American soccer's other early epicentre was in the more unlikely location of St Louis, Missouri, the fourth-largest city in the country, but at that time still a decidedly western outpost. Here the reasons for the sport's popularity were remarkably different: the immigrant population was predominantly Irish and it was the involvement of the Catholic Church in community affairs, rather than immigration, that offered an impetus. A St Louis Athletic Club is recorded as having played the game in 1881, but it wasn't until the church introduced soccer into its recreational programme that the sport began to thrive - and with home-grown teams. Kensington, winners of the 1890 city championship, featured a line-up consisting almost entirely of players born in the city. This unwittingly removed the'un-American' stigma attached to the sport elsewhere and with it, fan resistance - one match in April 1897 was said to have been witnessed by 6,000 people. (A newspaper account refers to this contest as being refereed by a man named Rogers who 'wore a big Texas cowboy hat, suspenders, civilian shoes and a big moustache' and notes that 'in the grandstand were dudes wearing big stove-pipe hats'.)
St Louis shows how the game might have developed across the country under different circumstances. Almost from the formation of the city's first league in 1886, organisers showed little respect for the laws of mother England. For much of its history, St Louis teams played halves of 30 minutes instead of 45; as early as 1919, the St Louis League allowed injured players to be substituted. Experiments with goal judges, two referees and other manifestations of 'Americanisation' were made before the Second World War. And its relative isolation even helped to foster an indigenous playing style, one predicated on speed, stamina and muscle, with players needing to work as hard as the ball. The Scottish passing game came to be looked down upon - enough for the St Louis Globe-Democrat to insist: Any neutral observer who has an opportunity to compare the two systems, must admit that there is more pep, punch, and thrill in the American style of play.'
No US city embraced soccer more unreservedly than St Louis, which operated all manner of junior, amateur and semi-professional leagues, most stocked with red-blooded Americans equally at home on the baseball diamond. Before the turn of the century, at least one ambitious team had lured players from Chicago and Canada in an effort to regain the league championship it had unexpectedly lost. Able to attract gates of a few thousand and with no travelling expenses to speak of, soccer in St Louis was, if not a money-spinning proposition, at least one which paid its own way. For decades to come the St Louis Soccer League, founded in 1903, would produce some of the strongest teams in the country, and many of the top American-born players.
One of the city's newspapers even offered a charming example of soccer poetry around the time of the First World War. Attributed to a WH James, Arabella's Favorite Game may not have scaled any artistic heights, but it illustrated soccer's ambition, in St Louis at least:
Outside the bastions of St Louis, Kearny and Fall River, small groups of exiled devotees nurtured soccer in the cities. There were, of course, plenty of British immigrants in New York - although those who founded the game there were generally drawn from the more affluent social positions. Chicago's roots can be traced to 1893, when the game was featured at the city's influential Columbian Exposition. By 1904 a Chicago Association Football League had been formed, and by 1909 a cup competition which was soon regarded as the city (and later the state) championship. Philadelphia also established soccer strongholds, in particular its Kensington district, where an organisation known as the Lighthouse Boys Club provided countless youngsters with an opportunity to learn and play the game. Detroit, Cincinnati and Cleveland were other important early midwestern centres. Further west, a Greater Los Angeles League had been formed by 1902, with San Francisco and Denver instigating their own equivalents.
It was all very fragmented, of course, especially in an era when travelling 100 miles was more unusual than travelling 1,000 today. A first attempt at unifying the game was made in 1884 when a group of British expatriates, led by the Clark brothers of New Jersey, formed the American Football Association, the first supposedly 'national' governing body outside the British Isles. This, though, was more of a loose collective, driven by the northeastern states and the West Hudson area in particular. Its domain was only an area roughly from Boston to Philadelphia, and even then it failed to enlist the majority of teams from the latter or from New York City. Decidedly Anglocentric, it even established an informal working relationship with the Scottish and English Football Associations, a source of concern to those preoccupied with American autonomy.
