Revisiting The Greatest Upset Of All Time
Taking a look at the 1950 USA - England World Cup match
Revisiting The Greatest Upset Of All Time
Out of curiosity, I took a little bit of time to look through old newspaper articles about the USA’s famous 1950 1-0 victory against England in the World Cup.
What I found kind of surprised me. Here’s a basic overview.
Nobody Covered Soccer
This part isn’t so surprising. There were very few American newspapers that said anything about soccer at all.
Most of the articles about World Cup qualification came from the same Associated Press or United Press sources. And none of them really mentioned that these matches were qualifiers for the upcoming World Cup.
Now, I think we can chalk some of this up to the relatively small and obscure nature of the World Cup at the time. But it still seems alien to us today.
This final article was the only one that mentioned the World Cup.
There Were Professional Teams In The United States
Professional soccer actually was a thing in the United States at the time. Well, sort of.
There was the American Soccer League, for example.
If you look into it, though, you’ll realize that all of those teams played in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
There were other regional leagues, as well as the National Challenge Cup, which was America’s equivalent of the FA Cup.
The players on that 1950 United States team chiefly came from the ASL and from the two finalists in the Challenge Cup that year: Simpkins-Ford, which played in St. Louis, and Ponta Delgada, which came from Fall River, Massachusetts — the spiritual home of soccer in the United States.
The Americans Had Played European Clubs Before
It was actually pretty common for European and South American clubs to tour the United States in those days.
In fact, Manchester United conducted a tour around the United States in May 1950.
Manchester United won this particular match in St. Louis by an easy 5-0 margin.
There’s more information about some of those early friendlies in this informative article:
England Was Shorthanded
Now comes the part I’ll never understand.
For some strange reason, a second England team toured the United States and Canada right before the World Cup.
Stanley Matthews was on this team instead of training with the World Cup squad — which he was also a member of.
I learned about this team when I read about them playing in Vancouver on June 2:
This is the team that famously beat the United States World Cup team 1-0 in New York City right before the World Cup started.
The most frustrating thing is that I was unable to find any newspaper articles beyond this small Associated Press snippet about this match. There were over 8,000 fans at the Triborough Stadium in New York City — but apparently no reporters bothered to show up.
English Papers Didn’t Really Cover The Match
It’s pretty well known that the American victory was greeted with a collective yawn in the United States.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch was the only paper in the country with a reporter on the scene:
Most of the United States read a variation of this Associated Press article, which was more mocking than informative:
Interestingly, most British publications seemed more concerned about the cricket match than the football that day:
Considering the legendary status this fluke victory has attained over the years, it really is interesting to see how little people cared at the time.