‘An American Game’: Uncovering the Untold History of Soccer in the US | OneFootball

Diving into the forgotten history of soccer in the United States, An American Game is a podcast that doesn’t need hot takes, exclusive insider transfer rumors, or splashy guests.

What is soccer culture in the United States? Many would argue we don’t really have it. Our league structure is a corporate spectacle, there’s a lack of quality at the national team level (on the men’s side at least), and there’s a short soccer history compared to other countries.

Most if not all soccer fans would agree with these three points, especially the last one. Sure, those tapped into American soccer would know about the third-place finish at the inaugural World Cup in 1930 or the legendary win over England at the 1950 tournament, but after that, it goes dark until the NASL era of the 1970s. Even then, it’s more or less a flash in the pan highlighted by a bevy of famous stars past their primes.

But to steal the iconic 30 for 30 line from ESPN, what if I told you that soccer arrived in the U.S. earlier than it did in Brazil and Argentina? Or that there are decades of additional history of American soccer that even die-hard fans of the game aren’t privy to?

That’s the premise of An American Game, a podcast from Soccertown Media, the group behind award-winning American soccer documentaries including Soccertown, USA and The Voice of the Game.

Co-hosts Tom McCabe and Kirk Rudell have a longstanding passion for soccer in the United States. The two were teammates at Princeton under Bob Bradley, and have since carved successful professional careers for themselves, with McCabe becoming a history professor at the University of Notre Dame in London and Rudell a writer and producer on TV shows including American Dad and Will and Grace.

Their years of experience in their respective fields as well as their unyielding love for the game make them the perfect conduits for these untold stories of American soccer history — including how the oldest sports trophy in the country comes from soccer, or that the original U.S. men’s national team denim kits go back to 1930.

While other podcasts try to stir drama and steal headlines to generate buzz (Urban Pitch’s included), An American Game doesn’t need to — these stories are just that interesting.

I was able to catch up with McCabe and Rudell to discuss their creative process, what it was like chasing down newspaper articles from over 100 years ago, and what we can expect in the final three episodes of their first season.

Urban Pitch: You guys are coming at storytelling from very different POVs being a historian and TV producer. Can you guys talk a little bit about how that has fueled each other and the creative process for something like a podcast?

Tom McCabe: I’m a trained historian. I was a history major in college, then a master’s degree and a PhD — but then to engage with Kirk, where I’d always had an affinity for narrative and documentary filmmaking.

Kirk kind of opened that door. I flew out to LA and I’m at his elbow like a eager little student, and I learned so much. I’ve learned a ton from him, but then also I’ve gotten a masterclass in how to write a script for the screen or for a podcast.

Kirk Rudell: Tom will be rigorous about the history. He will dig into the archives, he will find the old articles and then connect the dots.

When he’s explaining the history to me, my head always goes to story and story arcs. I want to look at emotional arcs, I want to look at narrative arcs. I will then try to take what he’s telling me and lay a story arc on top of it.

When we’re doing soccer history, I want to sort of step back and go, what’s the larger arc that we can lay on top of these facts? And I think while always honoring the facts, I don’t want to dismiss. I respect what Tom does. I think when we meet in the middle, which is this is real history, it’s legit facts, it’s vetted, but also we’re going to try to present them in a way that’s not just a textbook and we’re going to make it more entertaining to listen to and we’re going to give you a different way to hook into it. That’s what makes fun documentaries.

If we sound like two of your friends in a coffee shop or a bar who are telling you something, some cool stories that you didn’t know, but it’s got that kind of vibe, then great.

Harry Holden with the AFA American Cup, the oldest sports trophy in U.S. history.

I consider myself well informed about U.S. Soccer history and I had no idea about Bullets Cahill or the first AFA trophy.

Rudell: Our producer Matt Nelson, our lad from Dundee, said it early on: “Guys, this is your lore.”

McCabe: I think it takes a little courage because of this imposter syndrome of we don’t have a history, we don’t have a lore. I called Kirk, let’s say March of 2025, and I said something like, “We have too much to give not to do something before the World Cup. What about that podcast?”

And then he responds something like, “Yeah, that’s what the world needs, two middle-aged dudes and another soccer podcast. What’s the angle?”

