Soccer timeline 1863 The rules of association football ("soccer" for short) are codified in London. 1869 The first known match in the U.S. using the formal London Football Association's rules is played between Princeton and Rutgers. 1884 Teams from the United States and Canada play in Newark, N.J., the first unofficial international match outside the British Isles. 1885 The American Cup, the first non-league U.S. soccer tournament, is first played in 1885. 1914 The National Challenge Cup is first contested. This pro-am tournament is now known as the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup. 1919 Bethlehem Steel FC, an early American soccer dynasty from Pennsylvania, begins barnstorming Europe like the English and Spanish powers of today. 1930 The U.S. finishes third in the inaugural FIFA World Cup, played in Uruguay. 1950 In the World Cup held in Brazil, the U.S. upsets England, 1-0. America would not return to the World Cup for 40 years. 1999 The United States women defeat China for the World Cup title in front of a crowd of 90,000 in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.

× Expand Evan McIntyre, age 11, practices his juggling skills in front of a Sport Endeavors warehouse.

More than 30 years have passed since the New York Cosmos last packed upward of 70,000 fans into Giants Stadium for soccer matches as part of the North American Soccer League. Yes, soccer matches, featuring the legendary likes of Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia and Carlos Alberto. This weekend, the newly reborn Cosmos, now members of the revamped second division NASL, come to Cary to face the Carolina RailHawks.

Although Pelé, Alberto and the children of Chinaglia attended the Cosmos' reboot earlier this month, the names currently on the back of the iconic green kits are much more obscure. But this is a team in which nostalgia, not name recognition, is the biggest attraction. It's a revived brand in a league that itself is a revived brand.

But the history of U.S. soccer predates Pelé's stint with the Cosmos by a century. It's a history that is being stored right here in the Triangle. And it's one we can't visit.

(For more than a decade, there was a Soccer Hall of Fame in New York. What happened? Read the story.)

A short drive west of WakeMed Soccer Park, where the Cosmos and RailHawks will face off Saturday evening, there are entry points along the border of Orange County where road signs greet motorists with the county's official slogan:

Welcome to Orange County. You'll Be a Fan for Life.

The wordplay is an obvious allusion to nearby Chapel Hill, where fanaticism over University of North Carolina athletics is passed from generation to generation like a birthright. But 13 miles away in the village of Hillsborough, the border salutation strikes an ironic chord when it comes to a far less familiar bequest.

When the National Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta, N.Y., closed in early 2010, its tens of thousands of trophies, photographs, guidebooks, jerseys, balls and other exhibits were crated and freighted to Hillsborough. There, the largest collection of American soccer history sits in stasis, walled within a 3,200-square-foot warehouse beyond public view, awaiting the day when will and wealth might again combine to breathe new life into a showcase for this country's soccer legacy.

The first known match in the U.S. using the formal London Football Association's rules was played between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869, the same year America's first professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds, was formed. In the mid-1920s, the so-called golden era of American soccer, the practice of wealthy U.S. club owners poaching top foreign talentdubbed the "American Menace" in Scotland rankled several European football associations.

In 1930, the United States placed third in the inaugural FIFA World Cup in Uruguay.

Keepers of the fame

The train still runs every day through Hillsborough. But it doesn't stop anymore behind the White Furniture Company.

White Furniture's Hillsborough facility opened in 1940, an expansion of the furniture manufacturer in nearby Mebane, N.C. When White shuttered in 1989, the dilapidated facility lay dormant for two years until it was purchased by a local company looking to expand: Sports Endeavors Inc. Envisioned as a mail-order soccer apparel distributor by founder Mike Moylan, Sport Endeavors published its first catalog in 1984 under its trade moniker, Eurosport. Brendan Moylan, Mike's younger brother, joined the company full time in 1989. Today, Sports Endeavors is the corporate umbrella for a dozen brands and retail websites familiar throughout the soccer and lacrosse landscape, including Eurosport, Soccer.com and WorldSoccerShop.com.

Virtually every corridor of Sports Endeavors' offices is adorned with soccer collectibles, from vintage photographs to display cases showcasing autographed balls and jerseys. One array contains items salvaged from the original Wembley Stadium prior to its demolition. According to Brendan Moylan, for every thing on the wall, they have two or three things in storage.

