national team has qualified for ten World Cup finals.
The U.S. men’s team participated in the inaugural World Cup held in 1930. The New York Times even suggested the team was the favorite to win the title. The United States placed third in the 1930 tournament after recording two victories and losing to Argentina in the semifinals. The United States was eliminated from the 1934 finals after one game and did not compete in the 1938 finals held in France on the eve of the Second World War. In their third World Cup finals appearance, the Americans recorded a famous win at the 1950 tournament in Brazil, defeating England, which was making its World Cup finals debut, 1–0. The victory was even more remarkable in that many of the players were part-time professionals and amateurs as compared to the English team, which included Billy Wright and Tom Finney. As was the case with the 1930 U.S. World Cup team, the majority of players in the squad were born in the United States. Despite the historic victory in Brazil, it would take forty years for the men’s national team to qualify for the World Cup finals again. The failure to qualify for nine consecutive men’s World Cup finals was due to a combination of factors including poor organization by a relatively weak national federation and the preference for Olympic soccer tournaments as opposed to the World Cup.
David Goldblatt notes in his masterful tome, The Ball is Round, that the U.S. victory over England in 1950 “barely registered at home,” and if it had been, it “would have merely reconfirmed the profoundly alien and unassimilated quality of the game to Anglo-America.” Bill Murray notes in his equally impressive The World’s Game that the defeat “created barely a ripple in the United States sports world.” While Goldblatt and Murray are correct in that the match received little press coverage in the United States, soccer was far from alien. Rather, the sport was played by young American-born boys, girls, men, and women across many parts of the country. Goldblatt and Murray’s derisory comments are common in scholarly considerations of U.S. soccer in sport history. This collection considers the development and spread of the game between 1863 and 1913 across the United States and seeks to fill a gap in the scholarly literature on American sport.
Soccer’s failure to make cultural inroads in the United States has been the source of much reflection and retrospection. A number of theories have been offered as to why the proverbial “sport of tomorrow” has never made the jump from participant pursuit to national pastime: the game is too slow, it is for foreigners, it lacks homegrown heroes, and it cannot be quantified. Yet the most well-developed argument is that of exceptionalism, which suggests the United States is different, superior, and peerless.
This collection of essays builds upon prior historical work, drawing from previously underused archives and libraries across the United States. More specifically, it seeks to answer questions related to the development and spread of soccer across the American landscape between 1863 and 1913. We have selected 1863 as the starting point, as this was the year in which the Football Association of England (FA) was established and the Laws of the Game were codified. Soon thereafter, soccer made its way to the United States, where it developed in various East Coast hotbeds before beginning its southerly and westward drift. We end our discussion in 1913, a year in which the United States of America Football Association (since renamed the United States Soccer Federation, or USSF) was formed. Unsurprisingly, the recent USSF centenary celebrations only briefly acknowledged the country’s soccer history prior to 1913, thus foregrounding its own role in the game’s development. In tandem, the chapters that follow explore the institutions, industries, communities, and personalities that pioneered soccer’s early U.S. growth and helped it become a popular sport in turn-of-the-century America.
In the epilogue of this collection, Eileen Narcotta-Welp argues that the United States is “a vision of hope” that is constantly being renegotiated and reproduced. One of the key drivers of this theme is immigration. This is central in understanding the creation of the United States. By the 1600s, Europeans had settled across the Eastern Seaboard, including British, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish immigrants. Many arrived in search of economic opportunities and religious freedom. Thousands of African slaves were forcibly settled in North America, and by the Declaration of Independence in 1776, slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies. The Naturalization Act of 1790 permitted any free white person of “good character” who had resided in the country for two years or longer to apply for citizenship. Immigrants from Ireland and Germany also settled in the United States. While both groups were considered white, the former was seen as “highly undesirable.” For Matthew Jacobson, “whiteness was subject to new interpretations” in which meanings of “white” were reinvented in differing sociopolitical contexts. Race and ethnicity remained a central theme in immigration to the United States.
From the 1850s, large numbers of Chinese immigrants settled in the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed and barred Chinese immigration. In 1892 Ellis Island in New York Harbor was designated a federal immigration depot, and in 1907 immigration to the United States peaked at 1.3 million people. By the turn of the twentieth century, significant numbers of immigrants originated from southern and eastern Europe. Indeed, between 1886 and 1925, thirteen million “so-called new immigrants from southern, eastern, and central Europe (excluding Germany)” arrived in the United States. The chapters in this collection highlight the significant contribution of immigrants to the development of the game across the United States, primarily but not exclusively by English and Scottish settlers. Significantly, the game further developed when sons and daughters of these British immigrants or first-generation Americans took up the game and consolidated and promoted it across the country.
Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin’s essay on Boston’s Oneida Football Club challenges the foundational myths of American football and soccer in the United States. The authors highlight the contested nature of sporting memory and misrepresentation and draw on Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) in relation to historical memory. David Kilpatrick traces the development of the game in New York and shows the importance of the city in the formation and spread of the game. Thomas McCabe demonstrates the role played by individuals such as Thomas Tuffnell, a British immigrant to New Jersey who helped popularize the game in the Garden State. McCabe highlights how immigrants in the textile industries of the Northeast helped develop and spread the game. In 1884, New Jersey and New York soccer clubs were instrumental in the formation of the American Football Association (AFA). The AFA introduced a knockout competition similar to the FA Cup in England. The first winners of the trophy toured Canada that season while the Canadians returned to the United States, winning the first “unofficial” international match between the two countries. Ed Farnsworth considers the development of soccer in Philadelphia, where the quintessentially English elite game of cricket made strong inroads. Soccer too established a presence in the city from the early 1880s. In over thirty years, a number of amateur and professional soccer teams were established in the Philadelphia region, where they drew support from immigrants and, increasingly, locally-born Americans.
Patrick Sullivan considers the development of soccer in Alabama and Georgia with specific emphasis on Atlanta, Auburn, and Birmingham. The game spread with British immigrants to Alabama and Georgia; granite and gneiss quarries brought Scottish and Welsh miners, who played the game and helped popularize it, to the latter state. Southern colleges embraced the game and it was played in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the 1870s too. Gabe Logan tracks the development of soccer in Chicago from the mid-1880s onward. British migrants held regular English versus Scottish matches. Cricket was popular in Chicago, too, with many migrants playing cricket in the summer and soccer in the winter. George Pullman established a railway carriage manufacturer south of Chicago that fielded soccer teams. Dave Lange discusses the development of soccer in St. Louis beginning in the 1870s. Immigration and the Catholic Church in St. Louis were responsible for the initial development of the game. Thomas Cahill was born in New York in 1864 of Irish descent. When he was a young boy, his family moved to St. Louis and he became interested in soccer. He established the Shamrocks team and was instrumental in fostering the game in St. Louis.
Significantly, Cahill brought the first English touring team, the Pilgrims, to St. Louis in 1905. The Pilgrims returned in 1909 while the famous London amateurs, Corinthian FC, toured Canada and the United States in 1906, 1911, and 1924. A number of commentators have suggested the tours of the Pilgrims and Corinthians were intended as educational visits to teach American boys the virtues of the most popular game in England. The American Cricketer exclaimed, “They have come to spread the gospel of Association football.” A number of newspapers indicated the Pilgrims tour was “to popularize the English style of game” and that its purpose was “a distinctly missionary one.” Some have even suggested that the Pilgrims tours were “failed mission[s] of British cultural imperialism.”
The tours were considered showcases for the advantages of soccer in relation to gridiron, where a number of deaths and injuries occurred. President Theodore Roosevelt noted his concerns regarding the “brutality” and “cunning” of gridiron.57 Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard University, suggested removing the American game from college campuses, and members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted that “intercollegiate football should be prohibited to Harvard students in 1906, and until a reasonable game of football shall have been formulated.” The Harvard Bulletin also called for the abolishment of American gridiron or for “radical changes” to be made. The game was abolished at Columbia University in 1905.
Such sentiment was not limited to those residing in the United States. The captain of the Pilgrims, Fred Milnes, opined, “I cannot see much merit in the football game as played by the American colleges. It is involved, unscientific and puts a premium on brute strength.” Milnes offered to play an exhibition match for President Roosevelt in Washington if he was not able to travel up to New York to watch one of their scheduled matches. Milnes and his Pilgrims team met with Harvard president Eliot, and some accounts claim the captain and star player Vivian Woodward met with President Roosevelt in Washington. If a goal of the Pilgrims tour to North America in 1905 was to replace American gridiron on college campuses, a visit to President Roosevelt to discuss this issue would have likely been mentioned in Milnes’s published recollection of the tour. It was not. Milnes did, however, note that American gridiron is “played below the standard of gentlemanliness.”
