Overview

The Modern Creation Story American Soccer Didn't Know It Had By the late 1980s, U.S. soccer had solidified its reputation as a global laughingstock, a sporting oxymoron akin to Jamaican bobsledding: Starting in 1950, the richest, most powerful nation on Earth had gone 0 for 9 trying to qualify for the World Cup. Once the North American Soccer League petered out, U.S. sporting culture proved unable/unwilling to replace it. Soccer on TV? Post-1984, only the odd indoor match might be found there - late at night, on content-starved cable outlets, after competitive lumberjacking. Today, the phenomenon of U.S. soccer development is almost taken for granted: Live matches from Major League Soccer and a half-dozen foreign leagues are routinely beamed into American households, seven days a week. World Cup participation is routine, thanks to wildly popular men's and women's national teams. Americans don't just compete in World Cups. We host them (the next one arrives in 2026). Nationwide, millions of Soccer Moms preside over the game's grassroots, securing its growing place in the broader cultural tableau. Generation Zero profiles this epic transformation by spotlighting the national team players and fans who made it happen. Conventional wisdom assigns American soccer progress largely to an event, World Cup '94, but history shows the tipping point arrived five years earlier. With a single victory - against all odds, on a small Caribbean island, just as the Berlin Wall fell - soccer's haphazard, indeterminate development in the U.S. instantly became inevitable, headlong growth. Raised on the game and tempered by hardship, Generation Zero produced both ends of the formative equation: a national team good enough to break through and an audience that would care, the country's first legitimate soccer fan base. Featuring rare imagery from the 1989-90 U.S. Men's National Team photographer and candid snaps from the players themselves, Generation Zero is must-read for anyone who appreciates the fulsome futbol culture we enjoy today but wonders, ""How did we get here?""

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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. -Andrei S. Markovits, professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies, University of Michigan; author of Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, and the 2021 memoir, The Passport As Home: Comfort in Rootlessness ... a masterly job of celebrating the players and '80s era that laid the foundation for today's American soccer culture. -Jim Trecker, National Soccer Hall of Fame Colin Jose Media Award Winner, World Cup '94 Sr. VP/communications, co-editor 100 Years of Soccer in America It's taken my lifetime for soccer in this country to move from obscurity to the status of big-time sport, and over those decades, Hal Phillips was the journalist who stuck it out and followed that fascinating ascent. -Larry Olmsted, NY Times bestselling author of FANS: How Watching Sports Makes US Happier, Healthier and More Understanding Can four billion delirious soccer fans possibly be wrong? Brother Hal thinks not. A must read for your sports bookshelf - and the budding soccer star you're driving to practice twice a week. -James Dodson, bestselling author of Final Rounds, American Triumvirate and Ben Hogan - An American Life ...highly entertaining account of how a generation of players decisively moved soccer from niche to mainstream in American sporting culture. -Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights ...both a compelling, comprehensive history and a heartfelt account of one man's passion for something that many Americans didn't even notice was sweeping the nation and burrowing into its culture. -Jeff Wallach, Sunday striker and author of the novels Mr. Wizard and Everyone Here Is From Somewhere Else With dry humor and precise analysis, Hal Phillips has filled in the missing years between American soccer's early aspirations and today's actual achievement. -Patrick Symmes, author of Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey With Generation Zero, Phillips offers a touching, incisive, and above all personal history of the growth of soccer in the U.S., from what he calls The Before Time, through an American Soccer Metamorphosis, to its current position as a Big Time Sport that encompasses many levels of participation, class, and ethnicity. Read this book before the FIFA World Cup starts on November 21. -Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, author of A Conservation Notebook: Ego, Greed, and Oh-So-Cute Orangutans - Tales from a Half-Century on the Environmental Front Lines

Author Information

Hal Phillips is an author, journalist and media executive based in southern Maine. Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories and the Making of Soccer in America is his first book-length project. Phillips blogs on all matters soccer at www.genzero.halphillips.net. He posts about the world at-large at www.halphillips.net, and tweets (in fits & starts) @mandarinhal.A daily newspaper and magazine editor until 2001, Phillips has since contributed feature content to ESPN FC, Sports Illustrated, Soccer365.com, GOLF Magazine, Travel & Leisure, Golf Digest China, Portland Press Herald, Golf Australia, McKellar, LINKS, Robb Report and dozens of other titles worldwide, some of which still exist. He was founder and host of the Unsightly American Soccer Podcast from 2009 to 2013, pioneering but effectively pre-dating the podcast movement. An all-state striker at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts, Phillips played four years of college soccer at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he double majored in ancient Greek history and modern American literature. He logged three years in the semi-pro, Greater Boston-based Luso-American Soccer Association, before heading north and playing 10 more seasons in the Maine Open League. Since 1997, he has owned and operated Mandarin Media Inc., a media consulting, content- and digital-marketing agency serving golf, travel and property clients across North America, the UK and Asia-Pacific.

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