AN AMERICAN GAME

32 Episodes

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The American College Game

2026-11-0430:28

The leaves are falling, and the tension is rising across college soccer. Conference rankings are being finalized and post-season slots filled, with the ultimate prize a trip to the NCAA tournament. But a few developments in the college game have made the Division I field more uneven in new and sometimes-troubling ways. Are NIL, free transfers, corporate sponsors, and international recruiting hurting the college game? Or just making it more of what it always, kind of, has been? Man...

Blame Harvard (feed drop from AMERICAN FUTBOL)

2026-10-2129:59

Last spring, we were asked to explain why Harvard sucks. Okay, that's not quite the whole story: we recorded an episode about the origins of US soccer--and Harvard's place in it--with Fernanda Echavarri for Futuro Studios' series American Futbol. If you're not familiar with their work, Futuro Studios has won a Pulitzer Prize, which is very much like us being the 2nd best Soccer History podcast on Feedspot and top 10 on Million Podcasts. With all the other soccer content flying aro...

Shakedown, 1928: Inside the 15th Annual Meeting of the USFA

2026-10-0749:16

Are you ready for some impressions?! Tom got his hands on a rare transcript of a meeting of the leaders of US soccer from almost 100 years ago, and like any good historian, he took out his phone and photographed all 168 pages. And then, like any good screenwriter, Kirk said, "Hey, let's try to act some of it out." The USFA conference on June 30, 1928 is a snapshot of the mostly-forgotten era when US soccer was on the rise--and on the verge of being a world power. The battles and rivalries bet...

Football in Fall River feat. Pitbull (actually Rory Bryce of The Football Heritage)

2026-09-2348:06

Tom and Kirk have their first guest! Or, depending on how you look at it, their guest has guests. We sat with Rory Bryce of The Football Heritage, an ambitious independent project based in Scotland which explores the roots, culture and history of the game. And we talked about Fall River, Massachusetts, one of our favorite soccertowns--a lens through which we can see not just the earliest history of US soccer but also where the game is today. It's classic AAG stuff but with a Glasgow accent th...

The Pochettino Problem

2026-09-1618:43

Honestly, Mauricio seems like a nice guy, and he's a very talented coach, but he has a lot of very confident opinions about what it takes to win for someone whose only won one thing in his career--a Coupe de France with a loaded PSG squad that was supposed to win Champions League. That didn't stop US Soccer from falling over itself to renew his deal as USMNT coach. Historically, US Soccer can't resist a coach with an accent. Now, we don't think a US national team coach has to be American-born...

#box-pro-ellipsis-179435445814780{-webkit-line-clamp:2;}AN AMERICAN GAME