America’s First Football Team is Older than American Football
A brief history of soccer, rugby, and Boston’s Oneida Football Club
Imagine with me:
Boston Common in November. The air is pulled tight like a string with the chill of late Autumn. A group of boys, mostly high school boys, but some no doubt a little older, are lined up across from each other in teams of 10 to 15 a side. They have a small, round rubber ball between them.
Behind each team is a line. Maybe they chalked it, maybe it was pure playground rules with trees and shrubs serving as markers, depending on how seriously they decided to take their game that day. These are, after all, just kids playing ball in the park. But they have their goal to protect nonetheless.
The crowd was small, mostly made up of students from nearby schools and a few curious passersby. Nothing like what audiences for football in the United States would become in the next century.
And this is football. Football of a kind, at least. The kind called the Boston Game, played by the boys of the Oneida Football Club, which organized games on Boston Common between 1862 and 1865, and is the earliest known organized football team in the United States.
Again, not football as we (or anyone) know(s) it, but nonetheless these kids were the pioneers. From British immigrants games like this spread far and wide, with rules as elastic as the borders of the rapidly growing American republic.
And they weren’t alone in the world. The year after Oneida F.C. was founded, a group of athletic clubs in London got together to lay out some common rules for their own football game in England. They called themselves the London Football Association, and their game, Association football, commonly known as soccer in the US and Canada, was defined in large part to combat the persistent but decidedly lesser popularity of rugby football.
The origins of rugby are murky, but its lineage is at least as old as soccer’s, and possibly even older. The primary difference between the two in those days is what it remains today—in rugby you carry the ball with your hands. In soccer, you definitely do not. And we have records of carrying games that date back as far as ancient Sparta.
But by the time the Football Association was trying to legislate rugby out of existence, both codes had already made it off the island. And both landed in Boston, with Oneida and the Boston Game.
The Boston Game attempted to split the difference between these rival sports. You could catch the ball with your hands, but you could only advance it by carrying if you were being pursued. There were no goal posts, let alone a net, but you did have to score by kicking the ball across the goal line.
Tackling had a decidedly soccer flavor, in that challenging a player in possession of the ball was done by attacking the ball itself, not the ball player. Matches were played in rounds, a round was won by scoring a goal, a goal was scored by kicking the ball over the goal line and into the goal area (the ancestor of the modern endzone), and the first team to win three rounds out of five won the match.
The game played by Oneida F.C. isn’t remembered well in the history of American football, though they’re well documented and fondly commemorated in Boston. We usually mark the history of the sport beginning with the first intercollegiate game between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869.
But this is a mistake, in my opinion. Something interesting happened here. Athletic clubs are the deep history of the American game. Oneida F.C. was merely the first of what may’ve been hundreds of them all across the country, and it was these clubs that seeded the sport that would later grow into the genuinely bizarre, unique football code that has dominated the American sports landscape for a century and a half.
What we have here is a strange, largely forgotten history of simultaneous symmetry and distinction between American football and other codes around the world. Most modern soccer and rugby clubs descend from athletic clubs not dissimilar to Oneida F.C.
The current leaders of the Premier League table and all around Top Lads, Arsenal F.C. had similar origins. Rather than high school boys destined for Harvard, they were munitions workers who just wanted something to pass the time. So they started a football club called Dial Square F.C., which later became Woolwich Arsenal, then simply Arsenal. Today it’s among the world’s most valuable sporting organizations, but the beginnings were humble.
The result is a strange flip-flop. All football codes have their origins in English schools. Athletic clubs picked them up and ran with them and remain, in some fashion, the keepers of them to this day. But in the US, their spread began with athletic clubs, which carried them as far as the Pacific, only to see the game be taken over by American schools, who remain partially the custodians of American football to the present, along with the NFL, which emerged almost entirely as a commercial venture.
I’ll be honest: I don’t know what happened here. When I started this multimedia journey through the history of world sports, I started with American football precisely because it was a sport I thought I already had a pretty good grasp on. But I soon found all these stray mentions of the “Rugbys” of the “Galveston Club,” or that the University of Texas played their first football game against a team called Dallas Athletic Club.
Then I got a listener request to expound on it. So, in the spirit of Hashtag Content, I’m going to try to find out. Maybe there’s no good answer for why, but at the very least, let’s see how much of these clubs we can reintroduce to the American public, or whatever portion of it reads this newsletter.
Bet it’ll be fun.