Wisconsin in October can be a sight to behold, bathed in dazzling autumn colour under crisp, azure-blue skies. This, though, was one of its less memorable afternoons: grey and raw, barren and bleak. All the same, it was a remarkable enough day for me. For the first time in 22 years I was returning to the familiar plot of land behind the big football stadium, the bumpy pitch where I had spent many an afternoon keeping goal for the college soccer team.

It wasn’t something to look back on too fondly. We were one of the worst teams in the...

To many Americans the United States is the greatest sports nation on earth. To many elsewhere it is merely the most insular. Few would deny, though, that its array of leagues, circuits and tournaments has become an indelible part of modern American culture. The zeal with which its television networks have harnessed the country’s fiercely competitive psyche has transformed popular games into powerful brands and star players into potent commodities, while reinforcing their place in the heart of the average fan.

On less glittering stages, the fascination with sport is deep-seated and pervasive. Competitions such as Little League baseball and...

Few decades in American sport have proved as pivotal as the 1920s. Emerging from the First World War, the country’s prosperity combined with an unprecedented amount of leisure time to create what many still regard as the Golden Age of Sport. As with most golden ages the myth often outstripped a more prosaic reality, in no small part because of the fawning descriptions of sportswriters bent on creating mystique and the increasing savvy of promoters and publicists. But the heroes of the era are still well known to even the most casual American fan: the Sultan of Swat knocking out...

If any sporting occasion was tailor-made for Hollywood, this was surely it: the strange afternoon of June 29, 1950 when the United States upset England at the World Cup. In spite of its place in football history, and the worldwide attention it continued to receive, the match had remained stubbornly obscure to most of America – including, it seemed, its entertainment industry. Finally, in the spring of 2005, came a feature-length chance to enlighten the uninitiated:The Game Of Their Lives. Directed by David Anspaugh, who could lay claim to a number of popular sports dramas, the film was shot...

By the mid-1960s, the value of television to big-time sport was unmistakable. Gridiron’s NFL and its upstart rival, the American Football League, had each signed lucrative long-term contracts with commercial networks. This virtually assured them not only of a sound financial footing – as early as 1960 all but five NFL teams would have lost money without TV – but a captive national audience. Baseball, with itsGame of the Week, had also become a familiar living-room guest, as had college gridiron and basketball. In golf, tennis, boxing and other individual sports, the medium had begun to ‘personalise’ sportsmen such...

The largest crowd to watch a soccer match in the United States in 1970 was not the 2,000 who saw the Elizabeth Soccer Club of New Jersey beat Los Angeles Croatia in the Open Cup final, nor was it the 5,543 on hand for the deciding leg of the NASL championship game. It wasn’t even the 20,000 or so who filled Madison Square Garden and its adjacent Felt Forum to watch Brazil triumph in the World Cup final on closed-circuit TV. It was the 22,143 who squeezed into every available space in Downing Stadium to see Pelé and Santos draw...

Soccer in America had never experienced anything like the late 1970s. By 1978 more than 350,000 boys and girls had registered with youth associations, and 5,800 high schools fielded teams. White, middle-class suburbia provided the most fertile ground for this frenzied growth. Soccer moms and dads fervently pointed out that other sports were often dominated by children with exceptional height or strength, or who had simply matured faster than their peers. In Little League baseball, some players could go through a whole game without touching the ball. But there was no overpowering pitcher in soccer, no sitting in a dugout...

In the summer of 1968, a 36-year-old Hungarian refugee named Joe Martin turned up on Randall’s Island with a hefty stack of plywood and an idea for a new type of soccer, one he hoped would attract the kind of crowds the country’s two professional leagues had sought in vain the year before. Inspired by the speed and constant action of ice hockey – living in Ontario he would have seen plenty of it – he ringed the Downing Stadium pitch with a three-foot wall to keep the ball from going out of play. Other elements of the game were...

On July 21, 1991, a crowd of 31,871 came to Giants Stadium for a New York Cosmos reunion. Fifty-two players, representing every period of the club’s roller-coaster 14-year history, laced up their boots and turned back the clock to a happier time for soccer in America. Franz Beckenbauer withdrew because of stomach trouble and Giorgio Chinaglia was ensconced in Italy, but Vladislav Bogicevic, Johan Neeskens, Carlos Alberto, Rick Davis and a host of others turned out – as did Pelé, who waved to the crowd but didn’t play. Absence, it seemed, had made hearts grow fonder. In their final season...

In the 1990s, sporting entrepreneurs looking for a way on to America’s major league map were faced with a bewildering array of investment opportunities. In 1995, a professional cycling league made its inauspicious debut in the parking lot of New York’s Shea Stadium, its promoters vowing to produce ‘more of a contact sport’. CBS television, which had lost its NFL rights to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network, mulled over an ominous new gridiron proposal in which teams were to be backed by corporations instead of private investors. Before the end of the decade, two women’s basketball leagues came to fruition, one...

In the eyes of most fans, it remains the country’s proudest soccer moment, witnessed by more than 90,000 in person and another 40 million on television, and settled by the nail-biting vagaries of a penalty shootout. It came on a sunny July afternoon in California, one which put America finally on top of the football world, its players feted by an adoring public and a sympathetic national press.

Outside the United States, the women’s World Cup final of 1999 is not treated particularly seriously. The competition suffers from the same kind of indifference and deprecation the game as a whole...

Just how much of a soccer nation has the United States become? It’s a tricky question. Certainly the game has not managed to permeate popular culture – office conversations, school playgrounds, radio phone-ins and so forth – the way the major sports do, and it seems a long way from doing so. It has not left much of a historical imprint, either. Though catalogues of the country’s greatest sporting moments are certain to include all manner of World Series and Super Bowl victories, basketball triumphs, gold-medal-winning Olympic performances and highlights from golf and tennis, they are almost as certain to...