The (Not So) United Soccer of Atlanta: An Early History of Class Distinction and Racial Separatism in Organized Youth Soccer

Abstract

During the late 1960s, Phil Woosnam and the Atlanta Chiefs developed and implemented a community programming model to enculturate local residents into the cultural practice of soccer. The model was immersed in the racialized urban politics of Atlanta, demographic changes of suburbanization, and emergence of middle-class lifestyles. This study merges local historical evidence on the advent of organized youth soccer with the theories of Robert Putnam and Pierre Bourdieu to investigate the role of bonding social capital in early youth soccer, and examines how the pedagogies of the Atlanta Chiefs were constituted around a particular class-based lifestyle known as cultures of busyness or hyper-parenting. In this process, the Atlanta Chiefs increasingly focused on affluent white communities and institutions and removed prior engagement with predominately black neighborhoods. The removal of programming reflects the urban politics in Atlanta regarding recreational spaces in black neighborhoods. More precisely, organized youth soccer emerged in Atlanta from the embodied history of racial separatism in park and recreational spaces. This had consequences for the history of youth soccer in the United States. Based on the findings, future research could examine urban and suburban youth sport in Atlanta, and closely interrogate local developments of community programming by the NASL.