The U.S.'s role in shaping many elements of modern soccer (2024)

In 1981, with professional soccer in the United States on life support, San Diego Sockers president and general manager Fred Whitacre sat down and penned a letter to the Miami Herald.

The Sockers were a member of the top-flight North American Soccer League, and things were looking bleak. Years earlier, soccer had been propelled into the mainstream by the arrival of Pelé and the ascension of the New York Cosmos, but that glimmer was only temporary. Pelé retired in 1977 and just four years later, the league’s attendance was eroding and teams were folding. The old adage —that Americans would never embrace the world’s game —seemed to be coming true again.

“Having discovered the addiction of soccer,” Whitacre wrote in his op-ed, “I enjoy the beauty and the flow of the game as it now exists. But I would still like to see some open experimentation to create a more… Americanized version of the sport.”

He laid out a few suggested rule changes. Shorten the game from 90 to 70 minutes, with a clock that stops every time the ball goes out of play. Eliminate the offside rule entirely, which would surely promote higher scoring. And one final change would help the game connect with alienated Americans who preferred their own country’s version of football:

“Count each goal as six points,” Whitacre wrote. “And following a goal, a designated shooter would attempt a shootout goal for the extra point, given a total possibility of seven points per goal.”

These are the types of suggested rule changes American soccer is remembered for. Over the past century and a half, there have been plenty of ridiculous ideas: making the goals comically large, or even limiting the physical size of the goalkeepers themselves. The NASL, and later Major League Soccer, were derided for using a countdown clock, or for banning draws, using a uniquely American, high-flying, 35-yard shootout to settle tie games. And that’s not even touching the rule changes instituted in the U.S.’ indoor leagues —from long-distance, two-point goals to rolling substitutions and brown cards.

Buried in that flood of harebrained ideas, though, have been some good ones. And some of them have led to seismic changes in the way the game is played globally.

It was in the United States, for example, that the use of substitutes was largely pioneered. The backpass rule, often looked upon as the most fundamental change in the game’s history, was first tinkered and experimented with in the NASL, not the Premier League. Pan out a little further to the extrinsics of the game — the way it is presented and promoted —and America’s influence is even greater. Not that anybody abroad would ever admit it.

“For a long time, any idea on soccer emanating from America — and this is probably still largely true — is dead on arrival in the global game,” current Atlanta United general manager Garth Lagerway once told The Athletic. “It’s just the way it’s always been.”

Long before the NASL existed, the American Soccer League (ASL)was pushing the limits on the laws of the game and running afoul of FIFA, soccer’s international governing body.

The ASL is widely-considered America’s first successful top-flight league — a collection of teams from a handful of industrial cities and towns in the northeast. Its founding in 1921 came during a period of massive industrial growth and mass immigration, and those immigrants brought a deep understanding of the game to the United States. Teams like Bethlehem Steel and Fall River Marksmen, often stocked with workers plucked directly from the local factory floors, became dominant. And some of them became very profitable.

Soon enough, the league began to attract international talent. At one point the ASL had over 50 players in its ranks who represented their respective national teams in international play, many from England and Scotland.

The league’s owners were by and large industrial titans and it did not take long for them to start tinkering with the league’s rules. Some of their suggestions were relatively minor —eschewing the internationally-recognized points system (three for a win, one for a draw) in favor of using winning percentage to rank teams, or instituting postseason playoffs. Others, though, were more fundamental, and one in particular caused a massive row: the use of substitutions.

Substitutions feel like a fundamental part of soccer, but they weren’t introduced into the laws of the game until 1958 and were largely reserved solely for replacing injured players. They weren’t used in World Cup play until 1970. Decades earlier, though, the ASL was the first major professional league in the world to institute them.

In 1926, the league decided to allow the use of two substitutes per match, provided they were used before the last 15 minutes. They made other fundamental changes, like positioning an official on each team’s goal line — a very primitive form of goal-line technology — and allowing referees the ability to penalize players for infractions by temporarily removing them from the game, a concept drawn directly from ice hockey.

The rule changes, particularly the use of substitutes, angered FIFA. The English and Scottish federations, both of whom had dozens of players signed to ASL teams, made their own complaints. In 1927, FIFA summoned the president of the United States Football Association (now known as the U.S. Soccer Federation) to Finland for a tongue-lashing over the league’s enticement of international players who were already under contract and its disregard for the internationally-accepted rules of the game.

The USFA relented, forcing the ASL to refine its transfer policies and fall in line. The ASL’s owners took this as a stab in the back, and the ensuing schism between the league and its federation would end up imploding the entire ASL within five years. It would take nearly four decades for legitimate, top-flight soccer to return to America in the form of the NASL, and the ASL was relegated to the dustbin of U.S. Soccer, a curious footnote in this country’s lengthy history of Americanizing the game.

