Beyond the Field: How Soccer Built Community in the United StatesBy Bunk, Brian D. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2025. 213 pp. $24.95 (paperback). ISBN: 978‐0‐25‐204826‐5

According to Brian Bunk, the story of the early days of soccer in the United States is a story about the nation itself. Namely, a “people if diverse backgrounds uniting around the idea of companionship, fair play and equal opportunity” (3). In a title that evokes C.L.R James' treatment of cricket, Bunk shows how marginal communities used soccer to find belonging in the United States. In a collection of stand-alone chapters, or essays as Bunk calls them, Beyond the Field tracks the development of soccer from Rhode Island in the east to Hawai’i in the west. The point is that soccer was not located in one region or played among one group but was played by many groups across the United States. From the outset, Bunk is clear that Beyond the Field is a cultural history about community creation more than a chronicle of historic firsts. Using local newspapers from the dozens of cities in the study, Bunk details the creation of teams and leagues from the late nineteenth century up to World War I. Scholars of soccer in Argentina or Brazil will recognize the narrative in Beyond the Field. Immigrants come to a city looking for work and join or create a soccer club for community. These clubs then serve as mutual aid societies, helping new members find work, raising funds when one is injured, and so on. Finally, these immigrant teams form leagues with other clubs in the area and region to have opponents to play against. Bunk shows in Beyond the Field that this process was happening across the United States at the same time it was happening in South and Central America. While immigrants, and Scottish immigrants in particular, represent the largest group Bunk studies, they are by no means the only group represented. Bunk includes chapters on the first African American athletes in Rhode Island and blue-collar workers in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the 1870s. Teams of permanent bachelors, homosexual communities, and organized games in Miami, Florida, in the early 1900s. A retired wagon-train master in Denver, Colorado, brought the first football for people to kick around in the mid-to-late 1800s. Finally, in Hawai’i, a team from the United Kingdom played against a team made up of players from the Philippines and China in the late 1800s. Bunk argued convincingly that soccer provided opportunities for community formation for all elements of society. One of the standout stories was the history of a team with an unusual name, the Alameda Vampires. The team appeared in local papers in 1897, the same year Bram Stoker's Dracula was published in England and 2 years before it was published in the United States. In the chapter, Bunk hypothesizes the origins of an unusual name for a team. While he does not come to a definitive conclusion, there were close ties between the United States and the United Kingdom even in communities that were on the other side of the world. One of Bunk's standard themes throughout the book is that at the turn of the century, soccer enjoyed just as much popularity in the United States as did American football. The issue was that the sport was often sustained by immigrant communities, especially from the United Kingdom. Again, historians of soccer will recognize this pattern from the popularization of soccer in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, etc. Unfortunately, as Bunk shows in various examples, World War I disrupts those immigrant communities, and the American public shifts its focus to American football. However, soccer continued to thrive in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, whose communities experienced the same disruption. But such a comparison is beyond the scope of Beyond the Field. A critique of the book is that each chapter is fairly brief. In his effort to show that soccer was practiced across all U.S. territories, he spends a few pages on each city. A reason for this is the fact that the book was a project undertaken during COVID-19 when travel was limited. As such, the book should be read more as an introduction to the communities and cities rather than an exhaustive study. While the short chapters might disappoint those hoping for in-depth analysis of a place or group, they make Beyond the Field a good book to assign to students. I would recommend the book to students interested in sport history but also as an introduction to immigration history in the United States at the turn of the century. Bunk's inclusion of the sources he used at the end of each chapter is helpful for students and scholars who would like to learn more about a particular group or region. All in all, Beyond the Field does advance the historiography of sport in the United States by showing the sport's popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century. This claim is well supported by the variety of cities studied. Bunk's other claim, that soccer demonstrates the American Dream in action, is more tenuous. On one hand, he shows how soccer brought together immigrants from many countries of origin coming together in fair competition and helped them adapt. But when World War I disrupted those communities, soccer's popularity was eclipsed by American football. American soccer fans would have to wait until the 1990s for a professional league like the National Football League. The strength of the book lies in its scope, as Bunk includes communities across the United States. Those interested in the history of sport, identity and identity formation, immigration, and U.S. history will certainly find something that interests them in Beyond the Field.