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Football's final frontier: America's tangled relationship with soccer

Football's final frontier: America's tangled relationship with soccer

Football fever is sweeping North America this summer as Canada, the US and Mexico co-host the FIFA Men’s World Cup – yet for decades ‘soccer’ was the poor sporting cousin in the US. Matthew Taylor traces its development in the States, from stuttering starts to global success (for women, at least)

A composite image of several soccer players in action set against a packed stadium. An American flag motif blends into the background crowd. The players wear different uniforms—including white with purple accents, white with red‑and‑blue stripes with the number 12, and blue with the number 21—suggesting multiple teams or matches. The overall effect celebrates soccer in the United States.

Published: June 19, 2026 at 5:00 PM

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“Football, like life, is filled with ups and downs,” famously proclaimed Diego Maradona, one of the greatest players ever to grace a soccer field. “The most important thing is to keep moving forward and never give up.”

The diminutive attacker, himself no stranger to both ups and downs, hailed from Argentina – one of the most successful footballing nations in a football-mad region, flanked by Brazil and Uruguay. North of Latin America, though, the story is very different – as a whistle-stop run-through of the history of US soccer shows. Competing with numerous other sports for public attention and engagement, the European style of football long struggled for visibility and stability. And Maradona’s quote might have been spoken specifically about the US game.

In the mid-1970s, football – or soccer, as North Americans would have it – seemed to be on the verge of a major breakthrough in the US. The North American Soccer League (NASL), its team rosters filled with international stars such as Bobby Moore, Eusebio and Pelé, was drawing large crowds at stadiums and on television.

Then, in 1976, American soccer drew a global focus when the national teams of Brazil, England and Italy plus an NASL all-star line-up competed for the Bicentennial Cup, part of celebrations for the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Hopes were high that the ‘world game’ might elbow its way into US sporting consciousness alongside the ‘big four’ sports of baseball, (American) football, basketball and ice hockey.

A black‑and‑white photograph of two men in formal suits at a table. One man sits signing a document with a pen, smiling as he looks down. The other stands beside him, leaning in with one hand on the seated man’s shoulder and the other on the table, also smiling. A patterned wall forms the backdrop, suggesting an official or ceremonial setting.

Welsh former footballer Phil Woosnam (left) after signing a contract to manage a new football in Atlanta, Georgia, 1966. He was optimistic that football would take off in the United States, but it never reached the heights he imagined | Credit: Getty Images

NASL commissioner Phil Woosnam, a former player and high-school teacher from Wales, was confident of success. “This sport will take off”, he told Sports Illustrated in 1977. “There is absolutely no way that it will not bypass everything else.”

Woosnam’s optimism proved ill-founded. Ultimately, an over-reliance on imported players, alongside financial mismanagement by the league administration and club owners, led to the NASL’s demise in 1985.

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Observers saw it as the latest in a long line of failed schemes and missed opportunities that had hampered football’s progress in the US. Yet there are other ways to tell the story of American soccer. If we shake the tendency to focus on what might have been and look instead at what actually was, we can begin to see a picture of a sport that, far from being marginalised, became central to the recreational lives of both migrants and native-born Americans.

Soccer has never taken the US by storm, as Woosnam and others hoped it would. But it has, over time, become embedded in American social and sporting life – helping, as the pre-eminent US soccer historian Brian D Bunk has noted, build communities across a vast nation.

International language of sport

Codes of football emerged in North America around the same time as they did in other parts of the English-speaking world. Sport was part of a transnational culture, spreading as part of the movement of people, objects and ideas.

Although we know the British played a prominent role, details of the first clubs and competitive matches remain fairly sketchy. Some sources identify the Oneida Football Club in Boston as the first American ‘football’ club. Formed by schoolboys at elite preparatory institutions, the club played between 1862 and 1865 on Boston Common according to their own ‘Boston rules’.

Initially adopting rules close to those of the English Football Association (FA), leading universities such as Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Yale soon moved to a more rugby-style game, which was then developed along independent lines. The FA code of rules was first published in the US in 1866, but it was not until the 1880s that they really took hold.

Soccer found early success mostly in industrial regions populated by British-born workers. The West Hudson in northern New Jersey, incorporating the towns of Kearny, Harrison and East Newark, was a key destination for Scottish and Irish immigrants who arrived to work in the local textile mills. It also became a central focus for the establishment of the American Football Association (AFA) in 1884, and for the organisation of the first international matches against Canada in 1885 and 1886.

A large industrial textile machine fills a factory space, with hundreds of parallel threads stretched across its metal frame from a wide cylindrical spool. Gears, rollers and structural supports surround the mechanism. Tall columns, overhead pipes and large windows giving natural light frame the scene, emphasising the scale and complexity of the weaving equipment.

