Foosball Blog News

Foosball was first brought to the United States by Lawrence Patterson, an American military man who was stationed in Germany during the 1960s. While there, he fell in love with table soccer and imported coin-operated machines after he came home. As the popularity grew, Patterson helped found some of the first regional tournaments in the late-1960s. However, it was Missoula, Montana, bar-owner and foosball-enthusiast E. Lee Peppard who made foosball a national phenomenon, when he introduced his own custom brand of table, known as the Tournament Soccer table, and used high-stakes tournaments to promote his product.

His first tournament was held in 1972 with a prize purse of $1,500. By 1975, he founded the Quarter-Million Dollar Professional Foosball Tour, a traveling tournament that hit 32 cities across the country, with prizes ranging anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000. As the tournament crisscrossed the country from January until August, some of the winners traveled along, living off the purses they’d score, in the hopes they might be one of the lucky few to compete in the International Tournament Soccer Championships, a $100,000 tournament held on Labor Day Weekend in Denver.

The Championship tournament topped out at an impressive $1,000,000 in 1978, but shortly after, video games like Pac-Man took a sizable bite out of foosball revenue. Some estimates say that before video games, Tournament Soccer sold upwards of 1,000 tables every month; after video games hit, that number dropped to about 100. Unable to sustain the big money tournaments on such slim sales, Tournament Soccer filed for bankruptcy in 1981.

Smaller manufacturers were able to keep the tournament going until 2003, when the Championships moved to Europe and are now regulated by the International Table Soccer Federation. Although the game isn’t as popular as it once was, there are still plenty of high-profile tournaments across the country with thousands of dollars in prize money to be had.

Article Source: http://mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/121823#ixzz1xyEGc500