That Archie Stark
was the player in soccer, football in America's first great iteration, to have made the greatest impact is not in doubt. The figures speak for themselves. The U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame says he scored two hundred and sixty goals, whilst playing in the top flight. Other sources say he netted three hundred and twenty-five times in three hundred and fifty-seven games, a goals to games ratio of just over .9. We also know that in one single season, 1924, he netted sixty-seven times in just forty-four games or one and half games per match. That Stark is lauded for his achievements is entirely right. If anything his long and successful career is worthy of far greater recognition than has been given till now. Certainly in Scotland that is true. But he was not without competition and his stats are not incomparable. There was another scoring machine playing in the same league, who himself had a good career and, but for injury, might also have gone to greater things still. And like Archie Stark he was Scots. His name was John Nelson.
John, Johnny, Nelson was born in 1905, the twenty-seventh of February to be precise. He was eight year younger than Stark. His birthplace was Mary Street in Johnstone, by Paisley. His father was Thomas, an engine fitter, his mother Elizabeth. Six years later the family, he one of six children, had moved. They were still in the town but with no sign of his father. He had died, aged just thirty-nine, just eight months after John had been born. And a decade later still he and his mother in July 1922 were on a boat sailing from Glasgow to New York. John is listed as a "dresser", a textile worker. They were the following one of John's sisters who had arrived the previous year, settling in Yonkers and were in turn followed to Yonkers by the rest of the family.
But clearly John Nelson had talent in his feet. He joined the local Scottish club, Yonkers Thistle, but was soon spotted, signing still in the city for Brooklyn Wanderers in the Spring of 1924. He stayed four and half seasons in a team that in the American Soccer League finished mostly in mid-table and never higher than third yet he scored one hundred and twenty-six goals in just one hundred and one matches, a goal and quarter a game. Indeed in league games in 1926-27 he scored more times than Stark himself, although Stark was suffering from injury at the time
Then twenty-eight games into the season in 1928 Nelson was signed by the
Falls River Marksmen. What he had meant to the Wanderers can immediately be seen in a season divided into two halves. In the first his team finished in fourth place, one above Fall River. In the second it was eighth of ten with Fall River now second and Nelson scoring fourteen times in just ten games. Yet he did not stay, moving after three games of the following season briefly to J & P Coats in nearby
Pawtucket before again in mid-season returning to his adopted home-town. At the beginning of the 1929-30 season he signed for the New York Nationals. In fact he was signed by and played alongside Bob Millar, who knew about scoring goals himself, and there he continued to find the target in eighty two games netting ninety-three times and scoring twice in winning that year's ASA Cup final.
Johnny Nelson would remain with the Nationals for the rest of his career even though for the next season it changed names, becoming the New York Giants, but his stay would also be short. On 5th April 1931 he suffered a knee-injury that would end his playing career. At the age of just twenty-six and perhaps just reaching his prime he was forced to retire and returned in full to work that he had been carrying out in parallel with his football for several years, carpet colouring and design. His brother was in the same business and in the census of 1925 John even describes himself as an artist not a footballer. And it was work that he clearly enjoyed, continuing for the next thirty years with the same company, Alexander Smith & Co. during which time he married, in 1940 he was living with his wife and his mother, and he became an American citizen.
And, that is it. Johnny Nelson continued to live in New York until his death in 1984 at the age of seventy-nine and appears to have had nothing to do with football again. There is no known description of him other than he was a man who always seemed to have somewhere else to be and, although inducted into the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame in 2005, there is no known picture of him either. The moment of his final injury was recorded and is said to be shown in the picture above. But which of the players he is on what seems to have been a filthy as well as fateful night is unclear. He is somewhere in the Nationals team picture also shown above. Bob Millar is the bald man in the centre in the front row with the ball but which is Johnny is again unclear. It seems typical of a man, who appears to have been quiet and unassuming almost to a fault, and poses a conundrum. How with Archie Stark making himself unavailable was he, as the country's second best striker, not selected for the US team for the 1930 World Cup? Millar was team manager and from the Nationals he knew his qualities at first hand. Was it because not only was he Scots-born he was then also still a British citizen or simply because he was clearly just not one of the lads? And, of course, there is always the same question as with Stark. Had either been there, would the result, the 1930 World Cup result, have been different, indeed might the USA have won?