From Football to Soccer: The Early History of the Beautiful Game in the United States

Abstract

In From Football to Soccer, Brian D. Bunk describes the development of what becomes the sport of soccer in the United States. From the kicking games of Native peoples and European colonists in North America to soccer's establishment as a professional sport after World War I, Bunk examines the development of the sport across nine chapters, each with a different theme. Bunk begins with examples of kicking games that were part of Indigenous culture. In the next two chapters, he examines football as a game of children and then adult men. In the fourth chapter, Bunk uses 1920s Pittsburgh as a case study for the growth of soccer from the 1880s through World War I. In the 1890s, the establishment of two short-lived professional leagues brought professionalized soccer to the United States. In two chapters, Bunk describes where and how women played football and soccer, including an examination of two games between the Colleen Bawns and the Bonnie Lasses in San Francisco in 1893, bringing the narrative into California. Bunk offers Doris Clark and Helen Clark as pioneers for women's participation in soccer as they navigated the rules of appropriate engagement of women in sport. The involvement of the United States in World War I initiated what Bunk describes as a golden age of soccer in the 1920s. The efforts of the American government to encourage soldiers to play and watch soccer during the war resulted in an expansion of the sport once the veterans returned home. In the last chapter, “Ethnic and Industrial Soccer,” Bunk brings together elements of the main themes in the other chapters in a focused look at the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts. The book ends with a brief five-page conclusion. The last chapter has an overview tracing football's transition to soccer in the United States and adds some analysis that is lacking in the previous chapters.