On Stony Ground

The first professional football league outside the United Kingdom was founded in the United States in 1894, but lasted just 17 days. Why did football not take root in the USA?

The question is often asked of the United States took so long to become a football country, but perhaps the question should be spun the other way: why did football spread so quickly in Britain?

Football had existed in various forms for centuries and it’s clear that it was being played in at least a semi-organised way far beyond the small clutch of clubs who set up the Football Association in 1863. What the FA offered, particularly after the establishment of the FA Cup in 1872, was regular competition, a means of arranging fixtures with sides beyond a club’s immediate vicinity. That was fuelled by two major factors: the Factory Act which gave working men free time on a Saturday afternoon, which it turned out they liked to spend watching football, and logistics.

Britain was just small enough, and had a good enough rail network, to make national initiatives possible. Just as national newspapers thrived in Britain, leading to intense competition and a culture of sensationalism, because it was possible to print a newspaper in London in the evening and get it to even the furthest parts of the country by the following morning, so it was possible for clubs in England to take a train to play a club elsewhere in England without it taking a prohibitive period of time. It’s true that the League began in 1888 as a Midlands and North-West collective, but Sunderland were soon admitted and by 1910 the League ran to two divisions and comprised sides from as far afield as Bristol and Newcastle, London and Liverpool.

The USA did not have those advantages and so, even though football was implanted relatively early, as discussed here last week [https://jonawils.substack.com/p/the-birth-of-soccer-in-america] it did not spread in the same way. The first attempt at founding an American Football Association was taken in 1884 in a meeting held at the Scottish-owned Clark Thread Company in Kearny, New Jersey. Laws were standardised – although on what model is not entirely clear – and a Cup competition proposed to run on the lines of the FA Cup. Its first edition involved 13 teams from four states. It was won in 1884-85 and the two subsequent years by the team of the Clark factory – Clark ONT [Our New Thread].

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Although it was, notionally, the first attempt at forming a national football association outside of the UK, the truth is that the AFA was extremely small-scale. Even clubs from the further reaches of New York and Pennsylvania were sceptical, let alone St Louis where a distinctive variant of the game had sprung up. Games there were only 30 minutes each way and the impression is that football in Missouri, where the influence was largely Irish, was more direct and physical than the Scottish-inflected game further east.

The American Cup carried on, with teams from Fall River winning six of the following seven competitions. The other was won by the Free Wanderers from Pawtucket, which is only 20 miles north-west of Fall River. At that point, perhaps, the situation looks not unlike that in England a decade earlier. The American Cup began only 12 years after the FA Cup, and the game was rooted in the industrial heartlands. But in Engand, the game from that point took off; in the US it shrunk.

In part that was down to bad luck. The Panic of 1893 brought an end to the Gilded Age and led to the Panic of 1896, the greatest economic crisis to hit the US before the Wall Street Crash in 1929. The textile mills of the north-east were particularly badly hit and that reduced funding for football, leading the American Cup to be suspended for six years from 1899. Tours by Corinthians and an amateur touring side from England known as the Pilgrims in 1906 reignited interest in football in the area and the Cup began again. The fascination with foreign touring sides would remain a feature.

With a better economic climate, perhaps the American Cup would have taken off and led to a league. The sheer size of the US, though, made the establishment of national competition in the days before air travel almost impossible, and the climate didn’t help. In England, football was the winter sport and rubbed along easily enough with cricket, the summer sport. By the 1890s, baseball was established as the US summer sport but winter conditions were much harsher in New England than in England. Football can be played in the damp and the cold, but not in heavy snow.

And, whereas in England football was often seen as a way for cricket clubs to make use of their facilities out of season and for players to keep fit, in the US, baseball had more agressive designs on football. In October 1894, the owners of six major league baseball clubs launched a football competition to try to make use of their stadiums in winter. This was the first attempt at a professional football league anywhere outside the UK.

The football teams had the same names as the baseball teams and in many cases baseball managers were used for the football side as well. It was announced, probably as a publicity stunt, that baseball players would play football, although as it turned out that was true only in Philadelphia. The AFA was appalled and threatened to ban any player who signed up to the new league, but the baseball clubs had sufficient money that few were dissuaded when a contract was offered.

Philadelphia and New York played friendlies against local clubs and won easily, suggesting the level might be relatively high. The best side, though, were the Baltimore Orioles, the reigning baseball champions. They hired an actual football coach in AW Stewart, who also played in goal for them. He brought in pros from Manchester City and Sheffield United, many of whom have broken their contracts and were in US illegally; that would become a regular theme. The Orioles own every game they played easily, prompting protests about imports; Stewart insisted he players were not foreign, they just came from Detroit.

At weekends, the football was popular, with the Orioles drawing crowds of up to 12,000. Midweek games, though, often attracted only a few hundred. That poor take-up caused doubts among the owners and, when the threat of a rival professional baseball league emerged, they pulled the plug. The first US professional league lasted a total of 17 days.

There was another attempt by baseball owners from Chicago, Detroit, St Louis and Milwaukee to establish a league 1901, but that collapsed immediately when a friendly between Milwaukee and Chicago drew only 300.

From the very outset, football leagues in the US worked on a franchise model. There was no sense, as there as in Europe, of organic growth, still less of a national pyramid. We’ll look at the reasons why and the consequences of that vision of sport in the next article in this series.