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 It's
one of the most enduring myths of World Cup history and it won't
go away. It keeps being repeated from source to source.
The myth in
question is the idea that the United States team at the 1930
World Cup contained a half-dozen pro soccer players imported
from England and Scotland. The implication is very strong that
the United States recruited a bunch of ringers for that first
World Cup, thereby explaining how it managed to reach the
semifinals.
This myth is not
something that just crops up occasionally. It's the conventional
wisdom, rarely questioned. Listen to these statements:
From Brian
Glanville, in the latest edition of The History of the World
Cup, published in 1993: "The American team...was made up
largely of British and Scots pros...."
From David Guiney
in The Dunlop Book of the World Cup, published in 1973:
"...America's team--composed mainly of former Scottish and
English professionals...."
From Ian Morrison
in The World Cup: A Complete Record, published in 1990:
"...many British professionals, mostly from Scotland, had
emigrated to the United States since the [1928] Olympics and
were now members of the American national side."
From Guy Oliver
in The Guinness Record of World Soccer, published in
1992: "Five of the team were former Scottish professionals so
perhaps reaching the semi-final should not be seen as too
surprising."
From Richard
Henshaw in The Encyclopedia of World Soccer, published in
1979: "The American team was....made up of five former Scottish
professionals and one Englishman."
From Paul Gardner
in the latest edition of The Simplest Game, published in
1994: "The 'Americans,' who were mostly ex-English and Scottish
professionals..."
This is quite a
distinguished group of soccer writers, all making very similar
statements, and making them fairly recently. Who would doubt
such a chorus?
And perhaps they
are right, if you want to play around quite a bit with words.
Six of the 16 members of that United States team had been born
in England or Scotland, and all of the six were professional
soccer players by the time of the 1930 World Cup.
But having been
born in Britain and having been a professional soccer player
there are not the same thing. Four of those six players had come
to the United States as teenagers or younger. Going into the
1930 World Cup, the combined professional experience in Britain
of those six players added up to a total of two games, both in
the English Third Division.
Actually, those
six players were more of a factor on the 1930 United States team
than just six out of 16. In a sense, they were six out of 11,
because each of them played every minute of the United States'
three games, against Belgium, Paraguay and Argentina. The United
States used the same lineup in all three of its games, and no
substitutions were allowed.
But were they
former British professionals, just because they were British
born, and had become professional players by 1930? Let's look at
them one by one.
Andy Auld
was born in Scotland in 1901 and came to the United States in
1922. In Scotland, he had played for junior clubs Ardeer Thistle
and Parkhead. Two years after coming to the United States, he
turned pro with Providence of the American Soccer League, for
whom he ended up playing six seasons. After the 1930 World Cup,
and the breakup of the original ASL, he played several seasons
with Pawtucket Rangers. His professional career was entirely on
this side of the Atlantic.
James Brown
was the most recent immigrant in the team, having come from
Scotland, where he was born in 1910, only three years before the
World Cup. But his professional career was all still ahead of
him when he arrived in the United States, still a teenager, to
join his father in 1927. Brown had played local soccer in
Scotland. In America, he played briefly with Bayonne Rovers and
Newark Skeeters in New Jersey before signing his first pro
contract, with New York Giants, just three months before the
1930 World Cup. After the failure of the original ASL, he sought
his fortune playing in England. He played three seasons with
Manchester United in the early 1930s, and then played a season
each with Brentford and Tottenham Hotspur. He later had a long
career as a high school coach in Connecticut, and his son George
also was capped for the United States, playing in a World Cup
qualifying game against Mexico in 1957.
Jimmy Gallagher
was born in Scotland in 1901. He never played professional
soccer there, however. According to his daughter Carol, who
lives in Ohio, he moved to New York with his mother when he was
12 years old. He began his professional soccer career in 1924
with the New York-based Indiana Flooring team of the American
Soccer League. He played continuously in the ASL until it folded
in the early 1930s, after which he moved to Cleveland and played
there.
