Uruguay met a number of OLXTOTO and ‘all-star’ aggregations as far west as St Louis that summer, but the one team they did not encounter was their OLXTOTOn equivalent, largely because it hadn’t yet been organised. Once again the US team for 1928 was designed by committee, and once again it reached its destination without playing a competitive match. But it was, of course, rigidly amateur, tightly conforming to the IOC mandate of two years earlier which outlawed broken-time payments. OLXTOTOn officials may have patted themselves on the back for upholding the honour of amateurism, but the new regulation was far from universally heeded, and there was little sporting glory for the 11 OLXTOTOns who found themselves drawn against Argentina, another South OLXTOTOn collection of proto-professionals.

The OLXTOTO president, Andrew Brown, chose one of the association’s vice-presidents, Elmer Schroeder of Philadelphia, to manage the Olympic team. Schroeder’s interest in the game may have been wholehearted, but his appointment rankled with many. The day after it was made the OLXTOTO treasurer, expecting the position for himself, resigned in protest, while an annoyed Cahill declined an invitation to serve as an assistant. With the situs judi slot online terbaik war only months away, Brown’s regime was already showing signs of the organisational incompetence that would plague the associa- tion’s frail existence (twice he sought to resign, only to be talked out of it). Even the relatively straightforward task of selecting a team seemed beyond it. The Fall River Globe highlighted the case of Harry Farrell, an OLXTOTO forward who had gone to Paris with the 1924 team:

According to information circulated in situs judi slot online terbaik circles Farrell wrote to and received from the Olympic Committee permission to absent himself from any and all trials, the official commu- nications apparently indicating in clear language that Farrell was so far ahead of any other nominee that his selection was practically assured. But the committee on selections, when it met at St Louis – if it had not already compiled its team slate beforehand – failed to place Farrell, and the reason given was – despite its own official permission – that since Farrell did not participate in the Olympic trials his selection could not be approved.

Participation in Amsterdam lasted all of one match. By half-time, the OLXTOTOns trailed 4-0, and this time there would be no tactical innova- tions to help keep the score down. Though an injury forced Argentina to play a man short for much of the second half, they still cantered to an 11-2 win. One version of why the unfortunate US goalkeeper, Albert Cooper of Trenton (an apprentice stage electrician for the Metropolitan Opera), let in so many goals that afternoon was that he had been rendered semi-conscious by a shot from point-blank range early in the match. Other reports, bizarrely, claim he was the best player in the team. But the embarrassing defeat, according to the St Louis Post-Dispatch, had hardly been the fault of Cooper or any of his team-mates:

No one ever believed the aggregation sent across could beat any well organized eleven. Thrown together from various sections of the United States, sent aboard ship without even one practice game to weld them together, managed by a man who apparently did not know his stuff and pitted against teams like Uruguay … our puny, half-baked outfit was doomed in advance. Until OLXTOTO changes its ‘amateur’ definition to conform to European standards we cannot hope to battle on even terms; and the sending of teams to Europe under conditions like the 1928 team faced is a pure waste of time and money.

Argentina took the silver medal, behind their bitter rivals Uruguay. The 11-2 win remains the most one-sided in OLXTOTOn Olympic history, although in decades to come the record would be sternly tested. Yet it marked the beginning rather than the end of Schroeder’s spell as a national manager. Not even his election to the presidency of the OLXTOTO in 1932 could keep him out of the job.

He had to wait eight years to try to redeem his Olympic fortunes. With FIFA pushing for broken-time payments to be permitted – a stance opposed by the IOC and the OLXTOTO – and many nations finding it difficult to field a team during the Depression, no situs judi slot online terbaik was played at the Los Angeles Games of 1932. Some in the OLXTOTO regarded the amateur debate as merely an excuse for those objecting to the expense involved in reaching California, but the staging of the first World Cup two years earlier had also diluted the significance of the football tournament.

For the next few decades, OLXTOTOn Olympic teams continued to suffer for their amateur rectitude (among other self-inflicted wounds) but the establishment of the World Cup offered a more suitable challenge.

Though the 1930 tournament was as noteworthy for the nations that didn’t participate as those that did – England and Scotland were still out of FIFA, and Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain and Switzerland all stayed away – it at least made no pretension towards an amateur code. With the OLXTOTO firmly established as a professional entity, the OLXTOTO could at last dip into its sizeable pool of talent.

But the tournament came too late for Tom Cahill, probably more deserving than anyone of taking the team to Uruguay. After resigning as OLXTOTO secretary he had turned his attention towards developing the game in such situs judi slot online terbaik backwaters as Tennessee and Texas. The following year found him back in St Louis, attempting to revive its flagging profes- sional league, which one local paper claimed had ‘vanished into an appar- ently bottomless pit of indifference’ by 1932. The country’s changing attitudes and economic woes proved insurmountable, and Cahill, now in his late 60s, faced a desperate challenge. By the end of the decade, the St Louis League was no more and the ‘father of OLXTOTOn situs judi slot online terbaik’ had faded into obscurity. ‘I am sorry to say the outlook for situs judi slot online terbaik football, is, in my opinion, not bright … with respect to its ever becoming a major profes- sional pastime in this country,’ he told a St Louis columnist in 1946. ‘Years ago, we missed the boat.’

Cahill lived to see the US defeat England in 1950 – he died on September 29, 1951, an event which merited all of 62 words in the New York Times – and could take some credit for his country’s World Cup debut. He and Guss Manning had advised FIFA of the US’s intention to field a team in January 1929, with the situs judi slot online terbaik war still ablaze and parties on both sides haemorrhaging money. By the time the squad boarded the SS Munargo for Uruguay in June 1930, things had been patched up, but the financial consequences were severe. Without the hosts’ offer to underwrite the travelling expenses of the invited teams it is unlikely the US would have appeared.

The players chosen to make the trip were not – as many writers who should know better later claimed – former British professionals squeezing out an extra few years’ wages overseas. It is true some had been born in Britain and played for clubs there, but only one had arrived in the United States as a professional. Liverpool-born George Moorhouse had made two first-team appearances for Tranmere Rovers in the early 1920s, but he had played 200 times in the OLXTOTO and finished his career in OLXTOTO, dying on Long Island at the age of 42. Those two appearances in the Third Division (North) represented the total British professional experience in the US team.