Excavating American soccer fields, uncovering buried layers of sport
Martha Saavedra conducts a virtual excavation of youth soccer fields, showing that all sporting terrain leaves a legacy in sediment and memory.
Category: USA
In places without a name, ‘Pelada’ films the football we never knew
Pelada debuts at the South by Southwest Film Festival as the ultimate expression of football’s capacity for communion.
Mar 16, 2010 | 10 comments
View Post
In Chicago midfields, Hemon discovers transcendental soccer nation
For Aleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian-born writer, lack of soccer means spiritual death. With interview »
Mexico | Despite opposition, loyalists continue to spread América brand
Club América shirts predominate in the Georgia Dome in a friendly against AC Milan. The club has made itself a continental brand but has drawn loathing from Mexican compatriots, who shout, “Those colors make me sick!” With video »
The ‘wrong-footed soccer maiden’ who bridged Manhattan, Beijing
Gay Talese, following the Women’s World Cup final on 10 Jul 99, takes interest in the Chinese player who misses a penalty kick, Liu Ying. With podcast »
Jul 18, 2009 | 4 comments
View Post
Where Cossacks held sway, women’s football adds international spice
Even women’s football in Ukraine has shown effects of globalization, with players from South Africa, Spain, Mexico and Australia joining one club in 2008.
Municipal de Fútbol, where Angelenos do not fear to tread
Municipal de Fútbol focuses on what the project’s essayist, Jennifer Doyle, calls the most developed subculture in Los Angeles: improvisational soccer. With podcast »
Mar 30, 2009 | 0 comments
View Post
Cleats of many nations now rooted in Georgia clay
Liberated from apartments outside Atlanta, 75 kids play in a Martin Luther King Day soccer tournament. Local nonprofits use soccer to help children from warring countries, whether Angola or Burma or Sudan, adjust. With video (8:39) »
Northern latitudes helped make Marta a player of Sol importance
Marta Vieira da Silva, 22, announces that she will leave her home of five years—Umeå, Sweden, the northern coastal city that nurtured her game and personality but that could not keep her from the bigger world. With timeline and podcast »
‘The negotiation was long and difficult,’ says Farah of creating Marta’s LA story
Drawing primarily from online sources in Brazil and Sweden (links provided), our timeline summarizes some three months of negotiations over Marta Vieira da Silva‘s Jan 09 transfer to Los Angeles Sol.
Jan 10, 2009 | 0 comments
View Post
USA | Taking a second chance at building women’s premier league
The Atlanta Beat’s successors announce their ambition to join Women’s Professional Soccer in 2010—a second, perhaps final, chance to give professional women’s football a foothold in North America.
Dec 31, 2008 | 5 comments
View Post
In Atlanta, spreading soccer contagion at parade rest
Ron Newman helped build the U.S. game, calling on carpentry skills to construct goalposts out of discarded building materials. In Atlanta in 1967, he jumped off a Memorial Day float and kicked a ball to youngsters. With podcast »
Oct 04, 2008 | 2 comments
View Post
Islands | America’s internationalists have ‘a vague idea’ of Cuban life
Watching the Sept 6 World Cup qualifier between the United States and Cuba, at Pedro Marrero Stadium in Havana, offered a glimpse into the fierce inequities within the CONCACAF region. (Sept 7)
Sep 06, 2008 | 0 comments
View Post
Women’s football | From Amish heartland, FC Indiana builds ‘multicultural vision’
FC Indiana in four years has become a force in women’s club soccer in the United States, winning two Women’s Premier Soccer League titles and one U.S. Open Cup. But despite origins within a Midwest Amish agricultural enclave, its influence extends worldwide.
Jul 18, 2008 | 8 comments
View Post
Media | What’s that echo? Gary Smith, on the Fugees
Long-form Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith again has applied his odd epistemology to soccer (“Alive and Kicking,” Jun 23). In 8,000 words, he writes passionately in his familiar mode of author-vacated all-knowing about the Fugees of Clarkston, Georgia—ground already well plowed by Warren St. John of the New York Times (see 25 Jan 07). (Jun 19)
Grassroots | A big day for Haiti, a big day for little Haitians
Miami | Haiti past, present and future came together early in May on an urban oasis in Little Haiti. After 10 years of negotiation and bureaucratic delay, a rare inner-city, full-sized pitch opened on what was industrial ground north of downtown. With multimedia and podcast »
May 31, 2008 | 2 comments
View Post
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 FA rules established in London in 1863.
Apr 16, 2008 | 6 comments
View Post
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).
Mar 30, 2008 | 5 comments
View Post