The association's most notable achievement was the creation in 1884 of a prototype national championship, a virtual facsimile of the FA Cup which it christened the American Cup. Though scarcely a national competition (it initially attracted 13 entries from four states) the winners of the first three titles, the ONT club of Kearny, were perhaps as strong as any team in the country. They were also one of the pioneers of namechanging that would come to beleaguer American soccer. By the time of their fourth American Cup win in 1907, they had become the less cryptic Clark Athletic Association. Clark and other Kearny teams featured regularly in American Cup finals, but the Fall River area produced the next seven winners. By 1894, though, economic depression and labour unrest in New England were starting to cripple the industrial towns and their budding teams, while the association's authority was undermined by the continual poaching of players. It suspended operations in 1899.
Another thorn in the AFA's side had manifested itself in October 1894 as the first attempt at a professional league outside Britain. It lasted all of 17 days - setting a precedent of failure pro soccer would unwittingly follow for decades to come - and represented the first of many attempts by baseball owners to expand their sporting empires through the game. The spectacularly ill-fated venture, known as the American League of Professional Foot Ball, was conceived by the owners of six major league clubs, not out of an interest in soccer so much as a means of keeping their ballparks occupied during the winter. Their motives aroused the suspicions of the AFA, which passed a resolution barring anyone who signed a contract with the league from playing in AFA-sanctioned events - an ultimatum unlikely to have given the deep-pocketed baseball men much cause for concern. In an effort to capitalise on the appeal of their baseball teams, the owners insisted that each club take the name of its baseball counterpart, and many hired their baseball managers as 'coaches'. Some even teased the public with promises that their favourite baseball players would feature in matches (which in Philadelphia they actually did).
With the baseball moguls possessing more money and better facilities, assembling talented teams proved relatively straightforward, in spite of the AFA's threats. The Philadelphia and New York entries played friendlies against local sides and won them easily. But the best club, and the best-supported, was Baltimore. Baseball champions in 1894, the Orioles had taken the trouble of hiring a bona fide soccer coach, AW Stewart, who doubled as the team's goalkeeper. Stewart in turn imported a number of professionals from Manchester City and Sheffield United, many of whom had broken their contracts and were working in the US illegally. The Orioles had little trouble winning every game they played, but made few friends in doing so. After trouncing Washington 10-1, the losing manager complained bitterly of the opposition's use of foreign professionals. Baltimore are alleged to have defended themselves ingeniously by maintaining that the players with unusual accents came from Detroit.
The league practically died at birth. Although the admission price (25 cents) was not beyond the reach of working-class fans, many matches were held on weekday afternoons when they could not attend. The Orioles drew a total of 12,000 to their two weekend home fixtures, but just 500 turned up for a weekday afternoon game, which proved to be their last. Reports surfaced of fewer than 100 fans attending a match in New York, and with rumours of a rival professional baseball league distracting the owners, they soon baled out.
In 1901 another group of baseball owners proposed a new league,
this one in the midwest, with teams in Chicago, Detroit, St Louis and Milwaukee. Their motives were much the same, but their efforts proved even more ephemeral. Detroit withdrew before a ball had been kicked and the Milwaukee entry did likewise after its owners, according to the Milwaukee Daily News, `found that the railroad rate between here and St Louis was too strong'. Initially, the venture was merely put on hold and the players retained, but it collapsed soon after the Chicago team travelled to Milwaukee for a friendly and drew just 300 to the local baseball park.
Economic conditions were not especially favourable for such bold projects, and it was not until the resurrection of the college game and the first Pilgrims tour of 1905 that soccer started to recover from its gridiron-induced body-blow. By 1906 it had recuperated enough for the AFA to stumble back into life, though the association was now chiefly concerned with the semi-professional clubs from areas such as Kearny and Fall River. The American Cup was relaunched in 1906, and for the next four years it became the property of teams from the Kearny area.
