As in many former European colonies, soccer was introduced to the United States by white European settlers in the mid-19th century, especially in Northeastern and Midwestern industrial cities where it became popular among college students and some white working-class and European immigrant communities. Early team names reflected the industrial base sponsoring the sport: Bethlehem (Pa.) Steel Company, Indiana Flooring Company, Todd Shipyards in Brooklyn, and J. & P. Coats FC in Rhode Island, among others. By the 1920s, soccer had become a mass sport in the United States with the establishment of the American Soccer League in the Northeast, school leagues in Boston, national amateur club competitions, and local club leagues in cities such as Chicago and St. Louis. The country was one of the first non-European nations to join FIFA.
The interwar leagues included Black players and teams, as well as players from countries such as Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina. According to Scott, Black teams — including the New York City teams the Western Tigers, the Maroon Soccer Club, and the Falcon Athletic Club of Harlem — competed successfully well into the late 1940s. Soccer also attracted large crowds during this period, at times drawing nearly 40,000 spectators — not far from the 60,000 attending baseball games at Yankee Stadium.
Immigration from Central and South America from the mid-20th century on further deepened soccer’s working-class character in the United States. The sport became embedded in public parks, neighborhood clubs, and Sunday leagues across American cities, where immigrant and working-class communities sustained and expanded the game outside elite institutions.
Ownership at the top levels resembled that of other American sports, with many early soccer clubs owned by baseball executives and local elites. Yet elite ownership did not fully define the game’s social character. The sport’s players, supporters, and neighborhood institutions remained overwhelmingly working-class, rooted in industrial communities, immigrant enclaves, and urban ethnic networks.
Two overlapping developments began to change the game in the 1960s. According to Scott, as football, basketball, and parts of baseball opened up and Black athletes and other minorities began to excel — and in some cases dominate — at the school, college, and professional levels, many white suburban families began turning toward soccer. Some went further. When the American Youth Soccer Organization formed in 1964, it banned all “foreign-sounding” team names and permitted only English to be spoken at its games. This shift also reflected a growing perception that soccer was safer than football, said Martha Saavedra, a retired academic and former youth coach who has researched women’s soccer. Her father, Fred, helped found a coed recreational center where they started a girls’ soccer team in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the early 1970s. She told me, “Our club, our parents, eschewed American football, the staple fall sport of many boys’ clubs at the time — too expensive, too dangerous, and not friendly to girls. Instead they embraced the ‘new’ sports of soccer.”
At the same time, commercial interest in soccer increased dramatically. Investors and businessmen began jostling for control of the sport, and two professional leagues merged in 1968 to form the North American Soccer League.