It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

Hi, I'm Sienna-Greeves.

It's standing room only at the Globe Pub in Irving Park.

On this summer morning, spirited fans are watching England take on Slovakia in the

European Cup. In Chicago, soccer's popularity doesn't quite compare to that of sports like football

and baseball or professional teams bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Soccer fan Gerald Joyce asked Curious City... I heard that before World War I that soccer was more popular in many of the large northern

cities but died out at the end of World War I. Was this the case in Chicago?

Soccer once rivaled the popularity of baseball. At its height, the working-class game with

immigrant roots had spawned multiple leagues and tournaments.

Around the 1840s, when early British migrants arrived in Chicago looking for work, they brought soccer with them.

Probably for the first 20 years of the game, it was mostly British players and Chicago-born players.

Dr. Gabe Logan is a professor of history at Northern Michigan University and has spent

decades researching the history of soccer in Chicago and the Midwest.

Logan says as waves of new immigrants arrived from across Europe, the game grew.

Soccer strengthened old cultural bonds while creating new connections.

The U.S. soccer in general and Chicago soccer had a golden age of its own in the 1920s.

During that period, America's working class reaped the benefits of prior decades of transformational labor actions,

like shorter work days that allowed working class folk more time for leisure activities.

Industrial bosses took notice and capitalized on that.

We see several of the major industries that are sponsoring teams.

At the same time, we're seeing the state unions sponsoring, and the ubiquity of the ethnic clubs.

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