The oldest American team
Posted on November 19, 2012 1:12 am
Who is the oldest still-operating soccer club in the United States?
I used to be sure that I knew the answer to that question. I thought it was the Kearny Scots, the earliest mention of whom that I’ve seen is in 1895. Then I learned that the Kearny Scots who were among the founding members of the National Association Foot Ball League in 1895 were not really the same team as the Kearny Scots who won five straight American Soccer League titles around 1940 and who still exist today as an amateur team. That original Scots team folded in 1919, and the current one was founded in 1931.
Of course, 1931 is quite a long while ago, too, enough to make the Scots still a good contender for that “oldest still-operating” title, but I know of four older ones. The oldest of those is the Beadling Soccer Club of Bridgeville, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh. The Beadling club was founded in 1898 and played for decades in excellent Pittsburgh-area leagues. It has always been an amateur club, and it won the National Amateur Cup in 1954, beating Simpkins of St.Lous in the final. It also has done well in the U.S. Open Cup, reaching the quarterfinals four times and the semifinals once. Today, it operates a series of youth teams in various age groups along with its senior team.
The other three are Hoboken FC of Hoboken, N.J., founded in 1912; Gremio Lusitano of Ludlow, Mass., founded in 1922, and Croatian Eagles of Milwaukee, founded in 1922 (I didn’t know about Hoboken or Croatian Eagles before Big Soccer poster Chris Edgemon wrote about them last year).
Of course, there were many soccer teams in America before 1898, hundreds of them, but none of them have come close to lasting until 2012 that I know of. Many of the earliest, going back as far as 1866, were organized just for the day or for a few games. The first one that seems to have been organized on something of a continuing basis was at Princeton College, which played its first game in 1867 against the Princeton Theological Seminary and then played at least one game in each of the following nine years. There were association football teams in the late 1860s and early 1870s at several colleges that play soccer today, but those teams are not continuous. Those colleges, such as Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Rutgers and a few others, mostly abandoned soccer in 1876 and didn’t resume playing it until decades later (the oldest of the revived teams in Haverford’s, founded in 1905).
After the colleges faded out of the picture, the first two club teams to be organized on a continuing basis were the East Ends of Fall River, Mass., and the Hibernians of St. Louis, and which one of them came before the other is not completely clear, at least not to me. The East Ends apparently were formed in 1880 by members of the Fall River East End Cricket Club, but there are no records of games played by the East Ends before April 1883. Meanwhile, the Hibernians were founded in 1881, and the first recorded game played by them is in November 1881. Both the East Ends and the Hibernians were disbanded in 1891.
I haven’t mentioned the Oneida Football Club of Boston, who played from 1862 to 1864 and have sometimes been called the first soccer team in America. Research in recent years has indicated that the game they were playing, called the Boston Rules Games, was so much like rugby that it’s incorrect to consider it an early form of soccer. Nevertheless, the Oneidas were the first team in the United States in any form of football to be organized on a continuing basis.
But back to the original question. For now, I think that the oldest still-operating soccer club in the United States is Beadling. However, considering that I once before thought that I knew the answer to that question and later found that I was wrong, I’m open to suggestion. If there is another club out there that beats Beadling, it would be by only a few years, however.
Love your blog, thanks for the history lessons. Is there a place where you get most of your info?
The place where I get most of my information these days is the spare bedroom of my house. I’ve built up a pretty good reference library on American soccer history in the course of 30+ years of studying that subject and writing four books about it.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years looking at newspapers on microfilm in libraries (my favorite is the NJ State Library in Trenton). At one time, found a lot of information in the archives of the National Soccer Hall of Fame, but I haven’t seen those archives since they were moved from Oneonta to a warehouse in North Carolina in October 2010.
A good read Roger. Pullman here in Chicago might have had an outside shot at the claim if it were not for the greed of Mr. Pullman himself. They’re first recorded match was in 1893 and they dominated the early Chicago leagues, but Pullman’s little factory-based town utopia fell apart at the seams when he lowered wages but didn’t lower the rent he charged his workers.
There are a zillion reason why teams folded. If one thing didn’t get you, another would. The odds of any American team surviving from the 1890s until today are astoundingly long, evidenced by the fact that only Beadling beat those odds.
I’d love to see a “Top 20″ list keeping track of this still existing historic teams. Should one fall on hard times, it’d be interesting to see who is still standing.
Love the history lesson, especially with Beadling being my first club. Back then our home field was all dirt and before each season we’d walk around picking out any rocks.
I now play for Kutis over 40 and feel blessed to have played for two such historic clubs.
The Chicago Sparta page on Wikipedia indicates that it is one of the longest continuously established clubs in the US, but if they are still around they are keeping a pretty low profile.
Depending upon the source you rely on they’ve been around since 1914, 1915 or 1917.