Rather than being educational, missionary, or an attempt to dislodge the prominent college sport of American gridiron, the tours by the Pilgrims and Corinthians were primarily financial undertakings by shrewd businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic. Money was to be made, and it behooved the visitors to win as many games as possible so as to maintain interest in the remaining fixtures and keep the coffers filled. The Corinthians toured to various parts of the world before World War II, and as soon as they met local opposition superior to them, they no longer remained the drawcard they once were and would not return. This was the case in the United States, too, which became integral to the global circuit of soccer tours.65 In addition to the tours by the Corinthians and Pilgrims, a U.S. eleven visited Scandinavia in 1916, as did Bethlehem Steel FC three years later.
Tours were not only undertaken by men’s soccer teams. Dick, Kerr Ladies FC was established in 1917 in Preston, England, but the FA went out of its way to discourage women’s football. It banned women’s teams from playing on the grounds of FA-affiliated clubs in 1921.66 The team toured the United States the following year. Upon arrival in North America, the team was informed by one of the local organizers that arranged matches were to be played against men’s teams only, as there were not enough female teams of the caliber of the travelers.67 Alethea Melling documented the eight games the visitors played, of which they won three, tied three, and lost two before crowds of more than eight thousand spectators.68 Matches were played against sides that included Paterson FC, Centro-Hispano, and Fall River FC. Despite the visitors only playing against men, there were instances of organized women’s soccer in the United States during this period. Mabel Lee notes that some of the earliest references to women’s soccer in American colleges date back to 1907 at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania. By 1930, 58 percent of the 120 colleges that enrolled female students played soccer.69
Zachary Bigalke discusses the development of soccer in Astoria and Portland on the West Coast in the 1890s. He identifies the roles played by schools and by Scottish immigrants George Cameron and Colin Dyment in promoting the game of soccer in Oregon. Derek Van Rheenen considers immigration, social class, and ethnic communities in the development of soccer in San Francisco. He tracks the emergence of soccer leagues in the Bay Area and the formation of the California Football League. Brian Bunk locates his analysis of soccer in San Francisco, too. He, however, considers the development of the women’s game, which he traces back to 1893. George Kioussis charts the development of soccer in Los Angeles with specific emphasis on the role of British immigrants in promoting the game in Southern California.
The U.S. men’s team participated in the inaugural World Cup held in 1930. The New York Times even suggested the team was the favorite to win the title. The United States placed third in the 1930 tournament after recording two victories and losing to Argentina in the semifinals. The United States was eliminated from the 1934 finals after one game and did not compete in the 1938 finals held in France on the eve of the Second World War. In their third World Cup finals appearance, the Americans recorded a famous win at the 1950 tournament in Brazil, defeating England, which was making its World Cup finals debut, 1–0. The victory was even more remarkable in that many of the players were part-time professionals and amateurs as compared to the English team, which included Billy Wright and Tom Finney. As was the case with the 1930 U.S. World Cup team, the majority of players in the squad were born in the United States. Despite the historic victory in Brazil, it would take forty years for the men’s national team to qualify for the World Cup finals again. The failure to qualify for nine consecutive men’s World Cup finals was due to a combination of factors including poor organization by a relatively weak national federation and the preference for Olympic soccer tournaments as opposed to the World Cup.
David Goldblatt notes in his masterful tome, The Ball is Round, that the U.S. victory over England in 1950 “barely registered at home,” and if it had been, it “would have merely reconfirmed the profoundly alien and unassimilated quality of the game to Anglo-America.” Bill Murray notes in his equally impressive The World’s Game that the defeat “created barely a ripple in the United States sports world.” While Goldblatt and Murray are correct in that the match received little press coverage in the United States, soccer was far from alien. Rather, the sport was played by young American-born boys, girls, men, and women across many parts of the country. Goldblatt and Murray’s derisory comments are common in scholarly considerations of U.S. soccer in sport history. This collection considers the development and spread of the game between 1863 and 1913 across the United States and seeks to fill a gap in the scholarly literature on American sport.
Soccer’s failure to make cultural inroads in the United States has been the source of much reflection and retrospection. A number of theories have been offered as to why the proverbial “sport of tomorrow” has never made the jump from participant pursuit to national pastime: the game is too slow, it is for foreigners, it lacks homegrown heroes, and it cannot be quantified. Yet the most well-developed argument is that of exceptionalism, which suggests the United States is different, superior, and peerless.
