The Early Years of Chicago Soccer, 1887–1939

Recent events evidence the rapid rise of soccer in the United States. In June 2022, FIFA announced that the US, Canada, and Mexico will collectively host the 2026 World Cup. Months later, Telemundo's The Future Is Fútbol report noted the sport's burgeoning North American fan base, vibrant commercial markets, and swelling youth ranks. The soccer universe turned its collective gaze to the US in the summer of 2023 when Lionel Messi joined Major League Soccer. In comparison, the Pew Research Center, in a 2006 study of US preferences titled America to the Rest of the World: Soccer Not Really Our Thing, grouped the beautiful game with auto racing and ice hockey as lower-tier sports ranking far below the big three of baseball, basketball, and American football. For scholars, popular narratives underscoring soccer's American ascent too often elide the sport's rich history in the US. In Soccer Frontiers: The Global Game in the United States, 1863–1913, Chris Bolsmann, noted soccer historian, reminds us that “what is exceptional about U.S. soccer history is that it dates well before many of the traditional and current soccer superpowers had even kicked a ball” (11).Gabe Logan's The Early Years of Chicago Soccer, 1887–1939 effectively recovers and reconstructs American soccer's long durée. The book also contributes to soccer literature rooted in place-specific narratives. Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis are among the locations featured in monographs and edited collections produced over the past twenty years. Logan, a professor of American history at Northern Michigan University, pours his knowledge of labor, sport, and urban societies into a meticulously researched work set in Chicago, America's fastest-growing city during the late nineteenth century. His account, ranging from the Gilded Age through the Great Depression, adroitly weaves together multiple analytical threads while stressing how and why the sport “tenaciously developed” within a hypercompetitive sporting landscape (1–2). Each chapter describes Chicago's dynamic socioeconomic environment and tracks the state of soccer abroad and within North America before analyzing the city's soccer scene, a formula producing a balanced work that underscores the city's crucial position within regional, national, and international soccer networks while also telling a richly detailed local story.Logan's foundational chapter connects Chicago soccer's origins to familiar and unfamiliar immigration histories. He profiles key individuals, teams, and leagues, such as the foreign-born Andrew Barr, who joined the Thistles, a squad teeming with Scottish émigrés, in the 1890s. The Thistles earned exalted status within the Chicago Football Association (CFA), the city's predominant league during this formative period. Logan persuasively conveys the centrality of British transplants who introduced and organized soccer in Chicago's industrial age. Through these colorful examples, he simultaneously highlights nationalities often overlooked in standard narratives about turn-of-the-century immigration. In subsequent chapters, he uses a variety of sources, including foreign-language newspapers, to introduce readers to “new ethnic aggregates,” such as Czechs, Germans, Hungarians, and Scandinavians (114–23). Their “soccer experiments,” Logan notes, “provide additional insight into the Chicago immigration experience” (115).Logan's analysis also addresses intersections of capital, labor, and soccer. In the late nineteenth century, the Braidwood Miners, Illinois Steel, and the Pullman Car Builders soccer teams, initially imagined as recreational outlets, joined the CFA. Over time, several Chicago-area businesses devoted resources to fielding competitive teams, a phenomenon linked to inchoate forms of branding. Moreover, manufacturing firms such as McCormick and Western Electric viewed soccer as consistent with the logic of “corporate paternalism” (106). Logan also shows how and why Chicago's industrial landscape gave rise to clubs sponsored by labor unions. The story of the Chicago Bricklayers, the preeminent union squad of the 1920s, synthesizes several analytical themes. Not only did the “Brickies” use soccer to enhance the union's profile and implicitly promote labor rights, but its organizers pursued talent through scouting and player acquisition. This is an example of Logan fleshing out Chicago's early twentieth-century proto-professional sporting scene.Telling a multilayered story can challenge narrative clarity. The Early Years of Chicago Soccer's architecture (chapter divisions and internal chapter organization) renders this task even harder than necessary. Each chapter, except for the first, adheres strictly to a decade-by-decade division, a symmetrical device that feels artificial at times. The experiences of Chicago soccer players, organizers, and fans in the Great War era, for example, deserve a separate chapter rather than two separated by this decade periodization. In addition, each chapter contains a series of self-contained sections, an apparent effort to impose order on Logan's extensive research. After discussing soccer's national prominence and its governing bodies in the twenties, Logan divides chapter 4 into topics relating to native-born players, international friendlies, working-class and union-sponsored teams, ethnic leagues and teams, and the influence of electoral politics. Each section discusses leagues, teams, and players (resulting in internal repetition) and presents its own chronology. While this device empowers readers with specialized interests to consume the bite-sized content they deem most appetizing, it cordons off such material from the main story and disrupts the narrative flow. A unified, chronological narrative might better fit Logan's clear prose and sharp analysis.The Early Years of Chicago Soccer not only builds a foundation for Chicago soccer history but also inspires further research. Logan's account ends on the brink of the forties, inviting historians to extend the narrative into World War II, the Cold War, and beyond. His references to early examples of women's soccer present jumping-off points for more inquiry. Logan's immigration analysis warrants additional studies of the complex relationship between soccer and ethnic identity while leaving space for specialized explorations of groups such as Italians, Poles, and African Americans. Lastly, Logan blazes a trail for future scholarship by situating sport within the context of American capital and labor. Keeping these vectors in mind, The Early Years of Chicago Soccer not only fills a geospatial gap but stirs readers and researchers alike to continue journeying back in time to America's soccer past.

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