However, the premises' most treasured artifacts are the Soccer Hall of Fame archives, interred inside a storeroom formerly used as the company's distribution center. Outside of officials for U.S. Soccer and Eurosport, David Kilpatrick is one of the precious few who have been permitted entry. Kilpatrick, an associate professor at Mercy College and club historian for the current incarnation of the New York Cosmos, spent two days in Hillsborough in early August 2012 researching a project about the history of New York pro soccer. When not sating his newfound craving for Hillsborough BBQ, Kilpatrick rummaged through the archives' seemingly limitless bounty from sunup through sundown.

"The basement where the archives are housed is sort of like that last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark of the Covenant is hidden away," Kilpatrick confirms. "It is very much like that, in that you don't know what you'll find from box to box."

Indeed, exploits worthy of Indiana Jones himself are almost required to gain access to the Soccer Hall of Fame archives. Only a handful of historiansincluding Kilpatrickhave been afforded admittance for research purposes. (My request to U.S. Soccer for access in order to write this article became a three-month odyssey that ultimately concluded with a terse refusal.)

Although U.S. Soccer wouldn't unlock the gates, it did supply an inventory of the stored Hall of Fame archives. For venerable soccer historians like Colin Jose and Roger Allaway, the most important items are the tens of thousands of books, documents and images stored inside filing cabinets. There are Spalding guides dating back to 1904, editions of the American Soccer League News as early as 1934 and National Soccer News from 1944, and much more.

Photographs include Carlo Zilliani's collection from the 1940s and '50s, plus a general array of images believed to date back to the 1880s. But the crown jewel is famed street photographer John Albok's catalog, which includes hundreds of pristine photos of soccer in New York City as well as rare color film of soccer being played in such places as Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds.

There are also individual collections and scrapbooks given to the hall by players like Jack Hynes, Arnie Oliver and Werner Mieth; coaches such as Jack Rottenberg and Kurt Lamm; journalists Milton Miller, Frank Kracher, Ike Kuhns and others; and longtime soccer historian Sam Foulds.

The find that most blew away Kilpatrick was the scrapbooks of Bob Millar. A Scottish immigrant, Millar played for more than a dozen clubs from 1913 until 1929, including Bethlehem Steel FC and the New York Giants. He also coached the U.S. National Team to its third-place finish in the 1930 World Cup.

"It was really right there in a nutshell," says Kilpatrick, "the history of U.S. pro soccer in the 1920s right there in front of my eyes ... There was your Ark of the Covenant. There was your Holy Grail."

A large portion of the archives comprises records and other materials from the 1994 World Cup, hosted by the United States, which Allaway says have never been fully inventoried. When the original NASL disbanded in 1983, former player Howie Charbonneau, then working in the league's front office, passed along the NASL's archives, including hundreds of reels of match footage.

Last year, U.S. Soccer loaned a handful of items from the Hall of Fame archives to SCORE! Sports Exhibit in the Luxor Las Vegas casino and hotel. For a cover charge, patrons can glimpse U.S. jerseys from the 1930 and 1950 World Cups, the 1999 Women's World Cup trophy and other antiquities. If you have trouble finding the exhibit, it's upstairs next to the food court.

"A museum in my home"

The absence of a physical soccer hall of fame exacerbates a dissipation of U.S. soccer lore and memorabilia that occurred even during the hall's days in Oneonta, when there were scant resources for research and collection.

Throughout his 13-year coaching career at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Jack Huckel enjoyed a close association with the Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta. In May 2000, Huckel left Skidmore to become director of museum and archives at the hall, a post he held until late 2009.

"For most of the history of the museum," Huckel says, "what it has in the archives came from people who brought stuff and was not proactively collected."

There are many anecdotes about history that got away. Allaway claims the hall lacks more American Soccer League (ASL) materials because the league trashed its archives when it disbanded in 1983. Huckel recalls that hall of famer John Souza owned "a significant collection of memorabilia" from his playing days in the 1940s and '50s that was destroyed during a hurricane in Florida about a decade ago. And the last anyone heard, the original 1885 American Cup trophy was in the hands of a Texas antiques dealer.

