Blue Chippers from the Emerald Isle

Irish Soccer Players’ Migration to the United States of America

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first Irish footballers began to move from the Republic of Ireland to the United States of America to take up soccer scholarships in universities there.¹ These student soccer players are part of a wider tradition of Irish emigration there which stretches back to the seventeenth century.² After the partition of Ireland in 1921, Irish emigrants generally moved to Britain rather than the USA with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 leading to a decline in work opportunities.³ It was at this time that emigration from Free State Ireland to Canada, Australia and the USA ‘virtually ceased’.⁴ The entry process for the USA became more difficult through the introduction of a number of US Immigration Acts in the 1920s, with the 1924 Act specifying that ‘all US immigrants were required to obtain a visa from the American consulate in their country of origin’.⁵ By the late twentieth century non-Europeans were being given more than ninety per cent of US visas, but the Donnelly and Morrison visas, which were initiated in 1986 and 1990 respectively, allowed tens of thousands of primarily Irish and other emigrants to enter the US labour force legally through ‘random selection or lottery’.⁶ Irish athletes on scholarships have been able to bypass these restrictions on moving to the USA, with the first of these, Jimmy Reardon, moving to Villanova in 1949.⁷ By the latter decades of the twentieth century, those with aspirations of combining soccer with education were able to enter the country legally as students on scholarships for a four-year period.⁸ There was also the possibility to extend their time there through postgraduate studies with a view to fully joining the work force. This pathway, while initially largely informal and based loosely on contacts, was by the later twentieth century much more firmly developed and offered aspiring young footballers an opportunity to develop their football skills while gaining a third level education. Given the close proximity, tradition of migration, cultural similarities and the general strength of England and Scotland’s football leagues, Irish-born footballers with aspirations of a full time career in professional football have, beginning in the late nineteenth century, generally gravitated towards the United Kingdom.⁹ However, this is not to say that they have not attempted to earn a living in the United States of America’s temporary professional soccer leagues (albeit in much smaller numbers), with the American Soccer League (ASL) attracting at least thirty-seven Irish-born players during its short existence from 1921 until 1931.¹⁰ Similarly, the North American Soccer League (NASL), which ran from 1968 until 1984, also gave Irish players the opportunity to play professional football before it folded.¹¹ Major League Soccer (MLS), established in 1996, is currently still operational, and has featured a number of Irish players, particularly some of those who were nearing the end of the careers having starred at English clubs.¹²

Much less has been written on Irish footballers who have moved to the USA to undertake soccer scholarships within higher education. Writing in his Evening Herald column in 1995, Noel King, a prominent figure in Irish soccer circles, stated that ‘today, the American soccer scholarship is thriving and no wonder, it offers education, a challenge, adventure and experience’.¹³ King offered a number of tips for those contemplating applying for a US soccer scholarship, and noted that ‘boosted by the World Cup the game is developing rapidly with serious movement towards the establishing of a professional league’.¹⁴ He also stated that ‘Irish soccer scholars have been availing of these schemes for more than 25 years with many achieving fine careers’ and added that ‘however, with America being so far away and soccer being small time there, it has attracted little publicity’.¹⁵ Given that most of the national media’s focus on soccer in Ireland has been on elite leagues in Britain, the League of Ireland and the national team, the migration of Irish-born soccer scholars to take up soccer scholarships abroad has not featured heavily within discussions of sport, particularly within academic sports writing. Where this phenomenon has received some attention, it has been almost entirely from journalists rather than historians. This movement has generally been to the USA and this book seeks to rectify the lack of research on Irish-born players who have undertaken soccer scholarships there by uncovering three key aspects of these, namely their recruitment, playing and educational experiences, and their post-college careers.