This collection of essays builds upon prior historical work, drawing from previously underused archives and libraries across the United States. More specifically, it seeks to answer questions related to the development and spread of soccer across the American landscape between 1863 and 1913. We have selected 1863 as the starting point, as this was the year in which the Football Association of England (FA) was established and the Laws of the Game were codified. Soon thereafter, soccer made its way to the United States, where it developed in various East Coast hotbeds before beginning its southerly and westward drift. We end our discussion in 1913, a year in which the United States of America Football Association (since renamed the United States Soccer Federation, or USSF) was formed. Unsurprisingly, the recent USSF centenary celebrations only briefly acknowledged the country’s soccer history prior to 1913, thus foregrounding its own role in the game’s development. In tandem, the chapters that follow explore the institutions, industries, communities, and personalities that pioneered soccer’s early U.S. growth and helped it become a popular sport in turn-of-the-century America.
In the epilogue of this collection, Eileen Narcotta-Welp argues that the United States is “a vision of hope” that is constantly being renegotiated and reproduced. One of the key drivers of this theme is immigration. This is central in understanding the creation of the United States. By the 1600s, Europeans had settled across the Eastern Seaboard, including British, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish immigrants. Many arrived in search of economic opportunities and religious freedom. Thousands of African slaves were forcibly settled in North America, and by the Declaration of Independence in 1776, slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies. The Naturalization Act of 1790 permitted any free white person of “good character” who had resided in the country for two years or longer to apply for citizenship. Immigrants from Ireland and Germany also settled in the United States. While both groups were considered white, the former was seen as “highly undesirable.” For Matthew Jacobson, “whiteness was subject to new interpretations” in which meanings of “white” were reinvented in differing sociopolitical contexts. Race and ethnicity remained a central theme in immigration to the United States.
From the 1850s, large numbers of Chinese immigrants settled in the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed and barred Chinese immigration. In 1892 Ellis Island in New York Harbor was designated a federal immigration depot, and in 1907 immigration to the United States peaked at 1.3 million people. By the turn of the twentieth century, significant numbers of immigrants originated from southern and eastern Europe. Indeed, between 1886 and 1925, thirteen million “so-called new immigrants from southern, eastern, and central Europe (excluding Germany)” arrived in the United States. The chapters in this collection highlight the significant contribution of immigrants to the development of the game across the United States, primarily but not exclusively by English and Scottish settlers. Significantly, the game further developed when sons and daughters of these British immigrants or first-generation Americans took up the game and consolidated and promoted it across the country.
Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin’s essay on Boston’s Oneida Football Club challenges the foundational myths of American football and soccer in the United States. The authors highlight the contested nature of sporting memory and misrepresentation and draw on Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) in relation to historical memory. David Kilpatrick traces the development of the game in New York and shows the importance of the city in the formation and spread of the game. Thomas McCabe demonstrates the role played by individuals such as Thomas Tuffnell, a British immigrant to New Jersey who helped popularize the game in the Garden State. McCabe highlights how immigrants in the textile industries of the Northeast helped develop and spread the game. In 1884, New Jersey and New York soccer clubs were instrumental in the formation of the American Football Association (AFA). The AFA introduced a knockout competition similar to the FA Cup in England. The first winners of the trophy toured Canada that season while the Canadians returned to the United States, winning the first “unofficial” international match between the two countries. Ed Farnsworth considers the development of soccer in Philadelphia, where the quintessentially English elite game of cricket made strong inroads. Soccer too established a presence in the city from the early 1880s. In over thirty years, a number of amateur and professional soccer teams were established in the Philadelphia region, where they drew support from immigrants and, increasingly, locally-born Americans.
Patrick Sullivan considers the development of soccer in Alabama and Georgia with specific emphasis on Atlanta, Auburn, and Birmingham. The game spread with British immigrants to Alabama and Georgia; granite and gneiss quarries brought Scottish and Welsh miners, who played the game and helped popularize it, to the latter state. Southern colleges embraced the game and it was played in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the 1870s too. Gabe Logan tracks the development of soccer in Chicago from the mid-1880s onward. British migrants held regular English versus Scottish matches. Cricket was popular in Chicago, too, with many migrants playing cricket in the summer and soccer in the winter. George Pullman established a railway carriage manufacturer south of Chicago that fielded soccer teams. Dave Lange discusses the development of soccer in St. Louis beginning in the 1870s. Immigration and the Catholic Church in St. Louis were responsible for the initial development of the game. Thomas Cahill was born in New York in 1864 of Irish descent. When he was a young boy, his family moved to St. Louis and he became interested in soccer. He established the Shamrocks team and was instrumental in fostering the game in St. Louis.
