Scotland | As foretold in scripture: ‘The queen of the South will rise up …’

Dumfries, Scotland, Apr 18 | “All our dreams are viable,” ventures songwriter Chris Belford, launching into the refrain of the Queen of the South anthem. “We’re the only team in the Bible.” The strength of the connection to Jesus’ prophecy about the “queen of the South” rising at judgment day (Matthew 12:42) is dubious, but Doonhamers’ supporters, following the side’s first berth in a Scottish Cup final, are convinced about the rest: “Something greater than Solomon is here!”

History | Were Paterson FC the first stateside association football club?

Which was the first American association football team? Some evidence points to Oneida Football Club of Boston, honored with an obelisk in Boston Common as “the first organized football club in the United States.” While Oneida played one of the football codes—perhaps a soccer-rugby hybrid—beginning in 1862, photographic evidence offered by a descendant of a Paterson FC captain suggests that the New Jersey side, formed in 1880, staked claim early to playing by the Football Association rules established in London in 1863 (see also Mar 30). (Apr 16)

History | Remembering New Jersey’s immigrant soccer past

Newark, New Jersey, Mar 30 | At the start of its 13th season, MLS lacks a nuanced appreciation for history. But the sense of American soccer as a game among immigrant enclaves has been preserved, with regional focus, at Sport Clube Português and within a northeastern amateur league featuring divisions along ethnic lines (see New York Times coverage).

Poetry | ‘View well this Ball, the present of your Lords …’

We publish an excerpt from Matthew Concanen the Elder’s 1720 canto describing a six-a-side football match in Dublin—at variance with a traditional view that only the frenzied folk football variety was contested at the time. The players “around the field in decent order stand …” (Mar 13)

Books | For centuries, life has had its uppies and downies (w/ podcast)

Jedburgh, Scotland, Mar 12 | Hugh Hornby, author of a comprehensive account of Britain’s 15 surviving festival football games—Uppies and Downies: The Extraordinary Football Games of Britain (English Heritage, 2008)—was busy signing books during the Jedburgh Ba’ Game on Feb 14, but says that the Uppies “may have prevailed by an odd hail.”

That he terms the annual rituals “mass-participation games” indicates that the emphasis is on taking part, not the result. With 27-minute podcast.

History | In hard stone, ancient ball-playing exploits remain

Ongoing exhibits in Chicago (“The Ancient Americas”) and Washington, D.C. (“Exploring the Early Americas”), feature artifacts of ball-playing in Mesoamerican cultures as part of larger surveys. (Mar 6)

Islands | A multihued archipelago, tuned to soccer’s harmonics

Honolulu, Feb 29 | Gamba Osaka’s 6–1 victory over Houston Dynamo in the Pan-Pacific Soccer Championships final added another jot to the history of the Japanese on the Hawaiian Islands—a history that spans three centuries and that has helped create a multicultural population well-suited to building soccer from the grassroots.

History | Soccer fields, for King and Atlanta, lent space to move ‘beyond Vietnam’

Atlanta, Feb 5 | His work in ministry, as a public speaker and as face of the American civil rights movement prevented him from developing strong sporting enthusiasms, but at least once in his career Martin Luther King Jr. stepped onto a soccer field.

Metaphorically, King’s strides on the Sacramento State pitch in Oct 1967 point toward soccer as a place of social change in America of the civil rights era.

Books | A majestic history built around games (w/ podcast)

Jan 5 | The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer, by David Goldblatt, appears at booksellers in North America this week, and we wonder how many will read the title’s four words as a direct challenge to the myth of American centrality in all things. With 50-minute podcast.

Pathos | Manchester is united

Manchester, England, Dec 7 | Commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the 6 Feb 1958 Munich airplane crash that killed 23, including eight Manchester United players, will incorporate the entire city and avoid commercial tie-ins, organizers have decided.

Visuals | Round ball, flat art (w/ multimedia)

British Museum database shows football in mix of media

London, Nov 20 | Perusing institutional archives for football-related arcana has been made considerably easier in the Internet age.

A recent example is the quiet launch to the Web of a portion of 50,000 drawings and an even greater number of prints—so-called flat art—within the British Museum collection.

Canada | First among soccer nations

Beckham, on Vancouver swing, tries football by Canadian rules

Vancouver, British Columbia, Nov 7 | As usual, David Beckham’s North American barnstorming circuit—with a stop tonight at BC Place Stadium—to us raises more interest in pre-existing soccer traditions than in the soccer actually being played.