The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off next month, with eight games played at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. This story is part of Gothamist's ongoing coverage of how local communities are experiencing the games.
The list of Kearny, New Jersey’s soccer achievements could fill an entire night of bar trivia.
Which local team won the country's first three national championships in the mid-1880s? Clark O.N.T.
What year was the town's legendary Scots American Club founded? 1931.
Which Kearny High School star would go on to captain the Men's National Team in 1994, the last time the FIFA World Cup came to the United States? The renowned goalkeeper Tony Meola.
A large framed photograph of Meola and the rest of that year's U.S. team hangs in the Scots American Club's trophy-filled bar room on Patterson Street in Kearny. Playmaking midfielder Tab Ramos and winger John Harkes also stare out from the picture in red-and-white-striped jerseys. They all grew up playing here.
“Three of them from this club were in that team,” beams Alice Duffy, a bartender at the Scots club for the past 25 years and a big-time soccer booster since moving to Kearny from Scotland nearly half a century ago. “They were amazing.”
For Duffy and other Kearny residents, the World Cup's kickoff at New Jersey's MetLife Stadium next month marks a kind of homecoming for American soccer. The sport gained one of its first U.S. footholds over 150 years ago in this industrial Hudson County town of 40,000 on the edge of the swampy Meadowlands.
That legacy has earned Kearny the nickname "Soccer Town USA," a moniker emblazoned on a scarf hanging near the Scots club entrance.
“It’s the cradle of American soccer,” said historian Tom McCabe, a professor at the University of Notre Dame whose documentary details Kearny’s legacy and impact on the sport. "It came with the immigrants and it planted its roots and they've been here since.”
The Scots-American Club on Patterson Street is a hub of Kearny’s rich soccer history.
Those roots stretch back to the 1870s, when Scottish immigrants, drawn by plentiful factory jobs at the hulking Clark Thread Company mills along the Passaic River, joined company teams and formed clubs that played on scrappy fields wedged among the smokestacks — a sporting revolution amid the industrial one taking place in North Jersey.
The new game of “soccer” — a term derived by pulling “soc” out of its more formal name, "association football” —became the sport of choice among Kearny's immigrants, even as other pastimes, like baseball, American football, basketball and rugby flourished elsewhere in the Northeast.
You could always find a game. You could always find a team.
In 1885, a U.S. national team played its first-ever international match near what is now the border of Kearny and neighboring East Newark. The site of the field is now a parking lot for the beloved Tops Diner. The old factories across the street are being converted into riverfront apartments.
Kearny later produced the first president of the original soccer governing body in the United States and multiple national team players. The town fielded more mid-20th century champions, including the Scots, who won five straight titles in the 1930s and 1940s.
Through the decades, the sport remained popular in Kearny and other nearby towns, like neighboring Harrison — a longtime rival.
“Kearny has been constant,” McCabe said. “There's no ruptures or disconnections. It was always there. You could always find a game. You could always find a team.”
Same streets where legends walked
Duffy never lost her native Glaswegian accent. On a warm April afternoon, she scrubbed the wooden bar and cleaned glasses at the Scots-American Club about an hour before the first rush of members arrived for a beer. Every inch of the walls is covered in historic photos, plaques and jerseys, providing comfort for regulars and curiosity for visitors.
She described one out-of-towner who recently visited the club after hearing for years about his great-grandfather’s playing days.
“ I was in here cleaning up,” Duffy said. “He goes, ‘I'm flying to California, going home, but my flight’s been delayed. I figured I’d come out the airport and I see a sign for Kearny.’”
Duffy said she had recently received photos of Scots club players from the 1930s from the local library, and he spotted his great-grandfather in the images.
“ He burst out crying,” she recalled. “I go, ‘Are you OK?’ He says, ‘I've never seen him playing. I can't believe it.’”
A scarf near the entrance to the Scots-American Club bears Kearny’s nickname, “Soccer Town USA”
Nearly a century after those photos were taken, soccer still unites generations of Kearny residents, even as the town’s demographics have changed. U.S. Census data shows the majority of Kearny residents are now Hispanic.