Rudell: There comes a time in every middle-aged man’s life when he has to buy a microphone and start a podcast. This is that time. But we certainly, we don’t need MLS recaps and EPL banter, roundups, and transfer news. Other people are already doing that, and we don’t have the specific connections to add anything to that conversation. So we’re like, what do we have? We’ve got one of the preeminent historians of U.S. soccer.

McCabe: I love when you say preeminent. Come on man.

Rudell: What are our superpowers? Well, we’ve got a respected historian of U.S. soccer and a veteran longtime Hollywood screenwriter who’s pretty good at telling stories. That’s our superpower. That’s what we can do is we can sort of combine those experiences and those abilities and tell stories that people don’t know in a pretty entertaining way.

There was a lot of unearthing that had to do be done. I’m curious if there’s any particularly funny or interesting sources you guys are using for information in the process of research.

McCabe: Well, I mean for American soccer historians, we’ve been in the weeds in the margins looking for source material for so long, and it was kind of an errand in the wilderness, if you will.

But then the digital turn happens where the newspapers are digitized and particular certain soccer towns that had coverage from the 1880s all the way through. So for an early American soccer story, like Bullets, the AFA Cup, the 1930 World Cup, you’re looking in St. Louis, the New York, New Jersey newspapers. Fall River, Massachusetts.

They have competing papers that are trying to top one another with coverage much better than the coverage today. The digital turn is really what happened. And then doing the dirty work. So I told the story in Bullets. I put in all sorts of variations of Cahill, Tom Cahill, Tom, and there’s like 2,000 hits and I’m like, okay, I guess I’m going to have to go through every one here. And I was doing it in reverse chronological order. I was going from his obituary back in time and I hit 1900.

It was almost like I wanted to put that flag in the ground, and I did a presentation on it and then a couple talks on it, and I’m like, this is a good story. And obviously you get that’s perfect fodder for what we’re after and it becomes true.

Rudell: Tom putting a mask on during COVID and sitting alone in the Scottish FA Cup archives and going through those old ledger books is pretty cool. And Tom driving down to a warehouse in North Carolina to go through the boxes of old U.S. soccer memorabilia and stuff. Some of it is the digital stuff and the laptop work. And if you’re shooting that as a movie, that’s always the boring stuff; someone at a keyboard with the light on his face. The fun stuff is like go do a road trip and go bust into a warehouse. He’s had a good blend of digital research and physical research that is kind of fun for me to hear about because I don’t have to do any of it. I’m just back at headquarters. And then Secret Agent Tom comes back from a mission and files his report.

For the next three episodes to finish out the first season are there any you are particularly excited for?

Rudell: So the next one is on the history of the U.S. goalkeeper, and everyone always says, what if our best athletes played soccer? What would that be like? Well, the goalkeeper is the one position where we have had world-class players. And if I say that, you would go, sure, Tim Howard, Tony Meola, Hope Solo, Brianna Scurry. Right? And you would be able to say exactly why; they grow up playing multiple sports.

What a lot of people don’t realize is U.S. goalkeepers have been great for that exact reason since the 1880s. In the 1920s and ’30s, we had world-class keepers who English teams were trying to poach, and it was because they were multi-sport athletes. That’s a cool one because we’re both old goalkeepers. Tom was the legit four-year starter. I was the scrappy two-year backup. But we love the position.

McCabe: I’m just going to interject there. I was thinking about this the other day as goalkeepers: your participant observers following the action. You’re called on to participate every once in a while. I think that’s similar to what a historian does or a storyteller does. Observing. Keepers, just go and do your stuff and then we’ll integrate you at the end in the big game. And then here, whether it’s Zoom, phone, or in person, we’ve done a lot of that off on our side working on our craft. It’s just soccer storytelling right now as opposed to how to perfect your diving technique or your handling of crosses.

Kirk: The one following that is going to be on the first U.S. women’s team that was put together in 1985 to go play in the Mundialito, the Little World Cup in Italy. They’ve been starting to get more attention lately, the 40th anniversary. And a lot of players from that team, Emily Pickering, Michelle Akers, have been very vocal about wanting to be recognized for what they did, and we think they should be.

