Introduction: An American Time Capsule – Retrospection and Reflexivity Regarding Soccer in the United States

Foreign, ethnic, immigrant, feminine, youth, and un-American. These are some of the predominant associations used in the United States to describe, understand, and position soccer within American culture. This edited volume endeavors to illustrate how and when these associations have been deployed, inculcated, and challenged through the pages of the world’s only journal devoted exclusively to the sport (i.e., Soccer & Society ). There are certainly other outlets, books and relevant academic journals, that have included similar content, but the focus of this effort is to explore the corpus of work that has appeared over the past 25 years in the interdisciplinary journal that has chronicled the various codes of football/soccer exclusively, continuously, and globally.