I read the articles for group C and the first article I read was about the beginning of club soccer in America, it surprised me the U.S. had the first league outside of the British Isles because soccer has always been seen as outside the “big four” sports in the U.S. even though it would have had a league before football and basketball had only been invented three years before the soccer league began. It seems the league would have worked out if they took the approach of what old pro wrestling companies did by having their games played at night and trying to reach their audience of foreign-born workers and having a foreign-born hero for them to cheer for as WWWF did with Bruno Sammartino and Italian-Americans. The one thing that interested me about the reading of the 1934 game of Mexico versus the U.S.A was the fact that one of the players was described as the Babe Ruth of Soccer, this reminded me of a famous clip that goes around of a person on Pawn Stars describing Christian Pulisic as the Lebron James of soccer to make him sound more important. This bothered me because it makes it seems like soccer isn’t as important as the other sports and to make it sound more important it has to be compared to sports that actually matter like baseball back then and basketball now. The story about Bethlem Steel really surprised me because I never knew about the team’s history but I have gone to plenty of Charlotte Independence games and always wondered why they had that team name. I feel they should have done more to show their team history as they have a team older than most teams in America today and choose not to speak out about the rich history of the club. It reminded me of the reading about Pele and how the new owner wanted to get rid of everything that had to do with Pele and the old team which alienates all of the old fans of the team.
