Reddit reviews Distant Corners: American Soccer's History of Missed Opportunities and Lost Causes (Sporting)

Except that if you actually look at the history of soccer in the United States, it's had precisely the opposite effect. The late, great David Wangerin wrote about it in his two books -- Soccer in a Football World and Distant Corners.

Distant Corners, particularly, is really brutally poignant about the harm that it did to the growth and development of American soccer; it basically put us in about a 70-year hole, from which we're only now emerging.

I don't think -- as I've written before -- that you can draw parallels between what took place in football, basketball, and hockey in the '60s and '70s and soccer today. The context for the rise of the AFL, ABA, and WHA was utterly different. Of those three leagues, only the AFL was truly successful, mostly because it was very well-financed and managed to compete on an equal footing with the NFL by the time of the merger. Neither the ABA nor the WHA were able to do that, with both leagues essentially capitulating to the circuits they were challenging.

So what was that context? In short, the reason you had those three competing leagues was that they were trying to meet perceived demand for those sports. This was especially true in the case of the AFL, much less so in the case of the WHA.

I happen to think that soccer is in a similar boat. Right now, NASL attendance and MLS attendance aren't even in the same ballpark, even if you throw in Chivas USA. For me to think otherwise, I'd have to see NASL teams consistently drawing 10,000+ people to their home games, week in and week out, and we're nowhere near that.

When we get there, then we can talk about MLS not meeting the demand that's out there. But not before.

If you liked the article, I would recommend reading

Corner Kicks and Corner Offices by the esteemed US Soccer Historian, Roger Allaway

Distant Corners: American Soccer’s History of Missed Opportunities and Lost Causes and Soccer in a Football World by the late David Wangerin

Some titles that come to mind:

• Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game
  by David Wangerin
  
  
• Distant Corners: American Soccer's History of Missed Opportunities and Lost Causes
  by David Wangerin
  
  
• The Encyclopedia of American Soccer History
  by Roger Allaway, Colin Jose and David Litterer
  
  
• Corner Offices & Corner Kicks
  by Roger Allaway
  
  
• North American Soccer League Encyclopedia
  by Colin Jose
  
  
• Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism
  
  by Andrei S. Markovits and Steven L. Hellerman
  
  
• Long-Range Goals: The Success Story of Major League Soccer
  by Beau Dure
  
  
• Star-Spangled Soccer: The Selling, Marketing and Management of Soccer in the USA
  by Gary Hopkins
  
  
• Once in a Lifetime; the Incredible Story of the New York Cosmos
  by Gavin Newsham
  
  
• Love Thy Soccer (pre-order)
  by Sean Reid

Big Bill of Chicago is basically a companion volume to Lords of the Levee -- by the same authors and covering the period under mayor Big Bill Thompson. Also rollicking good fun.

For more recent history, see Boss by Mike Royko -- an eviscerating portrait of the Richard Daley administration.

All three of these books, you'll note, are the works of journalists rather than academic historians, which means they're captivating and engaging stories by people who write with a joy and a sharpness you don't typically find among more academic works.

Not a history, but Devil in the White City is an excellent novel set in Chicago at the time of the World's Fair.

As for histories, Distant Corners and Soccer in a Football World constitute the definitive history of the sport in North America.