The hidden treasures of the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame archives

Publish date: 2024-06-24

The U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame archives are not open to the general public. The collection, stored in a warehouse in North Carolina, consists of everything that isn’t on display in the Hall’s permanent home, in Frisco, Texas. It’s a hodgepodge of thousands of items, bits and pieces of history donated by former players, historians and the like.

We were recently given the privilege of researching at the facility. Over the course of two days, we searched through hundreds of boxes in the medium-sized warehouse for our needle in the haystack, an item we wanted to find for an upcoming project that you’ll read more about soon.

For most people, this probably sounds pretty tedious, digging through odds and ends that mostly yield little. For a couple of soccer and history nerds such as ourselves, it was something closer to a work-related vacation.

In the course of all our rummaging, we came across fascinating, revelatory and comical artifacts from U.S. Soccer history dating all the way back to 1885. Certainly there are more valuable, or historically significant artifacts in the archives, but here is a selection of our absolute favorites.

The eight Striker the World Cup Pup costumes stuffed into various corners of the warehouse

There is no shortage of 1994 World Cup-related ephemera stored in the archives. Practically the entire center section of the warehouse is dedicated to the preservation of the official record of the tournament — pallets are loaded high with box after box of documents related to the bid, execution and aftermath of the event.

And while those relics will likely prove valuable to some researcher down the line, the collection’s real treasure lies in eight large, plastic boxes. Crack the lid open on any given one of them and you’ll lock eyes with the disembodied head of Striker, the official mascot of the festivities. Dig further and you’ll find the entire outfit, just begging to be tried on. Striker was omnipresent that summer — he was on shirts, keychains, mugs, pinball machines, just… everywhere. But lifting his head out of one of these boxes and slipping it on, well, that’s the sort of rush you can only attain via American soccer historian cosplay.

And if Striker isn’t your thing, there are a few other costumes, too. Most notably, his long-lost cousin Slyde, the official mascot of the 1999 Women’s World Cup. There’s also a banana suit, if you’re into that.

Proof that soccer has been the Sport of the Future since at least 1921

From the September 21, 1921 edition of Soccer Pictorial Weekly, about the formation of the American Soccer League, complete with a reference to early forefather of the sport in the U.S., Thomas Cahill:

The kind of people who are getting behind this league are the kind that will boom soccer to the skies. They are the businessmen who know sports from the promotion to the playing end, and with such men in power, the dream of Tom Cahill will soon come true.

The ASL, based predominantly in the northeast, would last 12 years before being doomed by infighting among its members as well as the Great Depression. It would be close to four decades before the Sport of the Future popped back up and took another swing at a national pro league.

It’s also hard to read that excerpted paragraph and not get strong MLS expansion vibes.

The murder mystery novel co-written by Pele

It was impossible to avoid Pele in the 1970s. His arrival in New York, where he played with the Cosmos, was a watershed moment in this history of the American game, and it led to a tidal wave of Pele-related promotional gear — Pele albums, Pele cologne, Pele soccer equipment. You name it, they made it. But a murder mystery co-authored by Pele?

That would come a decade later, after the Cosmos (and the entire NASL) were a distant memory. Penned by Herb Resnicow with guidance from the King himself. We’ve read the whole thing, but we’ll let the jacket tell the story:

It’s World Cup time — the final competition for the hardest-fought title in sports. Emotions will run high; in an atmosphere electrified by national pride and politics, riots may erupt over a disputed or prejudicial call by the referee. There are intense feelings on the field as well, for the American club, the Booters, have defied the laws of chance and logic and will play an East German team in New York for the title.

The U.S. team is helmed by “Grilho, the ‘grasshopper’” — a “fading yet still peerless Brazilian star.” On the eve of the World Cup final, the Booters’ Yugoslavian-born owner Gregor Ragusic is murdered. He wasn’t a popular figure. While the soccer sequences in the book are well-written, the author’s grasp on the logistics of the game are tenuous… A club team in a World Cup? It’s a mistake that continues to be made to this day, I guess.

