Soccer Made in St. Louis covers the history, playing styles, and evolution of the world's most popular sport in the nation's original soccer capital, St. Louis. Starting with the first reported game in 1875, the book details the teams, the players, and the organizers who brought home national championships at every level of soccer. Author and longtime St. Louis soccer writer Dave Lange tells the stories of those who took the game from the sandlots of St. Louis to soccer's biggest stage, the World Cup. From Harry Ratican, the first St. Louisan to gain nationwide soccer fame; to the six St. Louisans who led the United States to the biggest upset in World Cup history; to Lori Chalupny, who helped the U.S. Women's National Team to Olympic gold; the book covers the rich heritage of soccer in St. Louis and shows how the sport is woven into the fabric of the city's makeup.

The study of association football has recently emerged as vibrant field of inquiry, attracting scholars worldwide from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. "Soccer As the Beautiful Game: Football’s Artistry, Identity and Politics," held at Hofstra University in April 2014, gathered together scholars, media, management, and fans in the largest ever conference dedicated to the game in North America. This collection of essays provides a comprehensive view of the academic perspectives on offer at the conference, itself a snapshot of the state of this increasingly rich scholarly terrain. The diversity of approaches range from theory to pedagogy to historical and sociological engagements with the game at all levels, from the grassroots to the grand spectacle of the World Cup, while the international roster of authors is testimony to the game’s global reach. This collection of essays therefore offers a state of the field for soccer studies and a road map for further exploration. The chapters originally published as a special issue in Soccer & Society.

Forever Forest celebrates the 150th anniversary of Nottingham Forest, the second oldest professional football club in the world. Join official club historian Don Wright as he commemorates 150 years of the Reds, charting the lives of the people – officials, players and fans – who have made this world-famous football club.

A searing portrait of the racial dynamics that lie inescapably at the heart of our nation, told through the turbulent history of the city of St. Louis. From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America's most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War's first general emancipation, and the nation's first general strike—a legacy of resistance that endures. A blistering history of a city's rise and decline, The Broken Heart of America will forever change how we think about the United States.

For over a century, Chicago has played soccer. This work explains the early history of the game in the Second City, beginning with the 1887 formation of the Chicago Football Association, and concluding with the 1939 season and Chicago Sparta’s National Open Cup win, which brought the trophy to the city for the first time. This study chronicles the early British immigrants who first transported and organized the game in Chicago. It documents the myriad ethnic groups and native born players that kicked in the city’s many leagues, and examines the many championship tournaments, teams, and players that made Chicago one of the nation’s early soccer powers.

St. Louis has been the heartbeat of American soccer for years, dominating in club, high school, and college soccer. To this day, St. Louis University has the most NCAA Division I men's soccer national championship titles. Yet, in 1996, when Major League Soccer kicked off its inaugural season, there was no team to represent the Gateway to the West. How did this happen? Author Shane Stay guides you through St. Louis soccer's journey, from its past to the present, including the launch of St. Louis CITY SC. The story will start 100 years in the past and follow the major achievements—and setbacks—of St. Louis soccer. Shane recounts not only the history of soccer at the club, high school, college, and professional levels, but he also provides some helpful hints for which are the best local attractions for soccer fans, and he even goes so far as to predict the future successes of St. Louis CITY SC. This is one book soccer fans will want to have on their shelves!

Rediscovering soccer's long history in the U.S. Across North America, native peoples and colonists alike played a variety of kicking games long before soccer's emergence in the late 1800s. Brian D. Bunk examines the development and social impact of these sports through the rise of professional soccer after World War I. As he shows, the various games called football gave women an outlet as athletes and encouraged men to form social bonds based on educational experience, occupation, ethnic identity, or military service. Football also followed young people to college as higher education expanded in the nineteenth century. University play, along with the arrival of immigrants from the British Isles, helped spark the creation of organized soccer in the United States—and the beautiful game's transformation into a truly international sport. A multilayered look at one game’s place in American life, From Football to Soccer refutes the notion of the U.S. as a land outside of football history.

This narrative of U.S. soccer's history and present-day status addresses the issues of socioeconomics. Emphasizing the differences between social classes in U.S. soccer past and present, as well as those between American soccer and international football, this work analyzes the role of class in American soccer's failure to carve out a more prominent place in the sports landscape. Contemporary soccer is explored from its beginnings in informal Parks and Recreation leagues to the development of formal club programs, and university, professional, and U.S. national teams. In recent decades, Hispanic leagues formed primarily by Mexican and Central American immigrants have reinforced the theme of a class-based, exclusionary space in U.S. soccer. A personal perspective based on the authors' experience coaching soccer at the informal level broadens the book's appeal.

A French-founded frontier village that transformed into a booming nineteenth-century industrial mecca dominated by Germans, the city of St. Louis nonetheless resounds from the influence of Irish immigrants. Both the history and the maps of the city are dotted with the enduring legacies of familiar celts--John Mullanphy, John O'Fallon, Cardinal John J. Glennon--but the true marks of the Irish in St. Louis were made by the common immigrants--those who fled their homeland to settle in the Kerry Patch on St. Louis's near north side--and their battle to maintain cultural, ethnographic, and religious roots. Popular local historian William Barnaby Faherty, S.J., offers readers a look into the history and effects of the Irish immigration to St. Louis. The author can now be placed within a rich Irish heritage in the world of publishing: Joseph Charless, editor of the first newspaper west of the Mississippi, the Missouri Gazette; William Marion Reedy, editor of the Mirror and nineteenth-century literary mogul; Joseph McCullagh, editor of the Globe-Democrat in the late nineteenth century; and controversial author Kate (O'Flaherty) Chopin. The Irish in St. Louis is an enticing ethnographic history of one nationality clinging to its roots in a melting- pot American city. Both visitor and native St. Louisian, Irish or not, will relish this history of one of St. Louis's most enduring communities.

The significance of the Corinthians Football Club, founded in 1882, has been widely acknowledged by historians of football and by sports historians generally. As a ’super club’ comprising the best amateur talent available they were an important formative influence on football in Britain from the 1880s to the 1930s. As a touring club - they first travelled to South Africa in 1897 and made regular forays into Europe and also to Canada, the United States and Brazil - they were the self-proclaimed standard bearers for gentlemanly values in sport. Indeed for many years they were most famous football club in the world, drawing huge crowds and helping to ensure that the version of football emanating from the English public schools and universities in the mid-nineteenth century became a global game. Though their playing strength and influence waned after the First World War, they remained a significant force through to 1939, upholding ’true blue’ amateurism at a time when football was increasingly associated with professionalism and seen as a branch of commercial entertainment. Whilst much has been written about the Corinthians, mainly by club insiders, this is the first complete scholarly history to cover their activities both in England and in other parts of the world. It critically reassesses the club’s role in the development of football and fills a gap in existing literature on the relationship between the progress of the game in England and globally. Most crucially, the book re-examines the sporting ideology of gentlemanly amateurism within the context of late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century society.