But even today, the lack of a functioning repository means other American soccer materialsboth known and unknownremain scattered to the wind. When the Cosmos hired Kilpatrick as team historian, he was given the keys to a "treasure trove" of valuables preserved by former general manager Peppe Pinton. The Lewis Cup, a trophy awarded to winners of the ASL's league cup competition from 1925 to 1963, reportedly resides in the Museum of Sports Glory in Kiev, Ukraine.

Ironically, Hank Steinbrecher, the former secretary general of U.S. Soccer and today the chairman of the Soccer Hall of Fame's board of directors, knows another fruitful fount.

"I've got a museum in my home," Steinbrecher says. "My sons aren't going to want any of it, so where's it going to go? Ultimately it's going to go to the hall. But I don't want to see it sitting in a warehouse.

"I had a hundred jerseysvery often the chiefs of the soccer federations would exchange jerseys," Steinbrecher continues. "I had about a hundred of them up in my attic just hanging up there. So I called the high school and said, 'Boys, come on over and take your pick.'"

Colin Jose says the forgotten soccer history from the American West still awaits an enterprising young researcher. "Someone needs to go and research Oregon and California," he says. "We have no records of the Los Angeles league. No records of San Francisco. No records of Washington state. That sort of thing is a big problem."

Indeed, much of our information about the early days of American soccer comes from the work of people like Foulds, Jose, Allaway and David Wangerin. Records from the first iteration of the ASL during the 1920s, once lost to the dustbin of history and institutional infighting, were painstakingly re-created by Jose, who combed through clippings and microfilm of old newspapers to reconstruct statistics from every game and season. In 1998, Jose published his compiliation American Soccer League 1921-1931: The Golden Years of American Soccer.

But Foulds passed away in 1994, and Wangerin last year. The rest of the vanguard is past being able to volunteer large swaths of fleeting free time, or ward off Father Time.

"My memory is going, my ability to write is going," the 77-year-old Jose responds when asked if he still works. "I'm sort of going downhill. It's a struggle for me to do it now."

Bytes and mortar

Today, the Soccer Hall of Fame exists as a subdirectory of the U.S. Soccer website.

Still-speculative ideas for a more full-featured virtual hall of fame have been bandied about since the Oneonta location closed. However, Steinbrecher believes any effort to establish a new physical hall "may not be in the near future."

"We're not going to go willy-nilly and take a bid from a city and say, 'Well, we're going to push this hall here' without thorough investigation and guarantees of sustainability, because we just don't want another failure."

For Huckel, currently president of the board of directors for the National Soccer Coaches Association of America, the first hurdle is addressing the hall's finances.

"It's a museum. It loses money," Huckel declares. "You have to have financial backers to fill that hole. It's a money sink, not a moneymaker.

"None of them make money. None of them. They all have a sugar daddy. Baseball has the Clark Foundation and Jane [Forbes] Clark; she balances the budget with a check. The Basketball Hall of Fame survives because of the City of Springfield, the State of Massachusetts and Mass Mutual Insurance Co. Football balances their budget on the NFL Hall of Fame Game, which they get the rights to."

One seemingly modest funding proposalfloated back during Huckel's time with the hall of famewas that a small percentage of youth soccer registration fees go toward hall operations.

"There are 3 million kids playing soccer through U.S. Youth Soccer," Huckel explains. "What would happen if we got a penny for the hall of fame from each of those kids who registered? That'd be a big chunk of money. But that kind of idea, while put forward, never came to fruition."

Finding a site isn't the problem.

"Most people tend to say we want a domiciled hall of fame," Steinbrecher says. "We want brick and mortar. And we have had inquiries from a plethora of citiesWashington, D.C., Chicago, Springfield, Mass., Rochester, St. Louisall wanting to discuss domiciling the hall of fame. So there's significant interest.

"But there has to be financial backing in order to do that. Every city thinks it's Soccer City USA. But I can guarantee you this: Nothing will be done unless it's financially feasible to maintain and sustain it."

Over the past several weeks, both the baseball and pro football halls of fame celebrated annual induction weekends (even without a living inductee into Cooperstown for the first time since 1965). The National Soccer Hall of Fame also continues to induct new members every year (this week, U.S. Soccer announced that the 2013 ceremony will be held Oct. 11 at Sporting Park in Kansas City, Kan.). And for the honored few, the absence of a structural hall does not detract from the significance of their achievement.