We cannot stress to you enough that these are actual details behind his murder: he was killed in part because he favored the use of a 35-yard offside line and wanted the “U.S. Soccer League” to expand rapidly. Sounds like Pele might have had some hard feelings about the collapse of the NASL.

The archives copy remains under lock and key, but you can purchase your own copy of this murder mystery right here.

The U.S. manager’s log from the 1930 World Cup, with its detailed description of the first match and first final in World Cup history

This leatherboard notebook is meticulous — one could argue too meticulous, if not for its fascinating subject matter. This is a step-by-step, behind-the-scenes account of the inaugural World Cup, personally typed out by U.S. manager Wilfred Cummings.

It follows the U.S. team along on their oceanic voyage to Uruguay and describes the sandlot baseball pickup games the players took part in between training sessions to stay loose. It includes vivid accounts of everything from the pre-tournament banquet feast (“the immense banquet hall being appropriately decorated with the national flags of those in attendance; a wonderful string orchestra furnishing popular music and national airs”) to the Americans’ World Cup debut.

“The day was sultry and dreary,” reads the page labeled July 13, 1930, the day of U.S. vs. Belgium, “the field being a bed of wet sticky clay with pools of water too numerous to count. It was nevertheless to our liking as we had a couple of weeks jump on the European teams; the conditions were really ‘made to order’ so to speak.

“The weather did not bother some twenty odd thousand who attended; and our entrance, with the boys carrying the Uruguayan flag, followed by the Stars and Stripes, seemed to set the whole crowd and especially the little band of Americans (some eighty odd) into a frenzy.”

The U.S. won 3-0, a surprise to most, beginning a long tradition of occasional overachievement at the expense of more respected soccer nations. The description of the third goal paints the clearest picture of the events that afternoon in Montevideo.

“Midway in the second half a beautiful run by Brown on the right wing and an unselfish lob over the goalie’s head by Patenaude in the center chalked up number three and marked one of the most brilliant plays in the entire tournament.”

The Americans reached the semifinals — for the first and, to date, only time ever — before falling 6-1 to Argentina. This would appear to be a pretty unassailable scoreline, although maybe not if you asked manager Cummings.

“I honestly believe the Argentines were a little better, due to their having played together for many years,” he concedes, before the inevitable ‘but’… “but I believe that the unbiased footballer would have given us a good chance to win if we could have kept our eleven players in the game and uninjured — which gave them their first unearned counter — for it was a tremendous handicap.”

By the end of the tournament, Cummings began to wax poetic.

“Is it any wonder the boys consider 13 our lucky number? We sailed from home on Friday the 13th; it took 13 days to reach Rio de Janeiro; there are thirteen stars and stripes in our shield; thirteen teams entered the 1st world’s championship of football; our first game was on July 13th and thirteen goals were scored during our games in the championship series.”

The final page of the log includes a detailed (again, perhaps too detailed) rundown of the financials from that trip. History is so cool.

The front page of Buenos Aires newspaper La Razon from the morning after the U.S. upset Belgium in the U.S.’s first-ever World Cup match

The newspaper crumbles to the touch, its edges turning to dust. It was folded inside some random box without much thought for preservation. It’s amazing this thing — another relic of the 1930 World Cup — still exists at all.

Bartholomew “Bertie” McGhee, a Scottish immigrant, scored the opening goal, the second one in the history of the tournament (France and Mexico kicked off simultaneously elsewhere in Montevideo, where Lucien Laurent beat out McGhee by about four minutes).

Program from FC Barcelona’s 1937 tour of the United States, one of a number of artifacts with chilling retrospective historical implications

The 1930 and ‘34 World Cup descriptions and memorabilia are wild enough, given what was about to come next — from worldwide financial strife to World War II. Reading through them now, it’s hard not to project onto the authors a sense of foreboding, and to wonder whether they felt that, too.

What happened to all of these people? Surely some were swept up in the winds of history.

This program from Barca’s ‘37 tour of the U.S. gives off similar vibes. This was one year into the Spanish Civil War and less than a year after FC Barcelona president Josep Sunyol was arrested and killed by Francoist soldiers.