Another old one, but one for which I’ve been unable to pin down a year, is Gjoa SC of Brooklyn. The club was founded in 1911, but its original sport was tug-of-war. The earliest mention of soccer on its website is a tour of Norway in 1931, but the club must have played soccer before that. I just don’t know when. Does anybody out there know?
Great article. Since you’ve done your reasearch on the history of soccer in this country. How do you feel about the new Cosmos team? Would you consider this the same Cosmos as existed in the NASL? Would you say then that the new Cosmos team entering the new NASL have existed since 1971?
I have very mixed feelings about the new Cosmos. I was a fan of the old Cosmos (and briefly a season ticket holder). I was quite dubious about the new Cosmos when Kemsley was running the show, but I feel much better about the current bunch, especially since the hiring of Eric Stover two weeks ago. I hope they will succeed, and I plan to go to a game or two next year at Hofstra (not far from where I grew up), even though I live a three-hour drive away.
However, I don’t consider them to be an extension of the same team that folded 27 years ago. Over the years, there have been many teams in American soccer that took the names of earlier teams. By doing so, they honored those earlier teams without being a continuation of them, and that’s how I view the new Cosmos. Maybe in a few years I will change my mind about that and come to view these Cosmos as a rebirth of the old Cosmos, but I don’t think that’s going to happen at the D2 level.
Roger,
This is a question that I’ve been struggling with – where to draw the line (or not) between different clubs. Here are some examples where I’ve been uncertain what to do – any opinion on these clubs?
San Jose Earthquakes 1996-2005 & Houston Dynamo – team maintained ownership and roster, but moved and changed identity.
San Jose Earthquakes 1996-2005 & San Jose Earthquakes 2008- new team, same identity; maintained records.
New England Tea Men & Jacksonville Tea Men – same as San Jose/Houston, except maintained Tea Men name and no replacement New England team.
Portland Timbers 2001-2010 & Portland Timbers 2011- similar ownership, continuous history, but different organization. (Similar to Sounders, Whitecaps.)
J&P Coats & Pawtucket Rangers – J&P folded and the team was re-formed as Pawtucket Rangers, played out Coats schedule & played in the same place.
New York Metrostars & New York Red Bulls – team did not fold, but changed identity significantly.
Brookhattan & Brookhattan-Galicia & Galicia FC & Galicia-Honduras – Brookhattan merged with Galicia, went by Brookhattan-Galicia for a season, became Galicia SC, merged with Honduras SC. Where does one team stop and the other end?
I have no problem with the San Jose Earthquakes of today wearing the two stars earned by the team that is now known as the Houston Dynamo.
I think it’s possible to maintain both lineages without being too contradictory.
The MLS San Jose Clash and San Jose Earthquakes have their history. The Houston Dynamo have a separate history.
However, when I’m studying the league statistically, I consider SJ1/HOU to be one franchise and the 2008 expansion Earthquakes a second.
I think it’s possible to maintain a separation, but also acknowledge that the franchise now playing in Houston is tied with DC United with 4 MLS Cup championships. The fact that the four stars are split between the jerseys of two teams doesn’t bother me, nor do I think the fans of the two teams are particularly bothered, either.
“Research in recent years has indicated that the game they were playing, called the Boston Rules Games, was so much like rugby that it’s incorrect to consider it an early form of soccer”
You can’t just rewrite history when you want to. Even if it wasn’t exactly like the way the game is played today,the Oneida’s have always been considered the 1st soccer team in the U.S.
I know that you can’t just rewrite history when you want to. Why do you assume that I want to?
For years, I wrote in various places, including two books, that we don’t know whether the game the Oneidas played was soccer, rugby or a hybrid, and proposed reasons why it might well have been a prototype of soccer, even though the official rules of association football had not yet been written when the Oneidas were formed. I was quite content with this viewpoint.
However, Mel Smith of Asheville, N.C., who has researched the Oneidas more thoroughly than anyone else I know, classified their game as “American rugby style” rather than as “American soccer style” in a book published in 2003 and as “American carrying game” rather than “American kicking game” in a book published in 2008. In both cases, he placed it in his category reserved for forerunners of rugby rather than his category reserved for forerunners of soccer. I trust his research and have changed my viewpoint.
Still, if you wish to continue to believe that the Oneidas were playing soccer, be my guest.
I’m curious what you mean “the Oneida’s have always been considered the 1st soccer team in the U.S.”?
Has there been an unbroken knowledge of the Oneida Football Club throughout United States history or were they, like so many other pieces of American soccer history, rediscovered at some later point? If so, when was it first “recognized” that they were the first US soccer team.
(I disagree with your point, by the way – you can in fact rewrite history whenever you want to. That’s exactly what it means to write about history.)
Fair enough Roger, I think were both right.
Sorry for the poor choice of words.
Happy Thanksgiving.
I’m hoping that before the end of this century, the original MLS clubs will be able to work the year in which they were founded into their name, logo, or uniform. It won’t be too long until people will find something which has existed since 1996 really old. I can see the “96 Revolution” or “United 96″.
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