While details remain frustratingly scant, the story of the first professional soccer league in the United States, the American League of Professional Football (ALPF) in 1894, is generally known: Interested in creating a way to promote soccer in otherwise unused stadiums during baseball’s offseason, a group of National League owners created a professional soccer league with teams from Boston, New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The league proved to be a spectacular failure, lasting only two weeks before team owners decided to pull the plug in the face of generally poor attendance.
In recent years, many immigrants of the world’s diaspora have settled in Philadelphia and playing soccer is a one of many sporting activities in the city. You probably have not heard about the Diaspora World Cup in the area and that is about to change with the venue of the Diaspora World Cup. It brings together the world diaspora of over 200 countries in the Philadelphia area to build of coalition to committed soccer players, colleges and universities students to solve the world most pressing challenge: Illiteracy.