Bart McGhee
was born in 1899 in Scotland. His son Edward, who lives in New
Jersey, says that his father came to the United States when he
was "a young teenager," but is not certain of the year. Bart
McGhee's father, who had been a professional player and manager
in Scotland, came to America in September 1910, but Bart was not
with him at that time. It is known that Bart McGhee played for
New York Shipbuilding Company in the 1917-18 season, when he was
19 years old, and for Philadelphia Hibernians in 1920. He
eventually moved to the ASL, where he played for New York
Football Club, Indiana Flooring, New York Nationals and New York
Giants. There have been reports in Europe that he played for
Hull City in England. These are incorrect. The Hull City player
was a different man, named John McGee, who played for Hull City
from 1922 to 1928.
George Moorhouse
is the one member of the 1930 United States team about whom
there is no doubt that he did play professionally in Britain
prior to 1930, albeit briefly. Moorhouse was born in Liverpool,
England, in 1901 and raised there. In 1921, he had an
unsuccessful tryout with Leeds United, and subsequently signed
with Tranmere Rovers, a Third Division team near Liverpool. He
was with Tranmere from December 1921 until May 1923, but during
that time he played only two games in the first team, Third
Division games against Ashington on Dec. 26, 1921 and Accrington
Stanley on Jan. 28, 1922. The rest of his time there he spent in
the reserves, who played in the Cheshire League. He left England
in the summer of 1923, going first to Canada and then to the
United States a few months later. After a few games with
Brooklyn Wanderers, he moved to New York Giants, where he
eventually became one of the greatest stars of the original ASL.
He had a long career in New York, even after the failure of the
original ASL, and was a member of the New York Americans team
that won the U.S. Open Cup in 1937.
Alexander Wood
is another who, like James Brown, definitely did play
professionally in Britain, but not until after 1930. After all,
when his family moved from Scotland to America in 1921, he was
only 14 years old. He had been a promising soccer player in
Scotland, playing in a schoolboy international against Wales in
the spring of 1921, and he was playing for Holley Carburetor in
Detroit at the time of the 1930 World Cup. After the World Cup,
he moved to Brooklyn Wanderers of the ASL, and then on to
England, where he played several seasons with Leicester City and
Nottingham Forest in the mid-1930s.
So where are
these former English and Scottish pros that everyone keeps
talking about? Moorhouse is one, but his British pro credentials
are anything but imposing. And by 1930, those credentials were
not very recent. And the two players who did make significant
professional careers for themselves in Britain, Brown and Wood,
hadn't yet done so in 1930.
What the writers
quoted at the top of this article, and others, seem to have
overlooked is that there was a thriving professional soccer
league in the United States in the 1920s, and that for a
British-born immigrant to the United States to have played pro
soccer, it was not necessary that he have done so in Britain. It
was quite possible in those days to build a career in
professional soccer after emigrating from Britain to the
United States.
Of those
quotations, the strangest is the flight of imagination from
Morrison, who says that the emigration of "many British
professionals" was responsible for the United States team's
improvement since the 1928 Olympics. It's true that the U.S.
team at the 1930 World Cup was a far stronger one than the U.S.
team in the 1928 Olympics, but that was because the United
States had sent an amateur team to those Olympic Games. All 16
members of the 1930 World Cup team already were living in the
United States in 1928.
The United States
has had problems over the years with the use of the use of
players who weren't quite legit, although this has been cleaned
up in recent years. But there were no such problems in the 1930
team. The implication that the United States' excellent
performance in the 1930 World Cup was tainted by the use of a
bunch of ringers simply isn't true. The idea that the United
States team in 1930 was led by a group of players who were
veterans of the English and Scottish professional leagues has
been repeated so often that it tends to be accepted as fact. The
strength of American soccer in 1930, a result of the ASL of the
1920s, is forgotten.
This article has been composed by
Roger Allaway and Colin Jose
History by Colin
Colin Jose, who is North
America's preeminent soccer historian gives you an insight of
soccer history that is not known by the average soccer fan.
Colin has been researching soccer for over 40 years and has a
real passion for the history of ' The Beautiful Game'.
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