The NASL had its own way of refining the game’s relationship with substitutes. In 1973, the league transitioned from using two substitutes to three. FIFA, as it had done decades earlier, threatened to sanction the American league for its outlaw practices. The English top flight did not even adopt the use of two subs until the late ‘80s and the sport as a whole transitioned to the use of three substitutes in the mid-’90s, nearly 20 years after the NASL was panned for doing so.

The number of allowable substitutes was expanded to five during the COVID-19 epidemic, a temporary change that has since been permanently written into the laws of the game. 30 years earlier, the five-substitution rule existed in the United States Interregional Soccer League (now known as USL), the closest thing the United States had to first-division soccer at the time.

Even the ASL’s then unheard of idea of giving teams temporary advantages by using a hockey-style penalty box (or ‘sin bin’) seems to have had legs: this week, IFAB approved trials of the concept, almost 100 years after the ASL first utilized it.

Around the time that Whitacre was urging the NASL to award six points per goal, other executives across the league were making more reasonable suggestions, refining the league’s relationship with the offside rule and, crucially, the backpass.

Many argue that no rule in the history of the game has been more transformational than banning goalkeepers from handling passes played back to them by teammates. Instituted globally in 1992, the measure was a response to a dull, lifeless 1990 World Cup, one where several matches featured keepers who held onto the ball for upwards of five minutes. The rule change had an immediate effect on pace of play and forced goalkeepers to play more creatively, effectively creating an entire new position —the sweeper-keeper, a goalie who pushes higher up the field and is tasked with starting the attack.

The NASL, in its dying years, began to experiment with the backpass. Some, like Minnesota Kicks president Freddie Goodwin, wanted passes back to the goalkeeper to be banned in entirety. Others suggested the now familiar rule, banning keepers from using their hands to receive a backpass.

In 1984, the league came up with a clunky and over-engineered solution. If a player possessed the ball more than 35 yards from his own goal, he was not allowed to play the ball back to his keeper at all. Between 18 and 35 yards from goal, backpasses were allowed only when the player who had the ball was under defensive pressure. Inside of 18 yards, backpasses were allowed as normal. They added another wrinkle at the same time —between the 18-yard box and midfield, defenders would be penalized for intentionally playing an offside trap.

Tampa Tribune — April 21, 1983

There was no direct consequence during play for violating these rules, but an official at each match was tasked with tabulating each team’s violations and doling out fines afterwards. The league’s veteran players, many of whom were seasoned pros with years of European experience, bristled at the rule changes.

The NASL also instituted a pair of other fundamental changes, ones which would be adopted globally decades later.

Goalkeepers, the league’s rules committee said, had to distribute the ball “in a timely fashion” —within five seconds of handling it. Players were warned on their first infraction and ensuing infractions were penalized by an indirect free kick at the spot of the violation. In 1998, a modified version of this rule, which grants keepers six seconds to distribute the ball, was added to the laws of the game. The global interpretation of the NASL’s rule, however, gives the referee wide latitude in terms of enforcement, and officials rarely treat the time limit as law.

In the NASL, though, “the count was enforced strictly,” remembers former defender Alan Merrick, who arrived in the league after a distinguished career at West Bromwich Albion in England. “It kept the game flowing much better.”

1984’s other addition was one which, to this day, has had a dramatic effect on the game at large, and also has its roots in England (though the rule was first adopted in the NASL). Nowadays, it’s commonplace to see players issued a red card for denying an opponent a clear goalscoring opportunity — something commonly referred to as “DOGSO.” Until 1980, though, no rule existed that allowed referees to remove a player from a match for doing so.

That changed after the 1980 FA Cup final, when Arsenal’s Willie Young committed a foul against West Ham’s Paul Allen on a breakaway that was so blatant and egregious that it prompted English football to attempt to change its own rules. English football as a whole was in an attendance downturn and executives at the Football League formed a committee — led by former Manchester United coach Matt Busby and legendary Man United player Bobby Charlton.

The other leader of that committee was Jimmy Hill, a former player and coach turned broadcaster who had already pushed for other big changes in English football, like the abolition of the maximum wage for players and awarding three points for a win instead of two. By the early ‘80s, Hill had his hands in the American game, having owned the Detroit Express (who would later become the Washington Diplomats) of the NASL and having lured English phenom Trevor Francis stateside.

Hill, along with Busby and Charlton, suggested to the International Football Association Board (IFAB) in 1982 that DOGSO be an offense punishable by red card, but global soccer didn’t adopt the rule until 1990, later modifying it to include deliberate handballs. The NASL, where Hill had plied his trade for three years, did so almost immediately, and defined it almost exactly how the rule is applied in the present day.

“If, in the opinion of the referee, a player on the defending team stops an excellent scoring opportunity outside the penalty area by either a deliberate foul or an intentional handball, the player can be ejected from the game,” read the NASL rulebook. “An excellent scoring opportunity is one in which the offensive player has only one or no defending players to beat.”