In 1911 the amateur game created an umbrella organisation of its own. Members of the Southern New York State Association formed an American Amateur Football Association and elected an English-born, German-educated doctor, 'Guss' Randolph Manning, as president. As a medical student in Freiburg, Manning had been instrumental in the formation of the German FA in 1900. Five years later he emigrated to New York and became active in the game there. Now he set out to gain the AAFA recognition from a fledgling FIFA as the nation's governing body. In 1912 he sent the association secretary Thomas Cahill - soon to become one of the dominant figures of the American game - to a FIFA congress in Stockholm. The AFA was also represented but, curiously, by the secretary of the English FA, Sir Frederick Wall. FIFA, perhaps at Wall's instigation, instructed the two associations to come back when they could speak with one voice.
It took another year for them to do so, and the voice was that of the upstart AAFA, which quickly abandoned its devotion to amateurism and in April 1913 rechristened itself the United States Football Association. The occasional name change notwithstanding, it remains the country's governing body. Federations from states as far west as Utah quickly lined up behind it, but some areas - most notably St Louis - did not. The bruised AFA managed to stagger on for a few more months, but after the USFA's application for FIFA membership was provisionally accepted in August 1913, its forlorn struggle reached an end, leaving behind a cluster of embittered officials.
Brimming with optimism, Manning declared in the New York Times of December 28, 1913, that the USFA 'aims to make soccer the national pastime of the winter in this country'. But it faced all manner of obstacles. It lacked the financial clout to promote and organise the game effectively, and by leaving the high schools and colleges effectively to run themselves, it ignored its most promising area for growth. Perhaps most crucially, it failed to distance itself adequately from the ethnic foundations on which the game still tottered. In the memorable words of soccer writer Paul Gardner, the USFA quickly became 'a gathering place for immigrants whose devotion to soccer was a pretty good measure of their reluctance to become Americans, and for people who were amateurs mainly in the pejorative sense of the word'.
Not until 1928 did it elect an American-born president, and well into the latter part of the century its chieftains were largely men who spoke with conspicuously foreign accents (mostly British and Irish at first). In a country whose national motto, e pluribus unum (out of many, one), articulated a desire for assimilation, leaving soccer in the hands of what Roosevelt, Lodge and their ilk disparagingly referred to as 'hyphenatedAmericans' was tantamount to marginalising it for good. The migrants may have helped to keep soccer alive during its bleakest decades, but the establishment of ethnic clubs and leagues was poison to the game's chances of breaking through into the mainstream of American sports.
Perhaps the best hope for the game's broader development was the St Louis-born Cahill, whose appointment as USFA secretary placed him in a pivotal role. Cahill earned his living as a representative of a sports equipment manufacturer, the famous AG Spalding Company, and in his twenties had helped to organise a semi-professional baseball circuit of some standing, the Illinois-Missouri 'Trolley' League. Such an enthusiasm for the 'national game' doubtless furthered his standing as a 'real' American (he was even on friendly terms with the owner of one of the city's two major league teams). Though his forthright, confrontational style led some St Louis newspapers to refer to him occasionally as 'Bullets' - and certainly left him with no shortage of enemies - over the next two decades he energetically attempted to make Manning's lofty declaration a reality.
Behind the assiduous secretary, whose day-job had taken him to Manhattan, the USFA was not long in asserting its powers. Not everyone cheerfully fell into line, and some even accused Cahill of taking up his position chiefly so that he could sell more sports equipment (though he stridently claimed `never to have sold or solicited soccer paraphernalia to anyone connected with the game'). Antipathy towards the new body festered in many AFA strongholds, an attitude which must have hardened once the USFA announced the formation of its own cup competition and declared that its fixtures would take priority over all others, including those of the American Cup. The National League responded by turning its back; only one of its 12 teams entered the new competition. But though the American Cup retained a high profile for some years, it was fated to become an inferior prize, limited to eastern teams and trading largely on its history.