The program contains no direct references to the war itself, preferring to focus on the on-field accomplishments of Barca’s 27 Catalonian championships. But the list and description of each visiting player is haunting in retrospect, given FCB’s connection to the Republican cause and how much that region suffered in the aftermath of Franco’s victory.

This later became known as the Tour That Saved Barca, so dire were the club’s finances at the height of the war. Some of Barcelona’s star players chose to stay in North America afterward due to the unrest at home; others took the risk and returned to Spain, to uncertain and perilous futures.

A collection of newspapers from the days surrounding Trinidad & Tobago’s final World Cup qualifier against the United States in 1989

By now, any USMNT fan knows the bones of this story: an underpowered U.S. squad travels to Port-of-Spain, Trinidad for the final match of qualifying during the run-up to the 1990 World Cup. Win and the U.S. would be in. Anything else would send them packing. Famously, the game was won on Paul Caligiuri’s “shot heard round the world,” a looping, 30-yard strike that sent the U.S. to the World Cup for the first time in 40 years.

Reading the coverage from the Trinidadian side of things, though, paints a truly heartbreaking picture. The headlines in the run-up to the game were so full of promise — ”Italy Here we Come!” and “Holiday Win Guaranteed!” The next day, things are painted differently: “River of Tears” and “It’s All Over.” Maybe most poignant is a backpage column from the day before the match:

Whether or not Trinidad and Tobago qualify for the 1990 World Cup football finals, it will not change the reality of life in this country. A victory celebration in the streets does not ease the plight of the thousands of unemployed, or the sorrow of the family grieving the loss of a loved one murdered in these increasingly violent times.

Then why are we so obsessed with the “road to Italy?”

It is because of the pride we feel when those young men take to the field in the red, white and black colours of our native land. Trinidadians and Tobagonians just like us, who have endured the trials and tribulations as we all have while clinging to their dream. For those of us who lead lives unfulfilled, Trinidad and Tobago’s World Cup squad is an embodiment of our greatest hopes and dreams.

15 or so LPs produced by the State Department to provide soccer updates to soldiers overseas in the 1940s and ‘50s, during WWII and the Korean War

If you happened to have been fighting in the Korean War and in need of updates about your beloved Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute soccer team, you were in luck. This is another evocative time capsule, from the old-timey announcer voice to the results themselves. The shrill whistle to kick things off was a nice touch from the producer.

“There’s the opening whistle, and here is the spotlight on soccer/football in the United States,” intones our narrator. “The effect of the students from foreign lands on the soccer fortunes of some of our colleges is most noticeable. Those universities that had many players who had learned the game in their native countries came out extremely well in their various competitions.”

The discovery of an early, much more violent version of indoor soccer, complete with multiple references to all-out, bench-clearing brawls

The best writing drops the reader directly into the middle of a scene, with descriptions so vivid they can see it as if they were there, even more than half a century later. See: the intro to this story headlined “Soccer Players Riot in Garden, 2 Hurt” from the New York Daily News on Feb. 10, 1941.

If last night’s riotous debut of soccer at the Garden, played with seven men instead of the usual eleven is any indicator, the free-booting, free-wheeling sport is here to stay. A crowd of 8,000 paid to see a triple-header between teams from the American Soccer League and found they bought themselves a night full of thrills — with the feature an extended brawl during the first game in which every one of the 30 men on the St. Mary’s Celtics and Brookhattan Truckers squads threw punches.

The game, which Brookhattan won, 2-0, was exceptionally rough and before it was over, two players were across the street at Polyclinic Hospital. Mike Briscoe, the Brooks’ star halfback, slipped and landed on the back of his head during the first period, receiving a brain concussion, and in a scrimmage in front of his net late in the second half, goalie Frank Hunter of the Celts suffered a double fracture of his right arm and a split hand.

The other two games were technically good but they looked dull after the opener.

Look, we can debate the morality of a sport whose very first-ever match resulted in a man with a “brain concussion” and another with an arm broken in multiple places, but it’s hard to dispute that a mashup of soccer and the UFC might really have brought the sport to the mainstream masses many decades ahead of Socker Slam’s noble attempt to do so.