"When you hear hard-ass soccer players break down and cry when you tell them they're being inducted into the Soccer Hall of Fame," Steinbrecher says, "it is very meaningful."

But while those enshrined in Cooperstown are commemorated with a plaque, and those in Canton are immortalized with a bust, soccer hall of famers get a Web page.

Moreover, a sports hall of fame is more than a house of hallows. It is also a focal point, a symbol of the sport's acceptance and endurance. It's where history is not just honored but also bequeathed. Gradually and increasingly, America is rearing more soccer fans and players for life. The question remains, when will they see their inheritance?

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(For more than a decade, there was a Soccer Hall of Fame in New York. What happened? Here's the story.)

Cooperstown or bust

The largest city in Otsego County, N.Y. is Oneonta, situated amid the northern foothills of the Catskill Mountains. While the Susquehanna River forms Oneonta's southern spine, the waterway's source flows from 23 miles north in Cooperstown, Otsego's county seat and, since 1939, home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

In 1977, Oneonta Mayor James Lettis posed a question to Albert Colone, a lifelong Oneonta resident then serving as supervisor of the town's recreation department, during one of their weekly Thursday meetings.

"He had gotten some correspondence from alumni at in-town Hartwick College and Oneonta State wondering if there was such a thing as a National Soccer Hall of Fame," Colone recalls.

In 1950, the same year the U.S. upset mighty England in the World Cup, the Philadelphia Oldtimers Soccer Association, a small group of former professional and amateur players, formed their self-declared National Soccer Hall of Fame. Over the ensuing three years, the Oldtimers inducted 50 people before transferring oversight to the U.S. Soccer Football Association. However, this hall of fame lacked any physical presence or means to provide ongoing honor.

Enamored with Cooperstown's example, Oneonta decided to push forward with a soccer counterpart in 1979. After not receiving any immediate response to their hall of fame bid from U.S. Soccer, by mid-1980, the ad hoc Oneonta Soccer of Fame committee, chaired by Colone, began proclaiming the town home to the National Soccer Hall of Fame. That declaration and the accompanying publicity it generated began fostering a self-fulfilling endeavor.

"As soon as the soccer public became aware of what we were attempting to do, it was remarkable," Colone recalls. "People started sending us stuff... Things started to come in that were absolute treasures to soccer's history."

Soccer organizations and regional soccer halls of fame contributed items. Longtime U.S. soccer historian Sam Foulds donated his formidable archives. When the original NASL disbanded in 1983, former player Howie Charbonneau, then working in the league's front office, passed along the NASL's archives, including hundreds of reels of match footage.

But for Colone, the crown jewel was famed photographer John Albok's invaluable catalog, which includes hundreds of pristine photos of soccer in 1930s New York City as well as rare color film of soccer being played in such places as Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds.

In 1983, Oneonta finally received two essential sanctions: an educational charter from the State of New York and, in August, the official imprimatur of U.S. Soccer.

Located along Ford Avenue in downtown Oneonta, the hall subsisted on donations from visitors, gift shop revenue, state grants, local contributions and entry fees from area soccer tournaments.

"From the day I became involved on a day-to-day basis and for the 19 years that followed, there wasn't a day in our lives at the Soccer Hall of Fame that I would call financially secure," Colone says. "But we stayed alive. Somehow, someway we stayed alive."

The Hall of Fame secured a $4.5 million challenge grant in 1993 for the next phase in its development. However, it couldn't leverage the funds unless matched by public/private sources. In January 1997, the museum temporarily closed its doors due to financial woes. That month, Colone left his post.

"With the prospect of this challenge grant coming down the pike, operating in the red, along with this anticipated growth of the project," Colone says, "there were some philosophical issues that I found myself in a position that was contrary to other members of our organization."

"The Hall of Fame was kind of at a standstill, how it was going to progress," recalls Jack Huckel, then head soccer coach at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "I believe there was a feeling in Oneonta that if we don't do something, then nothing's going to happen. It was a struggling museum then, barely making funding and having visitors in the range of 3,000 or so a year. This was a chance to put it on the map."