While Irish athletes have been migrating to the USA to take up scholarships since the late 1940s, the movement to US universities of young Irish soccer players with aspirations of a full-time career in professional football, which began in earnest in the 1970s, marked a new departure from their traditional recruitment into British soccer clubs, which had taken place since the late nineteenth century.¹⁶ Basic forms of education had formally been available to apprentice footballers at British football clubs since the 1960s, but the emphasis was, unsurprisingly, on performance on the field and they have generally not prioritised players’ academic prowess.¹⁷ Although movement to the USA has not seriously challenged this traditional soccer migration to Britain, the growth of the US soccer scholarship system offered aspiring young players the opportunity to develop their soccer talent and gain a third level education, which was unusual in the formation of soccer players. It also reflected wider trends of the growing internationalisation of intercollegiate soccer in the USA in the opening years of the 1970s.¹⁸ The availability of these scholarships to Irish students since the late 1960s predated the organisation of soccer scholarships in Irish universities, the first scheme of which was established at University College Dublin in 1979.¹⁹ As will be shown, there has been an almost complete absence of published academic work on the experiences of Irish soccer players prior to, during and after their US college soccer scholarships.

The Growth of Academic Research into the History of Irish Sport

Sport has only become a topic which has been deemed as a serious strand of academic history research in Ireland over the past two decades. While there has been a notable growth in the number of publications examining sport’s relationship with Irish society, as yet, there has been no investigative research undertaken into the movement of Irish students to the USA for soccer scholarship purposes. This can be explained by, within academic soccer historiography, a focus on professional soccer in Britain, which has been more commonly associated with Irish soccer players. Given that much of the related findings on the lives of professional footballers have been written by sociologists, that relevant to Irish players has been included here, although it is important to note that this book itself is written through an historical lens.

The early twenty-first century has seen a rise in the number of publications examining the role and place of sport within Irish society. By the last decade of the twentieth century, ‘the cultural turn’ within academic history had led to a shift in traditional views of what was significant with the result that aspects of popular culture and sport have gained wider acceptance within history departments, and ‘as sport itself has gone increasingly global, so has its study’.²⁰ This has particularly been the case in Ireland, with, for example, five academic books published on the history of sport in 2015, with three of these focusing fully on soccer.²¹

Despite this, migration for soccer scholarship purposes has not yet been assessed, as much of the literature published in the early twenty-first century has focused on the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA).²² Specialist twentieth century studies of Irish sport centred mainly on the GAA and were generally written with a focus on the political and nationalist aspects of the organisation’s history and its links with the Irish Republican Brotherhood.²³ An exception was David Fitzpatrick’s 1996 article on boxing in the Irish Free State.²⁴ In the early 2000s academic studies of sport’s relationship with society in Ireland began to gain greater acceptance as a topic worthy of serious academic research, with the appearance of the work of Neal Garnham on soccer and the GAA in Ireland’s two leading historical journals, Irish Economic and Social History (2001) and Irish Historical Studies (2004) an indicator of this progress.²⁵ The publication of Alan Bairner’s 2004 edited collection, Sport and the Irish, by an academic publisher (UCD Press) was also an important step in this development, while Sports History Ireland organised annual conferences between 2005 and 2015.²⁶

Soccer Migration from Ireland

Mainstream assessments of the history of Irish emigration have not examined the movement of Irish students to US colleges to any great extent.²⁷ This comes despite the fact that a few historians such as Donald M. MacRaild have recently acknowledged the importance of Irish soccer migrants to the public.²⁸ More specialised work on the history of soccer migration has been centred more on professional football leagues. Pierre Lanfranchi and Matthew Taylor’s pioneering study of the migration of professional footballers (2001) focused mainly on the movement of British and international footballers without reflecting on movement into universities to take up positions as soccer scholars.²⁹ Although not an academic publication, Nick Harris’ 2003 book on migration into English league football, England, their England, has briefly looked at movement from England to the USA for playing purposes, but similarly it does not examine those who moved on soccer scholarships.³⁰ The research of sociologists John Bale and Joseph Maguire (1994), Joseph Maguire and David Stead (1998), Jonathan Magee and John Sugden (2002), and Paul Darby (2000, 2007) has, in different ways, applied world system theory, neo-imperialism and dependency theory to the study of football player migration, but does not address movement for soccer scholarship purposes.³¹ Academic historical studies of the migration of Irish soccer players to Britain are scarce, but include works by Conor Curran in 2015, 2017 and 2018.³² Sociologists Ann Bourke (2002, 2003), Richard Elliott (2014), Seamus Kelly (2015, 2018) and Patrick McGovern (2000, 2002) have also looked at aspects of this movement.³³