On May 7, 1921, representatives from eight of America’s premier soccer teams met late into the night at Manhattan’s Hotel Astor before embarking on a bold plan to launch a new professional soccer league. Although it had passionate supporters, soccer had not established the same foothold in the United States as it had in most parts of the world. Thomas Cahill, however, believed that was about to change. Called the “father of American soccer,” Cahill had founded the United States Football Association (USFA), which had been recognized by soccer’s international governing body FIFA in 1913, and now he believed that soccer was poised to enter the mainstream of American sports and become the national pastime during baseball’s fall-to-spring offseason.