Game-worn jerseys stuffed into random boxes that were as varied as Freddy Adu’s DC United, Brad Friedel’s keeper kit for the 1998 World Cup and a smorgasbord of MLS originals

The archives are a kit lover’s dream. Jerseys from every decade can be found throughout the collection, dating from the earliest years of the modern game all the way to the present. Most are neatly folded and labeled with details about when they were worn and who donated them.

And while holding a jersey from the ‘50s or ‘60s has its own magic, the real highlight for a gen X-er is the collection of original NASL and MLS kits. The jerseys are unbelievably well-preserved, many of them still bearing the original tags. In an era where nearly every new kit is positively snooze-worthy, a visit to the archives serves as a welcome reminder that we used to be so much better at this.

And there’s a bonus: dig a little deeper into any given bin and you’ll sometimes find matching shorts and socks. If you’ve ever wanted to engage in some form of Preki or John Harkes full-kit-roleplaying, the archives hold your chance.

The revelation that an early patron of U.S. Soccer was known as “the Shrimp King.” That’s it. That’s the thing.

The oldest newspaper clipping referring to soccer in the United States we’ve ever seen: a New York Times description of a U.S. loss to Canada on November 28, 1885 that said that “two of the players indulged in a regular fist-fight.”

“Canadians The Victors,” shouted the headline.

The play was very rough at times, so much so that the referee had to interfere several times. Once two of the players indulged in a regular fist-fight.

The home team had been well selected and played well together, the story continues, considering they had no practice as a team. About 2,000 people were present, some 60 of whom were ladies.

The box score includes a list of names (Goal — Hughes; Fullbacks — Holden, Lennox) and clubs (Paterson Thistles, Kearney Hangers) that have long since been lost to time. It’s all pretty crazy to imagine, that far back, almost beyond any shared frame of reference.

A vast, all-encompassing number of Soccer Will Never Make It Here stories, dating back to the middle of the last century — a recurring theme that somehow never changes

No single person has contributed as much to the Hall of Fame archives as Sam Foulds, the Hall of Fame’s historical consultant up to his death in 1994. There are dozens of boxes scattered throughout the archives that bear his name. Foulds, an accomplished amateur player in the ‘20s who’d go on to be an administrator at various levels of the game for decades, was meticulous about collecting news clippings, documents and memorabilia from every aspect of the American game, and almost all of his work resides at the hall.

Pore through any given box and you’ll find hand-labeled, manilla folders overflowing with news clippings. One of those folders grabbed our attention immediately. It was labeled, simply, “ANTI SOCCER.”

It is stuffed full of decades worth of curmudgeonly, old white men ranting and raving about how the game will never make it in America. The headlines, usually, tell most of the story. “No kicks from American Soccer Games” and “First they bring soccer here, now they tell us it’s football.”

A real highlight is a 1978 item from a paper in Lynn, Massachusetts, where columnist Red Hoffman offers this speculative headline: “Could Ponzi have sold soccer to these fans?” His dispatch contains the hallmark of any of these columns: thinly-veiled, jingoistic language (”because Latin fans who have come here from other countries are not, as a rule, economically well off, the support they may be able to give soccer could prove to be minimal”) with a dash of exceptionalism (“folks down in Brazil can’t exactly switch on 13 or 14 channels, take in ‘Man of LaMancha’ or shoot down to the Cape for the weekend, can they?”).

This folder is just the ultimate hate-read. 10/10, would open it again.

Pursuing the dream: the 1994 USMNT World Cup intro video

Narrated by soccer player turned Melrose Place actor Andrew Shue, this “World Cup fan kit” — with as ‘90s a soundtrack as possible — includes highlights such as Tony Meola dunking a basketball, Desmond Armstrong in his art studio and Alexi Lalas going full Alexi Lalas. This gem is best experienced in full; enjoy this gift from us to you, our dear subscribers:

(Photos: Pablo Maurer)

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