The Oneida Football Club By Grayson Banks

Soccer supposedly first began in the United States with the formation of the Oneida Football Club in Boston, Massachusetts. The Oneida football club was formed in the fall of 1862 by a group of boys from the Dixwell Private Latin School, making it the first organized football club in the United States. The club only lasted three years, but during this time, other informal clubs in public and private secondary schools across Boston started to compete in sports like football and baseball. Eventually, football would spread across the Charles River to Harvard University, where students would transform the sport, and they would start competing in the “Boston Game,” eventually developing intercollegiate gridiron football matches.

The Oneida Football Club claims that its club was the first organized soccer club in the United States and that it is the inventor of American Gridiron football. In reality, sports have very long, convoluted histories that can often be hard to pinpoint specific founders or inventors of sports. These sports often evolve and change over time, with different people and time periods bringing different ideas that either stick or don’t stick. And in most cases, like with Abner Doubleday, who supposedly invented baseball, myth can often overtake the reality of the sport’s creation. Usually, these myths are created long after the passing of the supposed creators of the sports, but with the Oneida football club, a lot the the members actually lived to see the sport they are said to have invented become popular. 52 members were included in the monument to the Oneida football club, and this really signified that the club was not really organized in the sense we think of today, but instead it was a group of boys who would meet up to play the game whenever they had time. A lot of the boys in the groups came from affluent Boston families, with a lot of them having connections to Harvard University, with 37 of the 52 boys attending Harvard.

The Oneidas never really laid claim to being the inventors of gridiron football or the first organized football club; instead, they just viewed it as they always had a group of friends playing their game in the Boston Commons.