The American Football Association was only the second “national” football association to be formed outside the British Isles, following one in Canada.
AFA
Sailor lads, jolly tars, and rovers of the briny deep: International ship-crew soccer matches in the US, 1890-1905, part 1
Ed Farnsworth’s review of matches between US clubs and British ship crew teams between 1890 and 1905 begins with a look at matches played in New York and Northern New Jersey.
“The Noxious Scottish Weed”: Early North American soccer and the Laws of the Game
Ed Farnsworth, Tom McCabe, and Kurt Rausch consider why the first soccer associations in North America favored the Scottish FA over the English FA as the source for their Laws of the Game.
Gentlemen of Color: Oliver and Fred Watson, the earliest known African American soccer players in the United States
Ed Farnsworth and Brian Bunk on Oliver “Allie” Watson and Fred Watson, two brothers from Rhode Island who between them from 1894 to 1901 were the first African Americans to play in a senior soccer league, to play and score in an American Cup match, win a league championship, and play for a professional team.
After the collapse: ALPF vs. ALPF in Baltimore and Fall River, 1894-96
Following the collapse of the ALPF after only 16 games over two weeks, four former ALPF sides met in seven additional matches, including a series of three games in Fall River for the “championship of America.” Former Boston and Brooklyn ALPF professionals continued in Fall River after that.
Dennis Shay: Patriarch of American Goalkeepers
The lineage of exceptional American goalkeepers may begin in the 1880s with Dennis Shay.
Turkey Bowl
American football is a Thanksgiving tradition, but so is soccer. In fact, Thanksgiving Soccer is nearly as old as the holiday itself. A day of national thanksgiving goes back to the colonial period, but it took President Abraham Lincoln to institute it as a late-November holiday. Modern soccer, codified […]
Loose threads
Tom McCabe on ONT Football Club, American soccer’s first dynasty, the American Football Association, the sports first governing body in the US.
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