On September 15, 1928, thousands gathered to watch the Boston Wonder Workers get their first win of the season by defeating the New York Giants. What sport was this? One of the most popular of the 1920’s: soccer.
While the sport originated in 1800’s England, it spread quickly across Europe before making the leap to North and South America. In the United States, soccer took hold most quickly in the immigrant communities of industrial cities like St. Louis, Boston, New York, and their surrounding suburbs. The first major teams like J. & P. Coats and Bethlehem Steel were founded by workers at those companies and later grew into more organized, and eventually fully professional concerns. Other clubs were founded as professional outfits and played in regional leagues like the St. Louis Soccer League and the Southern New England Soccer League, but the desire to have bigger competition led to the creation of the first major soccer league in the United States in 1921.
The American Soccer League was created by merging the Southern New England Soccer League, which had teams in Fall River, Boston, and New Bedford Massachusetts, with the National Association Football League which brought teams from Brooklyn, Newark, New York, and Philadelphia. While it lasted, the ASL was a resounding success. Crowds well into the thousands came to see regular league matches, and when playoffs began these crowds would swell to the tens of thousands. The 1925 ASL championship game took place in Fall River, Massachusetts, and attracted a crowd of 15,000 spectators. One in ten people in Fall River were at that game. In New York, the numbers were even bigger, with one exhibition match between the New York based ASL all stars and a visiting team from Vienna drawing a crowd of 46,000 to the Polo Grounds. These attendance numbers made soccer inarguably one of the most popular sports at the time in America.
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| Bethlehem Steel taking on the Fall River Marksmen |
We all know that soccer hasn’t kept its place as a big sport here. The ASL was a victim of its own success, with team owners angling for bigger returns by moving their teams around. In one season, the Fall River Marksmen moved to New York, merged with the New York Soccer Club, and renamed themselves the New York Yankees (Yes, the baseball team already existed). After a couple of season there, the team again moved, this time back to Massachusetts, and called themselves the New Bedford Whalers, the same name of a team that had gone defunct a few years earlier. It was downright confusing to be a fan of soccer at this point. Combine that with declining ticket sales due to the Great Depression and major disagreements between team owners and the league, and it was enough discord to disband the league entirely in 1933.
American soccer never died out, it just became much less popular. Competition continued after the fall of the first great league, but it was mostly semi-professional and amateur competitions. The country again took interest in the game when an unknown American squad stunned England by defeating them 1-0 in the 1950 World Cup. But without a strong league, and with football and baseball supplying Americans with their sports fix, soccer interest was sporadic. That period of the ASL was truly the golden age of American soccer, and only in the last twenty years has renewed sustained interest in the sport once again taken hold with the American people.
