SOCCER

St. Louis is not to American soccer what Cooperstown, New York, is to baseball or Springfield, Massachusetts, is to basketball. The sport had already gained a foothold in the northeastern U.S. decades before a St. Louisan named Thomas W. Cahill became the primary force for the sport’s American emergence.

But Cahill did more than just about anyone in the U.S. to popularize the game — and St. Louis became one of its most significant, and longstanding, hotbeds. Without Cahill, we wouldn’t have soccer as we know it today. And we certainly wouldn’t call it soccer.

Cahill was the driving administrative force behind the sport in the U.S. for the first three decades of the 20th century. He founded the sport’s first national governing body, the USFA, in 1913. He was the coach of the first American national soccer team and the first to bring an American team on an international tour. During the 1920s, he was the commissioner of the American Soccer League, the country’s first national professional league.

Yet Cahill — and soccer’s St. Louis roots — are hardly remembered today.

“Cahill was the giant in early U.S. soccer/football,” says soccer historian Gregory Reck. Reck is the co-author of American Soccer: History, Culture, Class and a professor emeritus in anthropology at Appalachian State University. “The tragedy is that until recently, the legacy of Cahill and early U.S. soccer history was part of the amnesia of post-World War II U.S. soccer development. When critics of soccer claim that the sport is ‘not American’ and ‘too recent’ in the sports landscape, they are victims in one way or another of this historical amnesia, an insult to the decades of work by Cahill in service to the beautiful game.”

“That generation is not as well known as it should be,” soccer journalist and historian Tom Scholes says of Cahill and his fellow American soccer pioneers. Scholes is a British sports journalist and the author of Stateside Soccer: The Definitive History of Soccer in the United States. “Football, or soccer in America, does not exist in the guise that it does without Cahill. He should be held in immense esteem.”

Now that St. Louis has a Major League Soccer team and a forthcoming exhibit about its soccer history at the Missouri History Museum, it’s time to remember the man who made it all possible — for St. Louis, and for America.

In the spring of 1917, a 4 millionstrong American Expeditionary Force went to Europe to support the Allied cause in World War I. Less than a year before, in the summer of 1916, Thomas Cahill of St. Louis had brought a much smaller force to Europe: 11 American soccer players taking a tour of Sweden.

At the time, the U.S. and Sweden were both neutral in the Great War. While war enveloped most of the European continent, Cahill was corresponding with Sweden’s national sports secretary. Cahill was the president of the United States Football Association, soccer’s newly created governing body in America. On the side, he worked for Spalding, the country’s leading sporting goods manufacturer, as its point man on soccer. Cahill sent his counterpart in Sweden a copy of the Spalding Guide to Soccer, an annual publication on the rules, strategy and history of the sport, which Cahill produced.

Impressed by the progress of the sport in America, the Swedish secretary encouraged Cahill to put together an American national team and bring them to Sweden for some exhibition games. The Swedes, in fact, footed the bill for the fledgling American organization.

The ever-diligent Cahill got to work. With the oversight of USFA, Cahill cobbled together a group he called the “All America Soccer Football Club.” The team set sail from Hoboken, New Jersey, in July 1916, amid rising tensions between the U.S. and Germany in the north Atlantic.

While sailing across the ocean, Cahill put his team through rigorous workouts on deck. He taught them a fast, visceral style of play which would frustrate solid if unspectacular Scandinavian teams that were used to a more measured approach to the game.

This first U.S. national team surprised its hosts. The U.S. won or tied five of the six games on the tour. Crowds of as many as 20,000 — which on one occasion included King Gustav V — watched the Americans overwhelm their opposition. Cahill’s no-holds-barred approach angered many Swedish fans, some of whom traded fists with American players after one of the games. But several newspapers in Sweden predicted that America would soon be the world’s top soccer-playing country.

The 1916 American soccer tour of Scandinavia proved to be the first of three organized by Cahill. In 1919, he brought a team that represented the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, then one of America’s top teams, to Scandinavia for a 14-game jaunt. The team won six, lost six and tied two. In 1920, he brought an all-star team that consisted largely of St. Louis-area players to Scandinavia. The St. Louis All-Star team won 12 of its 14 games and earned the personal congratulations of both Gustav V and King Christian of Denmark,

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