The new National Challenge Cup attracted amateur and professional teams from as far west as Chicago and as far north as Niagara Falls, though reasonably strong soccer centres such as Cincinnati remained absent for some time and the first west coast entry did not appear until 1951. Much of this was attributable to the cost of travel, though some was rooted in an aversion to the new association. Like the American Cup, the Challenge Cup drew its inspiration from Britain: it was a knockout competition, a strange concept to a nation which staged a best-of-sevengames final to determine its national baseball champions. Forty clubs entered the draw in October 1913, with play beginning the following month and continuing through the winter. Liberally sprinkled with teams named Rangers and Celtic, the draw also featured such entries as the Cowboy Club of New Jersey and Presbyterian FC of Connecticut. (The following season they were joined by Our Boys FC of Brooklyn, Viscose FC of Philadelphia and the Young Men's Catholic Total Abstinence Society FC of Massachusetts.)
But attempting to play soccer during the most inhospitable months of the year was still a dire proposition, leaving the Challenge Cup to run hot and cold in more than just a figurative sense. It achieved some early successes, including in Pittsburgh, where the nearby town of Braddock played its second-round tie in the city's major league baseball park and drew a crowd of almost 3,000. Just as often, though, the weather turned prospective fans away, while rendering playing surfaces all but unusable. The lone National League entrant, the Brooklyn Field Club, contested its quarter-final tie on a pitch 'which would have been more suitable for ice hockey than it was for football', according to one account. 'Scattered all over the field were little ponds. Just when a player would get going he would strike an icy spot, which would either send him sprawling or he would slip around until he lost possession of the ball.' Elsewhere, a tie between Yonkers FC and Fulton FC saw the teams 'floundering around in a sea of mud'; Brooklyn Celtic beat the Babcock & Wilcox club of New Jersey 'on a field partly covered with ice'; and in Chicago, the Hyde Park Blues and Clan MacDuff FC endured 'arctic conditions' at the city's Aviation Field, 'not one of the coziest spots on earth when the north wind is in its best winter form'.
Gate receipts were thus left at the mercy of the elements. An attendance of just 200 was reported for a quarter-final tie in New York, played in steady rain, while the Detroit derby between Packard FC and Roses FC attracted only about 500, a great pity in the light of the Detroit Free Press's assertion that 'those who witnessed the game ... were unanimous i
n the opinion that there was never a game staged in Detroit fraught with more brilliant play'. One could sympathise with the manager of the Niagara Falls Rangers, when asked whether his team would journey to Detroit in snowy January and honour its third-round tie with the Roses, certain to be a loss-making proposition. 'Yes, we'll go all right,' he replied. 'I don't know whether we'll ever get back, though.'
The Rangers and the other survivors slogged towards the spring, but the bad weather persisted, reducing the gate for one of the semi-finals - staged on neutral territory as in England - to about 1,000. Nearly 5,000 saw the other, with the Brooklyn Field Club edging New Bedford 2-1 on a more amenable April afternoon in Pawtucket. The Field Club returned to the same venue a month later for the grand final, defeating the amateurs of Brooklyn Celtic in front of more than 6,000 patient fans. The Providence Sunday journal claimed that spectators 'began to arrive at the field shortly after 2.30 o'clock [for the 3.45 kick-off] and by 3.15 the fans filled the grandstand and the bleachers and were lined 12-deep around the field'.
The journal rated the match a 'smashing one from start to finish', which it may have been in more ways than one. Five minutes from the end James Ford, the Field Club's outside-right, headed in the winner, but by this time plenty of private battles had been waged - and, in the eyes of some, had gone scandalously unpunished. The sports editor of the New Bedford Times offered this view:
The game was a success from every standpoint. The crowds were well handled, there was no disorder, the grounds were policed properly and everything possible to make the contest a good one was provided for ... To my mind the only real flaw was the referee work of [Charles] Creighton. Perhaps it is his style of handling a game to let the players go to the limit, but there was enough of the rough stuff in the contest to have barred several of the men on the field but Creighton let them finish with 11 on each team. It also seemed as though Creighton overlooked some very open violations of the rules but he was undoubtedly doing his best.
Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting) Page 4