Southampton’s links with football in the United States are not always obvious. They do not sit neatly in the club’s most familiar stories. They are not part of the 1976 FA Cup final, the academy golden generation, or the Premier League years at St Mary’s.

But they are there.

Hidden among the records of old North American Soccer League squads, beneath the glamour names and the nostalgia of the era, you find Southampton men. Not always the headline acts. Not always the players who filled scrapbooks back home. But proper footballers, shaped by The Dell, who crossed the Atlantic and became part of America’s early attempt to make soccer matter.

Two names deserve a little more light: Bill Beaney and Manny Andruszewski.

Their stories are not identical, but they belong together. Both were connected to Southampton. Both experienced the English game before taking their trade overseas. Both played a part, however modest or overlooked, in the rough, ambitious and sometimes chaotic rise of professional soccer in North America.

Bill Beaney’s story begins close to home. Born in Southampton, he was one of those players whose connection to the club was more than contractual. For a local lad, getting anywhere near the first team at The Dell was an achievement in itself. He made only a handful of senior appearances for Saints, but that does not make his story insignificant.

In football, a career does not need to be long to be interesting.

Beaney’s path eventually led him to the Washington Diplomats, a club that would become one of the more recognisable names of the old NASL. This was the mid-1970s, a period when American soccer was still trying to work out what it wanted to be. The league was colourful, ambitious and often eccentric. It wanted spectacle. It wanted credibility. It wanted experienced professionals who could help turn curiosity into a proper football culture.

Beaney was part of that world.

For Southampton supporters, there is something quietly fascinating about that journey. A player from the city, developed in the English game, ending up in Washington at a time when soccer in America was still trying to find its voice. He was not there as a global superstar. He was there as a working footballer, and working footballers were essential to that league.

The NASL is often remembered through its most famous names. Pelé. Beckenbauer. Cruyff. Best. The stars gave the league its shine. But leagues are not built on stars alone. They are built on squads, professionals, defenders, midfielders, local favourites, imported experience and the week-to-week grind of actually playing the games.

That is where players like Beaney mattered.

Then there is Manny Andruszewski, whose Southampton career was far more substantial.

Eastleigh-born and Southampton-developed, Andruszewski made 100 first-team appearances for Saints. He was not a showman. He was not the type to dominate highlight reels. He was a defender, and more specifically, the sort of defender who could be trusted with a difficult job.

His reputation at Southampton was built around discipline, strength and concentration. He was known as a man-marker, the kind of player you used when a dangerous opponent needed to be followed, frustrated and, ideally, removed from the game as a serious threat.

That sort of player travels well.

In 1979, Andruszewski joined the Tampa Bay Rowdies, one of the great clubs of the old NASL. If Washington gives Saints one American connection, Tampa Bay gives them another. The Rowdies were not a minor outpost. They had colour, noise, identity and a proper place in American soccer folklore. They were one of the clubs that gave the NASL its character.

Andruszewski arrived in a season that took Tampa Bay all the way to Soccer Bowl ’79, the NASL’s showpiece final. That placed a Southampton-developed player right inside one of the biggest occasions in American soccer at the time.

It is easy to underestimate that now. Modern American soccer has MLS stadiums, international stars, television deals, academies, supporters’ groups and a World Cup on the horizon. But in the NASL period, the sport was still fighting for permanence. It was trying to prove it could draw crowds, create heroes and survive in a crowded American sporting landscape.

Players like Andruszewski were part of that fight.

His American story did not end with Tampa Bay. He later played for the Houston Dynamos and also moved into the indoor game with the Dallas Sidekicks. That matters because indoor soccer was another important part of the American experiment. It was faster, louder, more compressed and more obviously tailored to American sporting tastes. It was football, but not quite as English eyes knew it.

For a former Southampton defender to move through those different forms of the game says a lot about the adaptability of players of that era. They were not protected by modern contracts, entourages or carefully managed career paths. They went where the football was. They adapted. They got on with it.

That is why Beaney and Andruszewski deserve to be remembered in this wider story.

They were not simply former Saints who happened to play abroad. They were part of a generation of British footballers who helped give American soccer some of its early foundations. They brought habits from the English game: toughness, positional discipline, professionalism, and an understanding of what football demanded over a long season.

They also show that Southampton’s contribution to the American game was broader than one or two famous names. The club’s links with the USA were not only about Bobby Stokes and Jim Steele at Washington, Alan Ball in the NASL, Kasey Keller coming the other way, or Bradley Wright-Phillips later becoming an MLS great.

There were other threads.

Beaney and Andruszewski are two of them.

One was a Southampton-born player who carried a local connection into Washington. The other was an Eastleigh-born defender who took his Saints education to Tampa Bay, Houston and Dallas. Neither story is loud. Neither story is usually placed near the front of the Southampton history books.

But football history is richer when the quieter names are brought back into view.

The American game was not built overnight. It was built in stages, through experiments, failures, big crowds, empty seats, outdoor leagues, indoor leagues, imported stars, local talent and professionals willing to take the game into places where it was still trying to belong.

Among those professionals were men with Southampton connections.

Bill Beaney and Manny Andruszewski may not have transformed soccer in the United States, but they were there when the sport was still trying to grow roots. They played their part in a football world that was uncertain, ambitious and full of possibility.

And that makes them part of the story.

Not the headline, perhaps.

But definitely part of the bridge between Southampton and soccer in America.