By Dina Goldman with Ethan Zohn
This June, 32 years after the United States last hosted the FIFA World Cup, the tournament returns with 16 host cities, 48 nations, billions of eyes on the game. For most Americans, it will be a spectacle of flags and jerseys and heroic goals. But many may not realize that for the Jewish community, soccer has been more than a sport, it has been a major source of pride.
To understand what Jewish soccer once was, and what it might yet become, you have to go back to Vienna, 1909. That year, a group of Zionist activists founded HaKoah Vienna. HaKoah is Hebrew for “the strength,” and functioned as a rebuke to the common antisemitic stereotype of Jewish physical inferiority. Inspired by philosopher Max Nordau’s concept of Muskeljudentum (Muscular Judaism), the club set out to build a new kind of Jewish identity, one forged through athletic excellence.
From Vienna to Exile
By the 1920s, HaKoah swelled to 5,000 members, making it the largest athletic club in Austria. Its teams drew Jewish stars from across Europe and became a source of fierce communal pride. In 1925, HaKoah’s soccer club won the Austrian national championship outright. Two years earlier, they had shocked the soccer world by traveling to London and defeating West Ham United at Upton Park, the first time any continental club had beaten an English team on their home soil.
But these were not just games. Away from home, HaKoah players faced violent antisemitic hostility, even having their field lit aflame. Players like Béla Guttman (who would later become one of the greatest managers in soccer history) wore the Star of David on their chests as an assertion of dignity, not just identity. One former HaKoah waterpolo player, the writer Friedrich Torberg, later captured what the club meant to him: “It was HaKoah that taught me the first concepts of Jewish sports, of Jewish attitude, and perhaps of ‘Jewishness’ itself.”
What took years to build was dismantled in weeks. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, HaKoah was shut down almost immediately. The Gestapo seized its Prater Park stadium. The German Football Association nullified the club's records. Its assets were confiscated for the Reich. At least seven Hakoah soccer players were murdered in the Holocaust, including former captain Max Scheuer, who was killed at Auschwitz. The golden age of Jewish club football in Europe was over and erased with terrifying speed.
But the flame never went out entirely. Jewish soccer players and coaches scattered across the globe carried their knowledge with them. Béla Guttmann resurfaced in Brazil and Portugal. Former Hakoah players in New York briefly formed a club under the old name. And in the newly founded State of Israel after 1948, football took root as a national passion, as a game for a people who had survived and were determined to rebuild.
The Goal Heard Across Israel
In the decades that followed, Israeli football did more than survive, it became part of the fabric of national life. Through wars and ceasefires, through waves of immigration and periods of relative peace, the league kept playing. Clubs like Maccabi Haifa, Hapoel Tel Aviv, and Maccabi Netanya became civic institutions, their stadiums one of the few places where political noise could briefly give way to simple communal enjoyment. Soccer brought Israelis together in a way that little else could.
It was out of Maccabi Netanya that Mordechai Spiegler emerged. In 1970, at the World Cup in Mexico, he became the first and only Israeli to score at a FIFA World Cup – the lone goal in a nation's entire tournament history, scored by a man who would go on to finish second on Israel's all-time scoring list with 32 goals in 83 appearances for the national team. His performance caught the attention of the soccer world, and not long after, he was brought to New York to play for the Cosmos alongside Pelé, one of the greatest players who ever lived.
But when Spiegler talks, what he returns to again and again is his family. On a Whatsapp video call, he proudly shows off his living room, where “you will see no World Cup, only [his] parents.” He credits his success to the family environment he grew up in, where he watched his father fleeing through antisemitic Europe. After all, as he says, “How hard can it be to dribble and score if my father had to escape with his life?” For Jewish people, soccer is often a rare opportunity to just be together in community, to work as a team towards a goal other than just survival.
Israel has not been able to qualify for the World Cup since 1970 but the tradition Spiegler carried did not end with him. Israeli and Jewish players and coaches are competing at all levels of the game worldwide, from lower leagues in England and Germany to Serie A and Major League Soccer. Beyond playing in the secular world, Jewish soccer also takes a spotlight every 4 years in the Maccabi Games, where Jewish players of all ages from around the world come to compete in Israel to celebrate the game and their connection to the Jewish faith.
Playing for Something Bigger
One of those players, Ethan Zohn, a Jewish-American professional soccer player turned global health advocate, has taken that spirit to a new project. Zohn co-founded Grassroot Soccer to teach young people life skills and mental health tools through the game. This summer, he is bringing it to American soil for the first time. Timed to coincide with the World Cup and Mental Health Awareness Month, youth organizations, tribal communities, and Boys & Girls clubs will be trained in Grassroot’s signature MindSKILLZ curriculum. This provides American youth with both a built-in community and an emotional toolkit to help cope with life’s challenges.
There is an undeniable throughline from the beginnings of Jewish soccer over a century ago to Zohn’s work today. HaKoah's founders believed that the field could reshape what it meant to be Jewish in a hostile world – that physical dignity was inseparable from human dignity. Spiegler carried that belief forward, finding in the game a way to bring family and community to the forefront. And now Zohn, working on a different scale and toward different ends, is betting that soccer still has that power: to walk into a community burdened by hardship and hand young people something they can use.
The World Cup will come and go. The stadiums will empty and the flags will come down. But the coaches will still be on those fields in Seattle and Miami and Colorado, running drills that are really lessons, asking kids to work together toward something larger than themselves. HaKoah would have recognized the idea immediately.