A large textile machine in a mill in Paterson, New Jersey, 1937. Soccer was particularly popular in areas where British-born immigrants moved to work in the textile industry | Credit: Alamy

Industrial areas such as Fall River in Massachusetts became hotbeds of soccer. The so-called ‘Spindle City’ accounted for the largest concentration of textile production in the western hemisphere, and the highest percentage of foreign-born residents in the country between 1870 and 1910. It also boasted as many as 25 soccer teams by the mid-1880s, with attendances averaging a few thousand per match. In the nearby mill town of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, teams competed for local, regional and national glory in front of crowds of up to 5,000 people – roughly one-sixth of the local population.

Going professional

Professional leagues were established during the 1890s and 1920s, with varying degrees of success. Created by a group of baseball club owners in 1894, the American League of Professional Football Clubs (ALPFC) had franchises in Baltimore, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC.

It filled its rosters with local players of mainly English and Irish descent and, in the case of the Baltimore Orioles, with a handful of imported professionals from Britain. Marred by controversy and limited public support, the league lasted only two weeks.

Founded in New York in 1921, the American Soccer League (ASL) survived significantly longer, having built on established competitive networks. The eight teams chosen for its inaugural season came from traditional soccer centres in the north-east: Bethlehem (Pennsylvania), Brooklyn, Fall River, Harrison, Holyoke (Massachusetts), Jersey City, New York and Pawtucket.

A sepia‑toned photograph of young textile‑mill workers standing in front of large spinning machines. Most are children or teenagers wearing worn work clothes, some barefoot, with a few adults among them. They face the camera in a long row inside the factory, surrounded by tall machinery and spools of thread, conveying the harsh conditions of early industrial labour.

A group of young doffers and spinner boys pose for a photograph in a mill, Fall River, Massachusetts. Sitting in the northeastern area of the US, Fall River was another place where immigrant workers helped to fuel soccer’s evolution | Credit: Library of Congress

Players were recruited from the immigrant communities where soccer was most frequently played. Some arrived in the US having played the game in their European homelands. One such was Archie Stark, the Glasgow-born goalscorer who starred for New York Field Club and Bethlehem Steel.

Others were American-born or had learned the game on US soil. Billy Gonsalves, for example, later described as “the Babe Ruth of American soccer”, was one of the stars of the ASL and a member of the USA’s World Cup squads in 1930 and 1934. Born in Rhode Island to Portuguese immigrant parents, he became a crucial member of the championship-winning Boston ‘Wonder Workers’ and Fall River squads.

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In its 13-year existence, the ASL also imported dozens of European professionals. For company teams, such as the Scottish-owned J & P Coats in Pawtucket and Bethlehem Steel, this was an extension of regular hiring practices. There were 75 British-born (predominantly Scottish) players registered with ASL clubs in 1924–25, and 94 by 1928–29, though only a small proportion of these moved primarily as football migrants.

Central and eastern Europeans and Scandinavians were fewer in number but better in quality. The Hungarians Béla Guttmann and Kálmán Konrád, the Austrian József Eisenhoffer and the Swedes Herbert Carlsson, Caleb Schylander and Thore Sundberg were all seasoned competitors on the international soccer circuit; in total, 55 European international players appeared on ASL rosters.

Competing brands

As the ASL collapsed during the early 1930s amid internal disputes and financial pressures, other competitions grew in status, and St Louis, Missouri emerged as one of the key hotspots for soccer activity. A professional league dominated by company-sponsored teams was established in 1915, but the game also flourished through municipal competitions between ethnic-based clubs. One early historian of the game calculated that over a million St Louisans attended soccer matches during the 1927–28 season.

Studies of soccer among immigrant communities have shown how groups were united in intra-city and inter-city competition while simultaneously reminding them of their ethnic and cultural specificity. It helped transform factional conflict into civic pride and unity.

According to Joe Correnti, a dry cleaner in St Louis who organised soccer teams, the game was “a tremendous thing for us Italians… You must remember we were almost a closed community. Sport was an outlet for us.”

Notwithstanding the short-lived success of the NASL, soccer was still some way from embedding itself in mainstream American sports culture when the US was selected to host the FIFA Men’s World Cup in 1994.

A fast‑moving moment in a football match. A player in a blue shirt with the number 7 runs toward the ball while a player in white slides on the ground attempting a tackle. Another white‑shirted player sprints toward the action, and a second blue‑shirted player is visible behind them. Blurred spectators and pitch‑side adverts fill the background, emphasising the intensity of the game.

Italy’s Gianluca Vialli in action during a FIFA World Cup match against the United States, 1994. When the US hosted the tournament that year, soccer was still not a mainstream sport there | Credit: Getty Images

According to Jere Longman of the New York Times, FIFA officials saw themselves as “soccer missionaries converting the last outpost of nonbelievers”. Yet swathes of the American population were already sold on the sport.

There may have been no viable professional league at the time, but soccer was growing quickly in schools and colleges, with an estimated 16 million active players across the country. What’s more, there was already a massive audience for the game among the 43 million immigrants living in the US.