Significantly, Cahill brought the first English touring team, the Pilgrims, to St. Louis in 1905. The Pilgrims returned in 1909 while the famous London amateurs, Corinthian FC, toured Canada and the United States in 1906, 1911, and 1924. A number of commentators have suggested the tours of the Pilgrims and Corinthians were intended as educational visits to teach American boys the virtues of the most popular game in England. The American Cricketer exclaimed, “They have come to spread the gospel of Association football.” A number of newspapers indicated the Pilgrims tour was “to popularize the English style of game” and that its purpose was “a distinctly missionary one.” Some have even suggested that the Pilgrims tours were “failed mission[s] of British cultural imperialism.”
The tours were considered showcases for the advantages of soccer in relation to gridiron, where a number of deaths and injuries occurred. President Theodore Roosevelt noted his concerns regarding the “brutality” and “cunning” of gridiron.57 Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard University, suggested removing the American game from college campuses, and members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted that “intercollegiate football should be prohibited to Harvard students in 1906, and until a reasonable game of football shall have been formulated.” The Harvard Bulletin also called for the abolishment of American gridiron or for “radical changes” to be made. The game was abolished at Columbia University in 1905.
Such sentiment was not limited to those residing in the United States. The captain of the Pilgrims, Fred Milnes, opined, “I cannot see much merit in the football game as played by the American colleges. It is involved, unscientific and puts a premium on brute strength.” Milnes offered to play an exhibition match for President Roosevelt in Washington if he was not able to travel up to New York to watch one of their scheduled matches. Milnes and his Pilgrims team met with Harvard president Eliot, and some accounts claim the captain and star player Vivian Woodward met with President Roosevelt in Washington. If a goal of the Pilgrims tour to North America in 1905 was to replace American gridiron on college campuses, a visit to President Roosevelt to discuss this issue would have likely been mentioned in Milnes’s published recollection of the tour. It was not. Milnes did, however, note that American gridiron is “played below the standard of gentlemanliness.”
Rather than being educational, missionary, or an attempt to dislodge the prominent college sport of American gridiron, the tours by the Pilgrims and Corinthians were primarily financial undertakings by shrewd businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic. Money was to be made, and it behooved the visitors to win as many games as possible so as to maintain interest in the remaining fixtures and keep the coffers filled. The Corinthians toured to various parts of the world before World War II, and as soon as they met local opposition superior to them, they no longer remained the drawcard they once were and would not return. This was the case in the United States, too, which became integral to the global circuit of soccer tours.65 In addition to the tours by the Corinthians and Pilgrims, a U.S. eleven visited Scandinavia in 1916, as did Bethlehem Steel FC three years later.
Tours were not only undertaken by men’s soccer teams. Dick, Kerr Ladies FC was established in 1917 in Preston, England, but the FA went out of its way to discourage women’s football. It banned women’s teams from playing on the grounds of FA-affiliated clubs in 1921.66 The team toured the United States the following year. Upon arrival in North America, the team was informed by one of the local organizers that arranged matches were to be played against men’s teams only, as there were not enough female teams of the caliber of the travelers.67 Alethea Melling documented the eight games the visitors played, of which they won three, tied three, and lost two before crowds of more than eight thousand spectators.68 Matches were played against sides that included Paterson FC, Centro-Hispano, and Fall River FC. Despite the visitors only playing against men, there were instances of organized women’s soccer in the United States during this period. Mabel Lee notes that some of the earliest references to women’s soccer in American colleges date back to 1907 at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania. By 1930, 58 percent of the 120 colleges that enrolled female students played soccer.69
Zachary Bigalke discusses the development of soccer in Astoria and Portland on the West Coast in the 1890s. He identifies the roles played by schools and by Scottish immigrants George Cameron and Colin Dyment in promoting the game of soccer in Oregon. Derek Van Rheenen considers immigration, social class, and ethnic communities in the development of soccer in San Francisco. He tracks the emergence of soccer leagues in the Bay Area and the formation of the California Football League. Brian Bunk locates his analysis of soccer in San Francisco, too. He, however, considers the development of the women’s game, which he traces back to 1893. George Kioussis charts the development of soccer in Los Angeles with specific emphasis on the role of British immigrants in promoting the game in Southern California.