I am a fan of soccer the same way that most people are in the U.S. Huge fan every four years or so, and occasionally when a close relative is actually playing in the game. So yesterday, U.S. vs. Paraguay to open the 2026 World Cup?! I was all in. What a game.

Which meant that today, searching for something interesting in the papers turned into an all day exploration of the state of soccer in the U.S. 100 years ago. And boy was I in for a surprise.

When I first pulled up the Brooklyn Eagle from exactly 100 years ago, June 13th, 1926, I saw the headline "America vs. Scotland At Soccer Today.” My first thought was genuinely exciting. Wow, what a coincidence. An international match. A hundred years ago. Right here in New York.

Then I read further, and it wasn't exactly what it sounded like. I had no idea what I was getting into.

This international game was real. But "America" and "Scotland" weren't national teams. Both sides (and every team in the tournament) were immigrant players living in the states, split up by where they were born.

The whole thing was organized by the New York Footballers Protective Association — a group founded in 1912 specifically because American soccer players had to pay their own medical bills when they got hurt. They staged these ethnic-team charity tournaments every summer, charged admission (35¢ for men, 15¢ for ladies), and used the proceeds to cover each other's expenses when they couldn't work.

I almost moved on. Cute story, charity game, cool.

But I was curious. Who exactly were some of these players? I didn’t even know when the first World Cup was, or if the U.S. men’s team has ever been any good before I’ve been watching. So I decided to look up the lineup.

Team America: Renzulli, Lederer, Kearney, Douglas, Ford, Ward, Ingram, Heminsley, Brown, O'Brien, Floria.

Team Scotland: Brown, Marshall, Ferguson, Gallagher, Carnahan, Cameron, McNab, Vallantyne, Stark, Millar, Goldie.

I didn't recognize most of those names yet. But I was about to.

Malcolm Goldie was born in Duntocher, Scotland. By 1926 he was playing professionally for Bethlehem Steel in the American Soccer League — the top professional soccer league in the United States. Two months before that charity game in the Bronx, he had scored the goal that won Bethlehem Steel the national championship at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, in front of 18,000 people. The year before, he had suited up for the United States national team.

Scottish born. Bethlehem Steel pro. US national team player. And on this particular Sunday afternoon, Team Scotland in a charity tournament in the Bronx.

Jimmy Douglas was in net for Team America that day. He played professionally for the New York Nationals in the ASL. Four years later, standing in goal at the first ever FIFA World Cup in Uruguay, he recorded the first clean sheet in World Cup history.

And here is where it gets genuinely remarkable. The Daily News covered the America vs Scotland game the next morning and noted two players as outstanding: Pete Renzulli in goal and Davey Brown up front. Renzulli was the same goalkeeper who had stood between the posts six weeks earlier when 45,000 people packed the Polo Grounds to watch the ASL all-stars beat Hakoah Vienna — the reigning Austrian first division champions — three to nothing. Brown was described by the paper as "crack scorer of the New York Giants FC." Both were ASL pros moonlighting in a Sunday charity tournament.

America beat Scotland 2-0 that afternoon. Harpman scored the first goal. Davey Brown put through the second. The doubleheader drew about 3,000 fans. The proceeds went to the injured players fund.

That June 13th doubleheader was just the opening round. The full bracket that summer included eight teams that I could find — America, Scotland, Ireland, England, Norway, Germany, Sweden, and Gibraltar — all immigrant players living in the states, sorted by birthplace, competing across six weeks of Sunday doubleheaders mainly at the Indiana-New York Oval in the Bronx.

Norway came in through a preliminary match, beating Gibraltar 6-2 before advancing to beat Germany 2-1 in the first round. Sweden's earlier path isn't documented in any paper that I could find — they may have had a bye straight to the semifinals, or played a game that simply wasn't covered.

The semifinals ran as a doubleheader on June 27th. America beat Norway 7-1 in the first match — Davey Brown hat trick, Tom Florie two goals, O'Brien two more, halftime score 4-0. Ireland beat Sweden 4-1 in the second. The final was set for July 11th.

Ireland won the final 3-1. The Leicester Evening Mail in England covered it — a brief item under the subhead "Irish Footballers Beat Americans." A charity tournament in the Bronx made the papers on both sides of the Atlantic.

THE WORLD CUP CONNECTION

At least four players from Team America's June 13th lineup went to Uruguay four years later for the first ever FIFA World Cup: Jimmy Douglas, Davey Brown, Tom Florie, and Jimmy Gallagher. They beat Belgium 3-0. They beat Paraguay 3-0. They reached the semifinals and lost to Argentina after two important injuries. They finished third in the world.

That record has never been matched by a US men's team in the hundred years since.

For soccer historians, the depth of that 1930 squad makes more sense when you see where it came from. These weren't players cobbled together from different backgrounds for a one-off tournament. They were professionals who had been competing against each other — and with each other — in the ASL and in these NYFPA summer tournaments for years. The 7-1 semifinal demolition of Norway in June 1926 featured the same core that would dismantle Belgium and Paraguay four years later. They already knew how to play together.

THE SOCCER SCENE IN 1926

Six weeks before that June 13th doubleheader, on May 1st, 45,000 people packed the Polo Grounds to watch the ASL's New York all-stars — including Pete Renzulli — beat Hakoah Vienna three to nothing. The Brooklyn Daily Times reported that the ASL had players comparable to the best in the world. That attendance record at the Polo Grounds for soccer would not be broken until Pelé arrived in 1977.

American soccer in 1926 was so flush with money and talent that FIFA wrote new rules that summer specifically to slow the drain of European stars to ASL contracts. The Daily News reported in July that more than fifty of the best players from Britain and central Europe had already been contracted by American clubs for the coming season.

And yet the warning signs were already there, hidden in the same newspapers from the same summer. On the very day of that America vs Scotland game, the Pittsburgh Press was covering the US Football Association's annual convention in Philadelphia. The report described the previous season as "disastrous" for the national governing body. The professional clubs had squeezed the USFA's share of gate receipts down to fifteen percent. The national secretary was recommending discontinuing the amateur cup competition entirely. The article noted plainly that if the professional league chose to disregard the USFA's authority, it would have to operate as an outlaw organization.

It was a warning that came true almost exactly two years later.

The Soccer War of 1928 pitted the ASL's wealthy owners against the USFA in an open fight for control of American soccer. The USFA declared the ASL an outlaw league and suspended all its players from international competition. The settlement came in early October 1929. The stock market crashed seventeen days later.

Bethlehem Steel FC folded in 1930. Fall River Marksmen in 1931. The ASL dissolved entirely in 1933. American soccer spent the next sixty years trying to remember what it had been.

I came into this story as someone who watches soccer every four years and has spent most of those four years wondering the same thing most Americans wonder: why are we so bad at this?

The answer has been sitting in the newspaper archive the whole time.

We weren't always bad at this. We were world class. We had the players, the crowds, the money, and the infrastructure. FIFA was genuinely worried the U.S. would become a superpower. We finished third at the very first World Cup with a team built entirely from a league that no longer exists, playing out of cities that haven't had professional soccer in decades, producing names that almost nobody remembers.

We didn't struggle to build American soccer from nothing. We built it, lost it in a war with ourselves, and have been trying to rebuild it ever since.

Jimmy Douglas. Malcolm Goldie. Davey Brown. Tom Florie. Jimmy Gallagher. Pete Renzulli.

They played a charity game in the Bronx on June 13th, 1926. Four of them went to Uruguay four years later and made history.

A hundred years later the World Cup is back on American soil. And most people have never heard of any of these guys.

See you tomorrow,

-Chris

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