Bunk Authors Book on History of Soccer

“From Football to Soccer. The Early History of the Beautiful Game in the United States,” authored by Brian D. Bunk, senior lecturer II in history at UMass Amherst, was recently published by the University of Illinois Press.

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The book aims to rediscover soccer's long history in the U.S.

Across North America, native peoples and colonists alike played a variety of kicking games long before soccer's emergence in the late 1800s. Bunk examines the development and social impact of these sports through the rise of professional soccer after World War I. As he shows, the various games called football gave women an outlet as athletes and encouraged men to form social bonds based on educational experience, occupation, ethnic identity or military service. Football also followed young people to college as higher education expanded in the nineteenth century. University play, along with the arrival of immigrants from the British Isles, helped spark the creation of organized soccer in the United States—and the game's transformation into a truly international sport.