Category — From the NYT Archives

The From the New York Times feature is one of my favorite things. By combing through the archives of the New York Times, we can uncover some really neat soccer history gems.

So far, we’ve read a few articles from the early 20th century and even one from the late 1800s. But, the New York Times archives can teach us about recent history too.

Take for instance, this article from 1993 that describes, in part, the conception of Major League Soccer.

This was not a very auspicious beginning for the Major Soccer League, a collectivist 12-team professional league that may be attempted in April 1995. According to the plan, investors would put money into the league rather than in individual teams, in an attempt to control salaries.

I got a kick out of reading this and, as a special bonus, I learned about the infamous “banning” of Pele during the 1994 World Cup.

It’s tough being a soccer fan in the U.S. We’re told that our game is for wimps and that it will never be popular here. I think we have a tendency to believe that this is a recent phenomenon. But, in 1915, the New York Times published an article entitled, “Why Soccer Game Is Not Popular.”

The reason for the piece was to report on the results of an NCAA survey. The NCAA collected data from colleges about the (un)popularity of the game and the reasons stated in the article are some of the very sames criticisms of the game today: it isn’t scientific enough; it is for poor people; there’s too much running. The subhead even refers to the game as “too tame.”

On November 24, 1901, the New York Times published an article (with the mysterious byline: “From Cassell’s Little Folks”) claiming that a version of football “very different from ‘Rugger’ or ‘Socker‘” existed in 17th-century Japan.

Actually, the whole thing (all two paragraphs) is interesting insofar as it hints at a monarchical origin for Asian football. Interesting, that is, except for one sentence that begins, “Considering how averse most Orientals are to hard work…”

For as much as we (yours truly included) rail on the modern media for their innumerable follies, we aren’t today exposed to media dripping with racist overtones. It was a very strange and different world then, friends.

Oh, and about Cassell’s Little Folks? The only thing I could find after a cursory googling was this eBay auction.

It’s an argument that tires all of us: the name of the game—is it called “football” or “soccer”?

Those who call it soccer think that those who call it football are Eurosnobs. Those who call it football believe that those who call it soccer are ignorant (and American; but they also believe those two qualifiers are indistinguishable).

Truth is, the argument has been going on for a long time. See, for instance, this letter to the editor of the New York Times in December of 1905. A fella named Francis Tabor calls it “a thousand pities” that the paper referred to the sport as “socker.”

Tabor also recites the commonly-agreed-upon history of the word “soccer”:

As a matter of fact, it was a fad at Oxford and Cambridge to use “er” at the end of many words, such as foot er, sport er, and as Association did not take an “er” easily, it was, and is, sometimes spoken of as Soccer.

Last week, the New York Times unleashed their massive archives onto unsuspecting internet slobs everywhere.

By removing the so-called “paywall” that kept hundreds of millions of readers at bay, the Times relented to common sense and opened their archives (dating back to 1851) and other “Times Select” content to the general public.

This decision led enterprising people to dig through the mess to find some olde-timey goodness. Per the norm, Kottke did it best.

I did a little searching of my own to discover that the first mention of soccer in the New York Times (at least in the searchable archives) was on June 19, 1885. The article is entitled “Football By Electric Light” and is intriguing for a few reasons:

• “Electric light” was evidently rare enough to warrant a mention in the headline
• We still called it football (association football)
• The article was all of 32 words long. (And you thought soccer coverage in America was dismal today!)
• It is printed proof that there has never been a respectable New York soccer club prior to or since Pele’s Cosmos. I kid…

Here’s how it looked:

As a point of reference, this article appeared 22 years after the English F.A. ushered in the modern game.

Stay tuned for more of “From the NYT Archives.”