Gone are the Scottish fish and chips shops. Today, a Brazilian hamburger joint, a Peruvian restaurant and a Colombian bar surround the Soccer Post, a shop selling bags, balls and boots — also known as cleats outside the United Kingdom and this corner of North Jersey — on Kearny Avenue, the town’s main thoroughfare.
Cristian Escandon, 21, works at the Soccer Post and also coaches in the town’s vaunted youth program.
He said his own Kearny soccer story traces back over a decade ago, when, at 9, he and his family moved to town from Cuenca, Ecuador.
A few years later, he and his older brother Jose played at Kearny High School, just like Meola and Harkes. His brother won a state championship with the school in 2017, later earning state Player of the Year honors from NJ.com.
We wear it like a badge of honor.
Escandon was a ballboy for that title-winning team and four years later won a state championship of his own after a dramatic come-from-behind victory in the 2021 tournament semifinals.
He said the town’s soccer culture is unlike anything he has encountered elsewhere, and that he now regales younger players with tales of Kearny’s traveling fan army and the intense, winner-stays-on asphalt pickup games that older generations recounted to him.
“I talk the same way they talked to me about Kearny,” Escandon said.
He recited the local stars’ names from the 1994 national team — Meola, Ramos and Harkes.
“I'm walking in the same streets that they used to walk years back,” Escandon said. “Kearny is just different."
‘Rough and tumble’
Today, as in decades past, kids and adults still pack local fields, mostly refurbished since their days as roughshod patches of torn-up grass where players kicked up dust as they dribbled.
But the surroundings still retain their grittiness. Gunnel Oval, a multisport complex, sits on the banks of the Hackensack River, down a hill from a row of autobody shops. The patch of turf at Harvey Field is surrounded by trucking depots, industrial warehouses and mountains of rock and construction debris from the nearby stone and recycling facilities.
Kearny’s Harvey Field is located in an industrial area and surrounded by mountains of stone.
It’s a far cry from the glass-encrusted Manhattan skyscrapers visibly shimmering in the distance and the wealthier suburbs of Essex and Bergen counties a short drive away.
“It has a kind of rough-and-tumble aspect to it,” said Michael Mara, a Kearny soccer lifer who opened the Soccer Post in 2022 and also leads the town’s youth program. “It's quite funny when you're playing teams from ritzier areas and they come down to Kearny and there’s a scrap metal yard back here.”
“We love that. We wear it like a badge of honor,” he added.
It’s a testament to Kearny’s no-frills soccer culture, and a kind of Jersey toughness, embodied by the Garden State’s ongoing fight with FIFA over tournament planning and payments for transportation to and from MetLife Stadium on eight match days, including the final on July 19. And, even though no games are taking place in New York, Jersey residents have still had to fight for recognition after getting second-billing to the Empire State in World Cup promotional materials. FIFA has insisted on calling the venue New York New Jersey Stadium.
Kearny soccer has remained a key part of Mara’s life, even if he took a meandering path to the center of the city’s modern-day scene. After graduating from Fordham University, Mara, now 46, began a career on Wall Street. But he said he ditched the finance gig in 2020, weeks before the pandemic lockdown, to spend more time with his two sons and build a career around soccer.
Cristian Escandon (left) and Michael Mara (right) inside Mara’s shop Soccer Post on Kearny Avenue. Mara also runs the town’s vaunted youth program, where Escandon coaches.
In 2022, he opened the Soccer Post, where Escandon works, and took over the youth program, Thistle FC for boys and Paisley Athletic for girls, following in the footsteps of his father, who co-founded and led the club.
He was 14 during the last World Cup on U.S. soil, where he saw his own Kearny soccer idols take the field. He said he hopes the current generation of players can have the same experience — though this year’s team won’t include Kearny stars.
“It can be life-changing when the kids are seeing it, feeling it,” Mara said. “It leaves a lasting impact.”
