GenZero Archives - Generation Zero

Requiem for Match of the Day (and The Sanctity of Unspoiled Endings)

Requiem for Match of the Day (and The Sanctity of Unspoiled Endings)

By Hal Phillips|2026-03-14T10:30:26-04:00February 14th, 2025|GZ blog|

There’s a wonderfully prescient exchange in Whit Stillman’s 1990 film, “Metropolitan,” wherein the know-it-all main character is interrogated on all the works of literature he can’t stop referencing. “You don’t have to have read a book to have an opinion on it. I haven’t read the Bible either,” he reveals, by way of defending himself. “I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelist's ideas as well as the critic's thinking.” Befitting [...]

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Chapter 8 Excerpt: Bleak late ’80s brought Peak Popularity of Indoor Soccer

Chapter 8 Excerpt: Bleak late ’80s brought Peak Popularity of Indoor Soccer

By Hal Phillips|2026-03-14T12:50:47-04:00September 13th, 2023|GZ blog|

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY U.S. SOCCER FANS may not realize it — or wish to contemplate such an unbecoming reality — but for a short time immediately post-NASL, indoor soccer was the American game’s dominant professional strain. Indeed, the peak popularity of indoor soccer, and for Major Indoor Soccer League (MISL), took place during this period, even as the country’s first golden generation of outdoor talent began to coalesce. These coincidental facts, these uncomfortable truths, represent yet more indicators of a [...]

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Hubert Vogelsinger created Youth Soccer Revolutionaries

Hubert Vogelsinger created Youth Soccer Revolutionaries

By Hal Phillips|2026-03-15T07:54:17-04:00June 28th, 2023|GZ blog|

Video evidence of the 1974 World Cup was not made available to me until July 1977. That was the summer I first attended overnight soccer camp, a veritable rite of passage for me and so many fellow members of Generation Zero, those American boys and girls born in the 1960s, then raised in the 1970s as this country’s very first soccer natives. The Puma All-Star Soccer Camp, where I matriculated three straight summers, was owned and operated by Hubert [...]

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Only Now Recovering from ‘Berhalter Fatigue’? Time to Buckle Back Up

Only Now Recovering from ‘Berhalter Fatigue’? Time to Buckle Back Up

By Hal Phillips|2026-03-15T08:15:21-04:00March 27th, 2023|GZ blog|

My own case of Berhalter Fatigue kicked in around Dec. 17, 2022 — a day before the World Cup final, 10 days into the Berhalter-Reyna Family Barbecue, and two weeks after Holland dumped the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team (USMNT) out of the tournament. The tawdry nature of Berhalter’s unprecedented bust-up with the Reynas could not be fully understood until last week, when the U.S. Soccer Federation released its third-party report. No one emerges unscathed from this full and [...]

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Coach Jim Gabarra Preaches the Virtues of Balance, All Year Long

Coach Jim Gabarra Preaches the Virtues of Balance, All Year Long

By Michael Conant|2026-03-15T08:50:57-04:00January 16th, 2023|GZ blog|

Screenshot {SJ Editor: Hal Philips recently published “Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories & the Making of Soccer in America.” This is an example of what you will read in the book. Highly recommended! By HAL PHILLIPSWhen Jim Gabarra competed at the highest levels of American soccer—and he did so both indoors and outdoors—players and coaches gave little thought to their transitions from one setting to the other, and back again. What’s more, during the late 1980s and [...]

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June 20, 1975: The Night They Came for Pelé

June 20, 1975: The Night They Came for Pelé

By Hal Phillips|2026-03-15T09:24:57-04:00January 6th, 2023|GZ blog|

[Ed. This excerpt was taken from Chapter 1 of "Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories and the Making of Soccer in America," by author Hal Phillips. It was published by Dickinson-Moses Press in June 2022.] 1. Hotbeds: When they came for Pelé that brisk June night, the locals ripped the shirt from his back. They absconded with one of his shoes, too, and tore his vintage Seventies-era short shorts. Global sporting icons deserve far more solicitous treatment, we can [...]

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