It’s big for us because when we’re talking about U.S. soccer history, even though we are talking about the diversity and the immigrant experience and all of that is real, we are still generally going to be talking about white guys. It has been something that we’re very aware of. We want to add more diversity to our storytelling as we’re telling the American soccer story.

So doing one, the goalkeeper episode is great because we get to talk about the men and the women. The one after that is just going to be on that 1985 women’s team, which we’re excited about.

If we were doing something on the ’94 World Cup, we would not try to tell the story of the U.S. team in 1994. Pick a part of that story that hasn’t been covered to death, and then from that little way in, what does that open up? It’s a classic way to tell a story. If you’re doing a sitcom about a couple in a relationship, you don’t pitch a story about how relationships work. You do a story about how one person uses the other person’s toothbrush, and then that opens up into a larger conversation. So for us, it’s finding those, for lack of a better word, those toothbrush moments through U.S. soccer history and having that become a larger conversation.

I was very surprised at how the history of soccer in the U.S. is truly an immigrant story, not just a sport brought by immigrants and one primarily of Scottish and Irish immigrants at that.

McCabe: The assumption is that it’s English, right? It’s an English game, the home of football. But the Scots are really instrumental. They’re almost like the ground troops. They get sent around the world as missionaries, as railway and textile workers, and they really bring the game and set it up in these communities. The English do as well. And then you get the Irish into this kind of British stew, if you will. And then later on in the ’20s and ’30s, you start to get French-Canadians and Italian-Americans. One of the goalkeepers we feature was a Hungarian-American from a family of acrobats, which I loved.

Rudell: And another one’s father was Swedish. He was like a sailor.

McCabe: A stowaway on merchant ship, illegal right?

Rudell: The goal scorer when we beat England in 1950 famously was Haitian and never actually was an American citizen. Look, I’m the amateur historian. I like history podcasts. I’m a middle-aged guy who likes reading about the Roman Empire and crap like that. So fine, I will cop to it. It is really jarring when you read about Americans who would call recent immigrants “sparrows,” which doesn’t sound like a harsh word, but it’s because they bred too much and invaded other people’s space and took their food from them, right?

And would bully them and take their ball and steal it and kick it away and crap like that. The people who were doing that were not indigenous. These were people who were maybe a generation off the boat themselves. That terrible rhyme of U.S. history, we saw that when we did Soccertown. The cool thing there was we were able to tell the story of Kearney, which was a booming mill town that everyone wanted to come to, and soccer grew there. And then when the mills closed suddenly it was alcoholism and drug abuse and unemployment.

The soccer in the town mirrored the sort of larger socioeconomic history of the country. And suddenly soccer was the only way out for some of these kids, and some of them didn’t make it, and a few of them did. And it’s Tony Meola and John Harkes and Tab Ramos.

You can kind of tell the story of U.S. history for 150 years through the story of U.S. soccer. And that is obviously compelling to Tom. That’s his PhD. That’s his career. But I find that fascinating. Look, the time we’re in right now is awful. When we see rising anti-immigration, we see oligarchs, we see sports being manipulated by politicians. I think there’s a lot of echoes, a lot of horrible echoes in our history. And it’s also a way for us to talk about where we’re at now.

McCabe: Hey, we have a history, cheer a little louder, be a little prouder, right?

Rudell: Totally. Look, who wants to go out next year and go U-S-A, U-S-A at the World Cup? It’s deeply conflicting. Even though the players on the field don’t deserve that, that jingoism is going to be deeply — we’ll see what happens in the next year.

But it could be deeply uncomfortable. Totally. And I think for us, what we want to say is if you’re a fan of the sport, what we want you to hook into is you are a fan of the diversity, the waves of immigrants who have always come here and always brought their dreams and their passion for the game. And the game looks a little different. When I used to play pickup soccer in Central Park in New York, everyone you’re playing with had their own style based on where they were from. And there was something cool about that. I love that. I think as a country, let’s embrace the melting pot stuff. Let’s embrace the diversity and that long history. That’s something we can cheer for. Let’s cheer for a better version of what the U.S. can be, which we have seen in some of our soccer for 150 years.

Interview lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Watch and stream An American Game on YouTube and Spotify.