During the 2026 World Cup, the question was regularly asked: is the USA a “football country” yet? Which almost as regularly became a debate about what right anybody had to expect other countries to follow sport in the same way they do. But, anyway, it always seemed possible to answer the question in two ways – and perhaps always has done.
On the one hand, no, the USA is not a football country; it has produced very few elite players and, while the likes of Weston McKennie, Christian Pulisic and Antonee Robinson are regulars in the top divisions of major European leagues, there’s still not that many US players operating at a high level given a population of almost 350million.
But on the other , the USA is a great consumer of football. MLS is an established league. NBC is paying $450m a year for Premier League rights. The 2026 World Cup, as the 1994 World Cup had done, broke attendance records despite eye-watering ticket prices. There is a great appetite in the US for friendlies and tour games: 109,318 turned out at the University of Michigan for a pre-season match between Real Madrid and Manchester United in 2014. But that has always been true – as became very clear during the boom years of the American Soccer League.
Hakoah were a Viennese club founded in 1909 with a self-conscious aim of promoting Zionism by Fritz Löhner and Ignaz Körner, respectively a librettist and a dentist, who had been inspired by Max Nordau’s ideas of muscular Judaism – ‘Hakoah’ is the Hebrew for ‘strength’ or ‘power’. They were very successful, winning the Austrian league in 1925 and beating West Ham 5-0 in London in 1923. Hakoah were regular tourists and in the summer of 1926 travelled to the US, a trip underwritten by two Jewish owners of ASL clubs: Nat Agar of Brooklyn Wanderers and Maurice Vanderweghe of New York Giants.
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Interest in football was booming anyway. The 1926 Challenge Cup final had attracted 18,000 fans to Ebbet’s Field, the home of Brooklyn Dodgers, to see Bethlehem Steel beat the Ben Millers 7-2, the highest attendance ever to watch a soccer match in the US. But the record stood for only a fortnight.
Hakoah may only have finished seventh in Austria in 1925-26 but they were a massive draw. Crowds were huge: 25,000 watched them in Philadelphia, 15,000 in Chicago, and 22,000 at Ebbet’s Field. But the biggest occasion by far was their game at the Polo Fields in New York in 1 May 1926 when 46,000 were there to see Hakoah play the New York Stars, a combined XI made up of players from New York Giants and Indiana Flooring. Not until the peak days of the New York Cosmos would a larger crowd watch football in the US.
It wasn’t just the size of the crowd that was striking; it was its make-up. Hakoah had attracted large numbers of Jewish spectators. This was a potential fanbase that had largely been untapped by other sports. It would be another four years before the first Jewish baseball star, Hank Greenberg, joined the major leagues. And this wasn’t one isolated star; Hakoah were an entire constellation.
For Agar, Vanderweghe and other entrepreneurs, this was a great opportunity. ASL sides started to sign Hakoah players. Béla Guttmann, the great Hungarian centre-half who would later win the European Cup twice with Benfica, led the exodus and was followed to the New York Giants by four team-mates, including the former Ferencváros and Makabi Brno winger Ernő Schwarz. Brooklyn Wanderers went one better signing five Hakoah players, among them the former VAC and Hungary goalkeeper Lajos Fischer, the former Ferencváros, Makabi Brno and Hungary winger Sándor Nemes and the left-sided forward or midfielder József Eisenhoffer.
Eisenhoffer was not ethnically Jewish but had converted after his marriage in 1922. He would go on to manager Marseille to the French league and cup before returning to his home city of Budapest after the Nazi occupation of France. Unable to get a coaching licence, he was unable to find work and, after the German invasion, his wife was deported to Auschwitz. He escaped, seemingly because he was a convert, but was reduced to living in a cellar, relying on handouts from old football contacts. He was injured in a Soviet air-raid, the untreated wound became infected and he died in February 1945, a week after the execution of his former Ferencváros team-mate István Tóth.
The forgotten heroism of István Tóth
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February 7, 2025
At dawn, 80 years ago last Thursday, the former Ferencváros striker István Tóth was led into the courtyard of the Buda Castle with several other prisoners. He took off his glasses and placed them in his inside pocket, then was shot dead on the orders of the SS.
Agar began looking beyond Hakoah, travelling to Europe to make further signings from VAC and DRC Prag, and then, stunningly, made a bid for the great Hungarian forward Kálmán Konrád from Wiener Amateure, offering a US$500 signing bonus, plus $75 a week, roughly double what an English professional could earn at the time. He accepted and, although he would flop at Brooklyn Wanderers, Konrád added lustre to the ASL.
The lure for players in Europe was clear. Austria was gripped by hyperinflation. Hungary had just come through the Red and White Terrors and was still in political and economic turmoil. Guttmann, probably the best paid player in the league had accepted a $500 signing bonus pls $350 a month, three times the wage of the average manual worker and far more than he was making in Vienna, even if you included revenue from the dance school he ran on the side.
The ASL was entering its golden years, but the faultlines that would bring it down were already beginning to emerge.
This is the eighth article in this intermittent series on US soccer history. Catch up with the previous seven here:
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