Off the field, the NASL — and American soccer as a whole —has had its share of innovations, as well. In 1968, on the league’s founding, the NASL became the first professional soccer league in the world to display player names on the back of jerseys. Clive Toye, who was intimately involved with a handful of NASL teams and served as the league’s final president, remembers that effort being helmed by Dick Cecil of the Atlanta Chiefs, a baseball man turned soccer pioneer. Others remember Lamar Hunt, a giant figure in American soccer, having a say, and that tracks: Hunt was among the founders of American football’s AFL, and one of the many ways that league differed from the NFL was its use of names on the backs of jerseys, which was unheard of at the time.

The NASL also pioneered the placement of numbers on the front of uniforms, typically on the shorts and shirt alike, something that wouldn’t become commonplace until the mid-’90s, when FIFA debuted it at the 1994 World Cup… in the United States.

The NASL, and the MISL, the dominant American indoor league in the ‘80s, were also pioneering in terms of selling the game, actively marketing the sport to minorities in the United States and, for the first time, to women. The NASL was founded not long before Title IX legislated gender equality in collegiate sports and the league was aggressive in marketing itself to women and girls alike. A study of the league’s finances from the early ‘80s found that nearly half of its consumers were women, an unheard-of percentage for any major American sport at the time.

In the ‘90s, the USISL became a test laboratory of sorts for U.S. Soccer as it scrambled to help throw together MLS. The league’s founders were grappling with the age-old question of how to Americanize the game and U.S. Soccer formed a committee of luminaries — amongst them Rinus Michels, the father of Total Football —to suggest some ideas. Over the course of the 1994 USISL season, they were all trialed.

The rules ranged from good (allowing teams the option to kick a ball back into play on throw-ins and punishing teams harshly for persistent infringement) to average (ejecting players after they committed five fouls) to bad (settling tie games by counting corner kicks). Some were even downright dangerous: the league trialed something called a stampede kick, a version of a breakaway penalty attempt where one solitary player broke in on goal with every other player on the field chasing after him.

A few of the rule changes were incredibly successful, though. Kick-ins proved particularly popular, as did the idea of removing players after five individual fouls, as they do in professional basketball, a modification that cut the total number of fouls in USISL matches in half. FIFA had already dabbled with kick-ins, trying them out at the 1993 U-17 World Cup, but they scoffed at every other one of the USISL’s suggestions, as did MLS.

Even after the NASL, MISL, USISL and any other number of lesser-known U.S.-based leagues fell by the wayside, U.S. professional leagues continue to push the envelope and refine their rules. The USL, USISL’s spiritual successor, was among the very first leagues globally to trial the use of a Video Assistant Referee. More recently, MLS Next Pro has pushed the envelope in any number of ways. The league uses playoffs after its regular season and allows higher-seeded teams to hand-select their own opponents, an entertaining and novel gimmick that seems unlikely to find its way to Europe anytime soon.

The league, though, has already achieved a high degree of success with at least one experiment: its efforts to curtail time-wasting. In its first two years of existence, MLS Next Pro seems to have largely resolved two issues that have plagued the game globally for years, players who exaggerate or even fabricate injuries late in matches, and players who don’t leave the field in a timely manner late in matches all to waste time.

It did so by instituting a pair of simple rules. “If the referee stops play due to a potential player injury,” reads the first rule, “the player may be required to leave the field of play for three minutes.” It’s a simple modification, and one that’s led to an 80% reduction in extended stoppages for treatment, according to the league.

The league’s other modification is just as simple: it gives its players 10 seconds to leave the field of play during a substitution. If a player takes longer than that, the replacement player cannot enter the field until the next stoppage of play after a 60-second holding period. Of the 3,150 substitutions in MLS Next Pro this past season, only 10 players were penalized for violating the rule.

The league effectively eliminated one of modern soccer’s most notorious problems with a couple of simple modifications.

The next step for those rules would be implementation in Major League Soccer. It’s unclear how quickly that will happen. MLS — despite trying to distance itself from the global game early on in its existence — has done a lot of work to align itself with the rest of the world in recent years. Room for experimentation still exists, though, and despite the league’s recently elevated profile thanks to the arrival of Lionel Messi, it still exists in the shadows, when compared with a handful of top European leagues. But if it plays its cards right MLS could be the latest in a long line of American leagues to help revolutionize the game (and not get credit for it.)

“These days, it is FIFA that needs the U.S., not the other way around,” said Francisco Marcos, who helped pioneer the USISL’s rules experimentation in the ‘90s. “I have no doubt about that. It’s everything from the sponsors that pay the bills, to the attendance at the World Cup, the progress of the women’s game; so today, the U.S. is in a position of saying this is what we want to do, follow us or not.”

(Top photo: Peter Robinson/EMPICS via Getty Images)