American Soccer, from Jamestown to 1900

    A Surprisingly Strong Start

Soccer-like games have been played in various places around the world since the golden days of Rome. The United States was the first British colony to play any football-type activity.   Some style of pick-up football was played as long ago as 1609, brought to the U.S. by the settlers of Jamestown. The rules of the game are unknown, but the game probably resembled the mob games going on in England around the same time. They were likely some kind of mix between today's rugby and soccer and were probably fairly violent. Unlike the games taking place between towns in England, local leaders in the first American colonies were successful in suppressing these football mob games, and by 1620, had outlawed them effectively for over two centuries.

Pick-up football games surged in America in the late 1820’s, when Northeastern universities like Amherst, Brown, Princeton, and Harvard infused the games into college life. The first written account of association football being played in the U.S. was in 1827, when the freshman and sophomore classes at Harvard instituted an annual football game to take place on the first Monday of every school year. This annual event was evidently quite riotous, earning itself the nickname of “Bloody Monday”.  Princeton played something known as “ballown” in which the ball, originally rubber, was hit with the fist along with the foot toward the opposing team's goal.  Each school played its own style of football, much like their academic counterparts in England, with some schools, such as Harvard, favoring a dribbling style game and others, like Prineton, opting to handle the ball with their hands.  It worked fine for every school to play its own type of football because there was no inter-school competition in the U.S. at this point.

Bloody Monday, 1830

    The next major development in American soccer was the founding of the Oneida Boston Soccer Club in 1862, which was only five years after the pioneering official British clubs formed. The Oneida Club consisted of students from some of Boston’s most prestigious secondary institutions, such as Boston Latin and Boston English. The Oneida boys played collegiate level pickup teams, and went both undefeated and unscored upon in their first season; proof that practice and familiarity with one's own team makes all the difference in competition sport. It is unknown whether the Oneitas were playing rugby style or association football, but if they were playing association football, then they would be the first club soccer team to have arisen outside of England, even beating out the oldest Scottish clubs.

                                        Oneida Boys, 1862

College association football hit a wall with the start of the Civil War, but was brought back shortly after in 1866. The game was still not what modern people would call soccer, Princeton, for instance, played the game with 25 people on the field per a team. In 1869, the first intercollegiate game was held between Princeton and Rutgers (Rutgers won 6-4). The teams used London FA’s 1863 rules, which interestingly allowed for the handling of the ball. The rules provided that the first team to score six goals won.  This game was also recorded as the first North American modern football game as well.

  A conference was held between Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and Rutgers in 1873. The meeting was held because football had become a popular enough college sport that the schools wanted to play one another. This had not been done up to this point because of the hodgepodge of conflicting rules each institution used. The universities agreed upon a set of rules, which differed quite a bit from the European rules of the time. Under the new rules, there would be 20 players per team, who could all carry the ball and the first team to achieve six points would win. This set of rules did not last long, as in 1880 Yale kicked-off against the Eton Players, from England, in the first Anglo-American soccer game ever. The Yale team lost 1-2, and was then persuaded by the Eton team to embrace the London FA rules. Yale went on to quickly and successfully persuade the other American colleges in their conference to adopt the FA rules as well. The soccer that these schools were now playing is the same game that is played across the globe today.

As Yale was busy endorsing London FA rule association football (soccer), Harvard was hard at work building up its rugby program. Both schools were proud of their own success at their game of choice, and keen to prove to the opposition that their school played the right kind of football. Parties from both Yale and Harvard met to set a compromised set of rules. There were to be 15 players per side, the ball could be handled or kicked, and either team could score via shot on goal or touch down. With Princeton students filling the audience, Harvard crushed Yale (4-0). It was such an embarrassing defeat that Yale agreed to switch to Harvard's new style of football, Princeton quickly followed suit. With the three most prominent institutions in the country all signed on to play Harvard's new American football, every other school jumped on the bandwagon. And with that, university american soccer fell into obscurity.

                           

  Harvard vs.Yale (4-0)

                                       

                                                Recommended Reading for this Post

                                           

• Litterer, David. “An Overview of American Soccer History.” A Historical Overview of American Soccer History, 21 May 2010, soccerhistoryusa.org/ASHA/overview.html. https://soccerhistoryusa.org/ASHA/overview.html

This is the most complete, well researched short article on the history of American male soccer that I have found. For the first post I am focusing primarily on the first two sections, which covers events from 1619-1880. This reading does spend a lot of time on college sports, but that is a good place to start looking for the history of most globally successful sports.

My second article on this topic will discuss from 1880-1970, which will cover the next six sections of the reading. I will probably sight this text again in the future. I recommend reading as much of it as you like, it isn’t the most captivating read but it is full of a lot of great general knowledge.