“Hal Phillips has written a uniquely important and highly original book that simply represents a MUST read for all soccer fans in the United States and beyond. Using his own personal experience of growing up in the location (white suburbia) and the time (1970s) where and when soccer emerged from its dormant if not moribund state in American history, Phillips offers a most vivid and learned account of how soccer congealed into a structure and force in the 1980s which, in turn, formed the basis for its most diversified flowering in contemporary America. I learned so much from this evocative work that I found enriching as well as entertaining!”

— Andrei Markovits

Author of Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism; the 2022 memoir, The Passport as Home: Comfort in Rootlessness; and new from Dickinson-Moses Press, Women in American Soccer and European Football: Different Roads to Shared Glory.