Soccertown USA (2018) dir. by Robert Penzel (review)

Robert Penzel's Soccertown USAtells the story of three U.S. men's national soccer team players who grew up together in the town of Kearny, New Jersey, before going on to help end the four-decade American absence from the FIFA World Cup in 1990. The true star of the film, however, is not midfielders Tab Ramos and John Harkes or goalkeeper Tony Meola but rather Kearny itself. The documentary reveals a deep history of soccer in Kearny, a town whose economy centered on thread mills drawing thousands of European immigrants to the area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As mills proliferated and the population grew, Kearny developed into a hotbed of the sport, fostering a culture of fanaticism that allowed generations of soccer talent to develop and thrive in the region.

Soccertown USAjuxtaposes Kearny's historical role in the sport with its modern influence on the U.S. men's national team. The glue that binds the documentary together is a wide-ranging series of interviews not only with Ramos, Harkes, and Meola but also other prominent figures from the Kearny soccer scene. Newspaper clippings, video footage, and photographs spanning a century of local soccer history further illuminate the sport's lasting influence on the town and, by extension, the town's lasting influence on the national team.

The film begins by tracing the early growth of factory teams in the 1880s. The most prominent, the O.N.T. (Our New Thread) team sponsored by the local Clark Thread Company, won the first three editions of the American Cup that preceded the modern U.S. Open Cup. Clark Field, where O.N.T. played its home matches, also served as the venue for the first international match between the United States and Canada in 1885.

Prior to World War I, Kearny had already developed a reputation as an incubator of top soccer talent in the United States. Prolific goal scorers such as Davey Brown, born south of Kearny in East Newark in 1898, and Archie Stark, the "Babe Ruth of Soccer" who emigrated from Scotland as a thirteen-year-old, both got their start playing for local teams in Kearny. Tom Florie, the captain of the U.S. national team that reached the semifinals at the inaugural World Cup in 1930, was born in nearby Harrison. Jimmy Douglas, the American goalkeeper who earned the first shutout in World Cup history, was also from the area.

Even as American soccer fortunes declined on the international stage between 1950 and 1990, Kearny and the neighboring towns remained a hotbed. From its early roots organized around factories, later teams in the area divided along ethnic lines. Teams comprised of Scottish, Italian, Irish, German, and other European ethnic groups competed against one another locally. The Uruguayan-born Ramos represents a later, more diverse wave of immigration; his family moved to New Jersey in the late 1970s, and the eleven-year-old Ramos quickly integrated into the soccer-mad community. For more than a century, soccer served as an intergenerational spectacle that provided an alternative route to assimilation for immigrants.

This intergenerational relationship shines through in the discussion about organizing youth soccer in the community. At a time when youth soccer was still in its early stages in the United States, the community came together to ensure opportunities for their sons to play. Whereas soccer started to open doors for American girls and women to participate in sports around the same time that Harkes, Ramos, and Meola began their rise up the youth and high school ranks, the game in Kearny is portrayed throughout the documentary as a predominantly masculine space.

That narrative of masculinity carries through into the street soccer scene in Kearny and Harrison, where pick-up games provided additional opportunities for young players to develop their skills in an informal, self-organized space. Harkes, Ramos, and Meola all discuss pick-up games and small-side competition as integral to their technical and...