Distant Corners: American Soccer''s History of Missed Opportunities and Lost Causes
ISBN: 9781439906323
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Temple University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Soccer -- United States -- History; Soccer -- History;

In Distant Corners , his follow-up to Soccer in a Football World , David Wangerin details several of the people, places, and events that shaped American soccer history. Despite its struggle for popular acceptance, soccer in the United States has a rich history. Wangerin profiles Tom Cahill, the almost-forgotten "father of American soccer," and writes passionately about the 1979 North American Soccer League season, the high-water mark of the game in the twentieth century.

Wangerin shows how the American appetite for soccer has ebbed and grown over the years, chronicling the game at the college and professional levels and describing the city of St. Louis's unique historic attachment to the sport. Wangerin believes that the time is ripe for American fans to look into their own history and recognize the surprisingly deep connection their country has to soccer.


David Wangerin was born in Chicago, grew up in Wisconsin, and moved to the United Kingdom in 1987. He is the author of Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Temple) and for more than twenty years has contributed to the British soccer magazine When Saturday Comes . He lives in central Scotland, where he has developed an affection for Raith Rovers.

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