On a hot summer day at Foster Beach, a chorus of whistles, calls and the fwump of soccer balls being kicked reverberate across patches of grass that recreational leagues, youth teams and pickup players have claimed as their own.
Tom Roe, a part-time coach, is holding a workshop for high school athletes to work on their skills.
“This city’s just got a bunch of diverse cultures,” says Roe, who moved from the United Kingdom to Chicago in 2010, during that year’s World Cup, and says he’s seen enthusiasm for the sport grow. “Even though sometimes they’re segregated in their little pockets, soccer is able to flourish in each one of those communities.”
Soccer comes to Chicago
Nearly a century ago, soccer had a golden age in Chicago. Immigrants brought the game to the city, holding onto their culture and also finding soccer could be a way to make inroads with other communities.
According to Gabe Logan, a Northern Michigan University history professor, Scottish immigrants were the first to bring soccer to Chicago as early as the 1850s. In his book “The Early Years of Chicago Soccer,” Logan traces the path of immigrants from Scotland who came to work in Chicago’s factories and northern Illinois coal mines and organized soccer games among themselves.
“When immigrants decide to make Chicago their home, they’re looking for like-minded institutions, and often it’s found on the soccer fields,” Logan says.
As more people arrived in Chicago from England, Northern Ireland and elsewhere in the United Kingdom in the late 1800s, soccer clubs and associations were formed. The first formal soccer match in Chicago, in 1893, saw the Pullman Car Works play the Original Wanderers.
European players dominated early on. But U.S.-born players gradually integrated the soccer scene, with games pitting British clubs against and Americans.
Making poltical hay
As more immigrant communities organized their own soccer games, some of their employers took notice. Companies sponsored teams in Chicago and elsewhere around the country, their investment leading to a 20th century golden age of soccer. The Pullman Palace Car Co., Western Electric, Illinois Steel and Marshall Field & Company all formed teams, providing players with uniforms, practice facilities and money for travel.
Soccer was seen as an investment in workplace morale, according to Logan. He says business operators saw the promotion of soccer as a way to keep workers happy — and maybe less apt to take part in labor actions of the sort that were common at the turn of the century.
“Politicians got involved with it as well,” Logan says, including Mayor Anton Cermak, who organized a major soccer tournament. “They saw where the votes were and recognized the political hay of Chicago soccer.”
The financial and political backing meant that semi-professional and professional teams in Chicago could now play for growing crowds at bigger stadiums.
By the 1920s, well-known international teams took note. In 1926, Vienna Hoaka, a popular team from Austria, visited to take on Chicago Sparta, a semi-professional team organized by Czech immigrants. Logan says the game at the old Comiskey Park was especially meaningful for the city’s Bohemian, Czech and Jewish communities.
“Chicago was still such an immigrant city that it pulled these immigrant communities together,” he says.
Hoaka crushed Sparta, beating the Chicago team 6-1, and its supporters rushed onto the field and carried the Vienna players off in celebration.
Soccer’s decline and revival
When the Great Depression came in 1929, Chicago companies that had sponsored teams and tournaments no longer had money to keep leagues going. Soccer’s golden age in Chicago was over.
By 1938, Chicago had only two professional soccer teams.
Recreational leagues organized by Czechs, Hungarians, Swedes and Germans kept attracting players through the mid-20th century, according to Logan, but on a smaller scale.
Over the decades, though, Chicagoans’ interest in soccer slowly rebounded.
The North American Soccer League, boosted in its early years by bringing in highly paid and past-their-prime foreign stars including Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff to attract an American audience, added the Chicago Sting in 1975. The team won championships in 1981 and 1984, though the NASL ended up folding in 1988 for financial reasons.
Still, the NASL laid the groundwork for the United States to host the 1994 World Cup, with the opening match at Soldier Field, and for the Major League Soccer, which succeeded the NASL as the top flight of men’s professional soccer in the United States. The Chicago Fire joined the league in 1997.
In 2009, the Chicago Red Stars played its inaugural season as one of the founding teams in now-defunct Women’s Professional Soccer and now plays in the National Women’s Soccer League.
Playing for fun
For a soccer lover like Amanda Varela, the game is more about the pickup or coed league games you might find her playing at McKinley Park on the Southwest Side.
“I get some friends from my soccer team to go to the park,” says Varela, 31, who played soccer growing up and plays in one of the city’s many coed leagues. “We end up playing with other folks who are there. And I had some really sweet moments at my neighborhood park where it was just really intergenerational.”
Her team, named “Slow and Old,” recently won its league championship game.
Varela’s teammate Brisa Reyes says she’s been playing soccer since she was 4. She says she’s seen pickup games become increasingly popular and more women joining leagues. Reyes says soccer has a way of bringing together people of all backgrounds, ages and professions.
“You meet people that, literally, you probably will never meet in your life if you guys weren’t playing,” Reyes says.