As part of its coverage of the 1994 tournament, newspapers highlighted the popularity of local soccer competitions and the vibrancy and diversity of the Latino communities that organised them. Many Americans learnt for the first time about the Bolivian Soccer League in Arlington, Virginia and the Guatemalan, Salvadorian and Peruvian leagues in Washington, DC, for example, among many others. As the historian Joshua H. Nadel has claimed, such media interest around the World Cup finals “in many ways validated the sport with Anglo-Americans”.

Women take control

Another major landmark in the rise of American soccer – the 1999 Women’s World Cup – was built on similarly strong historical foundations. As in other parts of the world, American women had played almost from the game’s beginnings. The first recorded encounter was between teams called the Colleen Bawns and the Bonnie Lassies at San Francisco’s Central Park in 1893.

Pioneers such as Doris Clark in California and Helen Clark in Connecticut coached girls’ teams as well as boys. Helen, also an experienced referee, became the first woman vice-president of the public-school soccer league in Bridgeport. She coached women’s high school teams and helped organise matches in 1920 between Bridgeport City and Swedish Ladies for the city and national championship.

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However, it was not until the 1970s that women’s soccer took off. As a result of Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments guaranteeing equal rights for educational programmes, including sport, the game thrived at recreational and then elite level. The percentage of US colleges offering women's soccer programmes multiplied from 2.8 in 1977 to 88.4 in 2004, while more girls than boys were playing youth soccer by the end of the 1990s.

By the time of the 1999 tournament, the US women’s team had established itself as among the world’s best, winning the inaugural World Cup in 1991 and the first Olympic gold in 1996. The dramatic penalty shoot-out defeat of China in the 1999 final, witnessed live by over 90,000 spectators, reinforced the popularity of the team and the women’s game. Forty million Americans watched on television – more than had tuned into the National Basketball Association (NBA) finals two weeks earlier. Leading players such as Mia Hamm, Michelle Akers and Brandi Chastain became household names. Since the 1990s, the most famous American soccer stars have invariably been women.

Three Team USA athletes stand side by side during a medal ceremony, each wearing a red‑white‑and‑blue Olympic jacket and a gold medal. They hold bouquets of flowers and place their right hands over their chests, appearing to sing or honour the moment. The background is blurred, suggesting a stadium filled with spectators.

US soccer players Shannon MacMillan, Mia Hamm and Michelle Akers sing the national anthem after winning gold at the 1996 Summer Olympics. Throughout the 1990s, the women’s team helped to bring much more attention to the sport | Credit: Getty Images

Viewed in the short term, the 1994 and 1999 World Cups had limited impact on the progress of American soccer. A women’s professional league proved difficult to sustain. The Women’s United Soccer Association League lasted only three seasons, from 2001 to 2003, and Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) operated for the same number of seasons between 2009 and 2011.

Slow start, major progress

For the men, Major League Soccer (MLS), promised as a legacy of 1994, became operational only in 1996, nearly folded around 2001, and made slow progress. Yet over time, as youngsters who had witnessed the 1994 and 1999 tournaments first-hand reached adulthood, soccer came to be increasingly embedded in the American sporting landscape.

Average spectatorship in the MLS surpassed the National Hockey League and the NBA in 2012. In 2023, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), which succeeded WPS in 2013, became the first women’s league in the world to register average attendances of more than 10,000 in the regular season.

A packed stadium crowd sits in tiered stands. Near the centre, one spectator holds up a handmade sign reading “Make It Reign!” in large, colourful rainbow‑style letters. The surrounding fans watch the event intently, creating a lively, energetic atmosphere.

An OL Reign – now known as Seattle Reign FC – fan in the crowd during the 2023 NWSL Championship. That same year, the NWSL became the first women’s league globally to average more than 10,000 attendees in a regular season | Credit: Getty Images

The following year, MLS became the second most-watched soccer league in the world, with over 12.1 million spectators annually, just behind the English Premier League – though average attendances were still below the biggest European leagues.

Soccer has never been, and is not likely to become, a national sport in the US in the way it is in Mexico, one of its co-hosts for the 2026 World Cup, and many other parts of the world. Yet far from being barren, the history of US soccer is deep, rich and varied. It is a game that, since the 19th century, has provided avenues for social connection within and between communities. Its current supporter base – young and socially and ethnically diverse – reflects important elements of American cultural life.

As in 1994 and 1999, the 2026 World Cup is likely to inspire millions of young Americans to develop a life-long love of the game – though, as the history of the US game shows, the pollsters and sports analysts will need plenty of patience. It could be decades before we see the impact.

Professor Matthew Taylor is director of the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is the author of several articles and books on the history of sport, including The Association Game: A History of British Football (Routledge, 2007) and World of Sport: Transnational and Connected Histories (Routledge, 2024)