Generation Zero

Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories
and the Making of Soccer in America

Generation Zero

Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories
and the Making of Soccer in America

Author Home2024-05-19T13:03:18-04:00

Listen Up, U.S. soccer fans: Generation Zero now Available via Audio Book

The audio version of Generation Zero, the best-selling U.S. soccer history from author Hal Phillips, is now available via Amazon, alongside its print and eBook editions. Published by Dickinson-Moses Press and released in July 2022, Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories & The Making of Soccer in America details the game’s unlikely modern ascent, during the 1970s and ‘80s, after a century of false starts. Featuring period imagery from USMNT photographer Jon van Woerden, GZ is the definitive account of fútbol’s long-elusive mainstreaming in the [...]

England May Have Wrexham AFC (Est. 1864) … We Have the Baltimore Blast

Americans have developed a soft spot for expertly produced, soccer-centric docuseries and “Welcome to Wrexham,” in particular, has engendered a specific appreciation for futbol clubs older than dirt. As a sporting culture, we have traditionally struggled to give a fig about this concept. The Chicago Bears, for example, don’t make a big deal about having been established in [...]

GZ Audio Book Now Available!

DOWN ON PAPER PRODUCTS? NO TIME TO READ? NO PROBLEM! LISTEN TO GENERATION ZERO — OR OPT FOR THE E-BOOK

The print, audio and eBook versions of Generation Zero are all available right now! Click here to purchase.

‘… a MUST read for all soccer fans in the United States and beyond.’

“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. 

Book of a
lifetime!

“It’s taken my entire lifetime for soccer in this country to move from obscurity  to the status of big time sport, and over those decades, Phillips was the journalist I knew who stuck it out and followed that fascinating ascent. Now he is ready to share the story with sports fans everywhere.”

— Larry Olmsted, NY Times Bestselling author of FANS: How Watching Sports Makes US Happier, Healthier and more Understanding

‘Masterly’

“Hal Phillips has done a masterly job of celebrating the players and ’80s era that set the foundation for today’s American soccer culture.  He has produced a valuable history of the players, who despite no pro league and myriad frustrations kept the game alive, and he pulls back the curtains on how they came together to create a national team that today ranks among the world’s most noteworthy.”

— Jim Trecker, Co-Editor 100 Years of Soccer in America
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