In 1998, owners of At-A-Glance, one of the largest manufacturers of time management products located in nearby Sidney, N.Y., became the largest of numerous capital donors to a new 35,000-square-foot National Soccer Hall of Fame museum project, which broke ground in November 1998 on a nearby 61-acre plot.

Less than eight months later, on June 12, 1999, the official grand opening ceremony was held for the new $5.5 million Soccer Hall of Fame museum. Among the dignitaries in attendance were U.S. Soccer Secretary General Hank Steinbrecher, as well as soccer stars Tony Meola, Eric Wynalda and Mary Harvey.

However, one person was conspicuously absent from the occasion: Al Colone. Although he was praised from the podium that day, Colone set foot inside the new Hall of Fame only once over the ensuing decade.

"It wasn't mine anymore," says Colone.

Soccer City RIP

In May 2000, Huckel left Skidmore College to become director of museum and archives at the Soccer Hall of Fame. The high points of his tenure range from simplespeaking to kids about the sportto loftythe annual hall of fame induction ceremonies, always festive, well-attended and emotional events.

But from the start, the hall's finances were uneasy. The Soccer Hall of Fame operated as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and reported yearly expenses averaged around $1.5 million. But lacking steady and sturdy revenue streams, the hall's annual losses gradually grew to $700,000 for both fiscal years 2009 and 2010.

That sort of funding crunch made for some creative curating on Huckel's part. He remembers his first stab at assembling an exhibit was one commemorating the United States' victory in the 1999 Women's World Cup. Huckel contacted Sports Illustrated seeking permission to incorporate their iconic cover image of Brandi Chastain celebrating her game-winning penalty kick. Instead, the magazine demanded a licensing fee of $10,000, "which was more than I had in the budget for the whole dang thing." So, Huckel decided to mount the magazine itself inside the display case, "and keep three more [copies] in the back."

"I think initially Will [Lunn, the hall's president] thought [the hall] could survive as a business," Huckel says. "After a couple of years, I came to understand that it would not and that we needed a more robust plan to drive donation revenue, develop a sugar daddy or create an endowment. For a relatively modest endowmentsomewhere in the range of $10 million and living off the income from thatwe probably could have survived ... That would have kept our doors open."

Steinbrecher boils the hall's financial struggles down to a simpler diagnosis: traffic.

"You can't have a sustainable hall with a staff and everything it takes to keep it up with only 17,000 visitors," says Steinbrecher. "There was a lot of analysis about, 'Well, you're only 15 miles from Cooperstown, why can't you sustain it?' Oneonta is a hard place to get to, it's not a travel destination, and the sustainability of the hall is what ultimately led to its demise."

Grants quickly evaporated as admissions did not match projections and, moreover, those with the resources to bring about long-term financial security for the hall remained unapproached or uninterested.

"I don't question motives. I just see what happened," says Huckel. "What happened was that those involved in soccer who had the deep pockets to do that, for whatever reason, chose not to even though we, in apparently ineffective ways, approached them.

"Lamar Hunt and Phil Anschutz were visitors to the Hall of Fame. I know they had conversations with the president regarding funding. Lamar was a member of the board, so he was well aware of the financial condition of the museum in 2005–06."

For years, people solicited Colone's opinion about the hall's ultimate fate. And for years, he declined public comment.

"But, if I had to say what may have been their demise, I have to say it may have been they forgot why they were in business," the now-68-year-old Colone contends. "Every time I read an article in the local paper after I left, it was either about them raising money or spending money. Very little was written about history or the core principle of the organization."

In February 2010, the Soccer Hall of Fame announced it was permanently shuttering the Oneonta facility. In October, the bulk of the hall's archives was shipped south to North Carolina.

The most distinctive physical feature of the Soccer Hall of Fame building was a giant soccer ball measuring nearly 18 feet across, sculpted so it appeared to be exploding through an exterior wall. The motif served as the backdrop for induction ceremonies and other events.

When Ioxus, a technology manufacturer, purchased the former Hall of Fame facility in 2011, the exploding soccer ball was removed.

During the time the National Soccer Hall of Fame was in operation, the Otsego County Tourism Office was located along Main Street in Oneonta. Their website's domain name? VisitCooperstown.com.