GenZero Archives - Generation Zero

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

Hal Phillips — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 15:29:21 +0000

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 [...]

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

Hal Phillips — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 17:11:06 +0000

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, [...]

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Hubert Vogelsinger created Youth Soccer Revolutionaries

Hal Phillips — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 19:42:12 +0000

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 [...]

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

Hal Phillips — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 17:29:51 +0000

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 [...]

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

Michael Conant — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 01:22:53 +0000

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 [...]

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June 20, 1975: The Night They Came for Pelé

Hal Phillips — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 19:34:35 +0000

[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. [...]

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