U.S. Soccer is not your typical business.
It has no profit motive. There are no shareholders to report to.
Its president is a volunteer.
American soccer’s governing body exists by statute. Its mission? Serve its members. The goals? They are entirely left up to the membership to decide.
U.S. Soccer was founded as the U.S. Football Association in 1913.
It existed as an overseer of the ethnic game for decades. In the post-World War II period, the U.S. Soccer Football Association operated on a shoestring budget out of New York’s Empire State Building.
The man in charge was Irish-born Joe Barriskall, its secretary general. A linen salesman by trade, Barriskall earned money on the side as a ticket usher at Yankee Stadium. He ran the federation for almost four decades, well into his 80s.
Circumstances – the start of pro soccer and the youth soccer boom that followed – thrust the USSFA, later shortened to USSF, into the modern era.
When Werner Fricker was elected USSF president in 1984, soccer was in a down cycle. The NASL was about to collapse, and the USSF was insolvent, the consequence of a misguided bid to host the 1986 World Cup.
Fricker made the USSF a business. He also gave it a focus it never had.
The United States would bid for – and get – the 1994 World Cup. It would operate a comprehensive national team program that qualified for every FIFA world championship after the 1986 World Cup until Fricker’s defeat in 1990.
Many criticized the power Fricker had, but he simply filled a leadership void in the USSF.
If the measure of greatness is what he accomplished with what he had to work with, Werner Fricker goes down as the greatest leader in the history of American soccer.