WORLD CUP/HOLIDAY BOOK REVIEW
A UniÞed Theory of How We Got Here Baseball has the 19th century National League. Basketball traces its roots back to Dr. John Naismith and his peach baskets. With Generation Zero, the new popular history from author and MYSA alumnus Hal Phillips, American soccer Þnally has a Creation story of its own Ñ a modern one, beÞtting the game’s extraordinary growth since 1970. Released in July 2022, Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories & The Making of Soccer in America (Dickinson-Moses Press) is today the bestselling soccer title on Amazon. It’s available for purchase there, at Barnes&Noble.com and Þner independent bookstores everywhere. With a World Cup upon us, with the tournament spilling over into the holiday season, this exuberant tale (much of it set here, in the author’s native Massachusetts) might just be the perfect holiday gift for all the parents, players, coaches, referees and club volunteers on your list. “U.S. soccer fans of a certain age all remember growing up in a famously soccer-indifferent nation,” says Phillips. “Today, we live in a completely different America, thanks to Generation Zero — this cohort of boys and girls born in the 1960s and raised on futbol in the ‘70s, during the Youth Soccer Revolution.” Generation Zero is Phillips’ narrative shorthand for Generation X, the cohort of Americans (born 1961-1981) that Þnally produced both ends of soccer’s formative equation in the U.S.: national
Generation Zero
Julie Foudy, Michelle Akers and Carin Jennings celebrate the 1991 women’s world title, the first ever contested.
20
teams good enough to compete on the world stage and an audience that would care, the country's Þrst legitimate futbol fan base. The author also asserts that everything we associate with today’s rich American soccer culture was enabled by the U.S. Men’s National Team that qualiÞed for World Cup 1990 Ñ and the newly formed Women’s National Team that claimed the Þrst world championship ever held, in 1991. “World Cup participation was the key, because pro soccer didn’t exist here once the North American Soccer League folded in 1984,” Phillips says. “And here’s where the GZ narrative connects: Every member of those pivotal national teams participated in the Youth Soccer Revolution during the 1970s. During the century prior, outside a few immigrant enclaves, soccer had never been a game played by suburban boys and girls — not as kids, not in such overwhelming numbers. “That lit the fuse — because those same boys and girls grew up! As adults, their fan support for U.S. national teams, men’s and women’s, starting
