The Slow Push West
As the American Football Association came to be perceived as lacking ambition, a new, more expansionist body emerged to challenge them, establishing the US Open Cup
The attempt in 1894 by the baseball owners to establish a league competition in the USA may have failed but, within a year, a league had been set up: the National Association Football League (NAFBL) began in 1895. Again it was for teams from the north-east of the USA and, like the American Cup, it was paused in 1899 before returning in 1906 as economic conditions improved.
New Jersey sides continued to dominate both the league and the cup, which on the one hand was an acknowledgement of the region as a footballing hotspot, but also hinted at the unwillingness or inability of the authorities to spread the game beyond their own immediate environment. And to an extent, why should they? They had a league that worked, and perhaps their reasoning was that they had no responsibility to anybody but their own clubs. But some of those clubs were beginning to become frustrated at the enclosed environment and also by the way, in 1909, the AFA became a member of the Football Association.
That perhaps hints at how the game, even 15 years after the foundation of the American Football Association, essentially remained British. After all, Fifa had been founded in 1904; if the AFA was looking to affiliate with other associations it would have been perfectly possible and probably more logical to align with the global body.
* There is a tasty 18% off The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, if you buy it at Amazon now.
Issue Sixty of The Blizzard is available here, featuring an investigation into Ghana’s underachievement, an examination of Kylian Mbappé’s childhood, George Weah, George Reynolds, Newcastle United, play-off finals and the Chicago Bricklayers.
On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we look back on Graham Taylor’s stint as England boss. Listen here.
World Cup Wednesdays continue on the It Was What It Was Patreon, with 1970, while on Friday went through another old Shoot! magazine.
On Libero, we complain about World Cup ticket prices. Listen here.
A new project with Tifo: an animation charting the entire history of football. The latest episode, about the emergence of the African game and the 1966 World Cup boycott, is here.
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The professional game, though, was only one part of US football at the time and, in 1911, the US amateur game got its own umbrella body, the American Amateur Football Association. Its first president was the England-born, German educated doctor, Randolph ‘Guss’ Manning, who had been a major player in the foundation of the German Football Association in 1900 before emigrating to New York in 1905.
The AAFA recognised the significance of Fifa, whose statutes insisted each country could be represented by only one national body. In cases of dispute, having Fifa affiliation conferred almost unimpeachable authority. So in 1912, AAFA sent their secretary Thomas Cahill to the Fifa Congress in Stockholm to try to gain recognition. Cahill would become one of the great early administrators of US football. He was a rep for Spalding sporting goods, which led his opponents to claim his principal motivation was the desire to sell more sports equipment. And he had enemies: so forthright was Cahill’s negotiating style that he drew the nickname ‘Bullets’.
Bullets Cahill found himself up against the secretary of the FA, Frederick Wall, who was representing the AFA, at least to the extent that it was one of his constituent members. Fifa looked on the rival bodies with weariness and, as it tended to, told them to sort out between themselves who was running what and come back as one united body. That did not happen but, the following year, the AAFA ditched its amateur strictures and, in April 1913, became the United States Football Association. That August, despite the protestations of the AFA, the USFA gained provisional acceptance from Fifa. For the AFA, that was the beginning of the end. It continued to run the American Cup until 1924, by which point it had declined in importance and was abandoned. The AFA disappeared with it.
Guss Manning had grand plans and, on 28 December 1913, he told the New York Times that the USFA “aims to make soccer the national pastime of winter in this country.” That was a national ambition way beyond what the AFA had attempted. Ambition, though, cannot simply sweep problems away. Winters were still harsh in the American north-east. The game was still dominated by British and Irish players; it was still seen as an immigrant game essentially because it was an immigrant game and that meant that many newcomers in the US, looking to fit in, preferred a more overtly American sport. And the USFA had little money and, beyond Fifa membership, no credibility.
There was resistance in the AFA strongholds, particularly when the USFA insisted that its competitions took precedence over all others, even the American Cup. Initially, the USFA seemed to be failing. In 1914, only one of the 12 league sides entered the National Cup, the new knockout coopetition launched by the USFA, but there were 39 other entrants, with teams coming from as far afield as Chicago and Niagara Falls. In time, the National Cup would become the US Open Cup, which still exists today – but it was only in 1951 that teams from the west entered; a reminder that the sheer vastness of the USA made truly national competition extremely difficult.
Yet even that broader competition, or more specifically its structure, added to the sense this was somehow unAmerican. The National Cup, like the FA Cup, was a straight knockout, but the World Series in baseball was already established as a best of seven series. To some, a one-off game seemed too random, and would not generate such revenue. That sense of alienness was reinforced by many of the teams involved: there were a lot of teams called Celtic or Rangers; the Scottish influence was strong. Religion played a key part as well: Presbyterian FC of Connecticut entered in that first year, and the Young Men’s Catholic Total Abstinence Society of Massachusetts in the second (they would beat Boston American in a qualifier before having a victory over New Bedford overturned on appeal and lose the replay).
Crowds were often disappointing, something that could partly be attributed to the weather. One quarter-final in New York, for instance, drew only 200 fans. But the final in Pawtucket attracted a crowd of 6000 as Brooklyn Field Club beat Brooklyn Celtic. The following season the National Cup boasted 82 teams, including the majority of the national league sides, teams from Ohio and increased numbers from Illinois and Michigan.
The beginnings of something approximating to a national cup competition were in place, but there was still a little way to go before the USA got a national league.
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This is the third article in this series on US soccer history (they won’t be every Monday going forward, but interspersed with other pieces). Catch up with the previous two here: