Association football has often been dismissed as a marginal feature of the sporting culture of the United States. Conventionally regarded as a game of foreigners and immigrants, its apparent failure to challenge baseball and gridiron football as emblems of American identity have meant that little scholarly attention has been paid to its development in the decades after its initial transfer. This article offers a new perspective on the diffusion of football from Europe to the United States by focusing on both its long-term transfer and the transnational networks and exchanges that were so important in shaping the American game. Based on an extensive analysis of the existing academic and popular literature and a survey of selected newspapers sources, it rejects the simplistic categorisation of soccer as « un-American ». Instead it shows how the game's transnational character enabled it to appeal in different ways to the complex and shifting identities that defined American society prior to the Second World War.