The story of football in America, not the grid-iron that would almost sweep it away, but soccer, is a shortened version of Robert the Bruce and the spider. Soccer has once more become a major sport in the United States but not without previous failures. At least three times, perhaps in reality five, over the last one hundred and forty years it has seemed to progress, even to flourish, only to fall back because of you name it, regionalism, economics, organisation, politics and finance. It was for many years regarded as the game of immigrants and there is no doubt that it crossed the Atlantic in the minds and feet of the newly-arrived, Scots and Irish first, others later. And for its first century it was promoted and sustained on and off the field to a remarkable extent by those Scots.
There are four parts to the story of that Scots involvement in American soccer. The first was the early days, in the 1880s; the days of the passionate amateur simply wanting to better himself often through work in the country’s growing, textile towns and not through a game. For him it was a leisure activity. The second, in the decade either side of the turn of 20th Century, was when the sport stuttered through the depression around the Spanish-American War, amateur became semi-professional and it took off again. It was then that footballers, some born in America, some already there as youngsters and others from abroad first saw the possibility of making a living of sorts from the game as “shamateurs” only to be to a large extent thwarted, if temporarily, by the outbreak of the First World War. At the beginning of the third stage it seemed that the decline of British influence, the pattern elsewhere in the World, especially at the other end of the American continent, might be repeated. The United States FA had in 1913 broken away from the FA in London and joined FIFA. It seemed to be going its own way but in fact the United States was to be the only country, where British involvement in general and Scottish involvement in particular would not shrink to almost nothing but do precisely the opposite. Association football in America would post-Great War grow rapidly, flourishing as in few other places and offer for a period opportunities to Scots professionals, on and off the field, that a few years earlier would have been unimaginable. And the fourth stage in the 1930s within five short years of its peak was the complete collapse of the professional game in the U.S. due to new political, social, economic pressures and a good measure of greed.
Here are some of the stories...........................