History
The Chicago Spurs were founded in 1967 and began play in the National Premier Soccer League, with home games at Soldier Field, which at the time had an auto racing track surrounding the field, no seating sections to cut off the northernmost third of the stadium and a soccer pitch positioned exactly between the columns on each side.
Following the 1967 season, the NPSL merged with the United Soccer Association (USA) to form the North American Soccer League (NASL). In order to keep from competing with the Chicago Mustangs of the former USA, the Spurs were forced to relocate. This was unusual because the Spurs already had a full roster of players in place, while the Mustangs had to form a whole new team from scratch. The first choice of destination was Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but Arthur Allyn Jr., the Mustangs' owner, had signed a contract with an exclusivity agreement for his Major League Baseball team, the Chicago White Sox, to play nine home games at Milwaukee County Stadium in the summer of 1968. The Spurs would end up moving to Kansas City, Missouri to become the Kansas City Spurs.
During its one season in the NPSL, the Spurs were coached by Englishman Alan Rogers, who would return to coach many of the same players in Kansas City for the Spurs season in the NASL in 1970.
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“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)