Long before St. Louis had a Major League Soccer club, the city was already a hotbed for soccer champions.
St. Louis club teams have won 10 U.S. Open Cup titles, a tribute to the region’s unyielding prowess on the pitch. The U.S. Open Cup, a tournament that pits teams from the various ranks of American soccer against one another in a knockout-style format, dates to 1914 and is among the oldest soccer events on the planet.
Are you a CITY SC fan?
Subscribe to the CITY Scene newsletter to get a fan’s guide to the pro soccer scene in St. Louis.
It just so happens that St. Louis teams have played starring roles in the tournament since its earliest years.
“There’s a legacy here,” St. Louis CITY SC’s Josh Yaro says. “This is a city that’s proud of its soccer history.”
Ben Millers was the first St. Louis club team to win the tournament, beating Massachusetts’ Fore River in 1920 in front of 12,000 supporters at Handlan’s Park—the first of four finals the city would host in a six-year span. The Ben Millers win also marked the first victory for any club west of the Mississippi River. Ben Millers would eventually make way for Scullin Steel’s rise and eventual cup win in 1922, helping St. Louis to its well-earned reputation as a soccer city.
These early St. Louis titles were the product of the St. Louis Soccer League, the country’s only full professional league at the time of its founding in 1915. In a country where baseball was first and foremost on most sports fans’ minds, St. Louis made soccer a priority, with many teams regularly playing in front of several thousand spectators and representing neighborhoods throughout the city.
St. Louis teams would lose their next five finals appearances before Stix, Baer & Fuller earned back-to-back wins in 1933 and 1934. The team switched sponsors after its second U.S. Open Cup victory, changing its name to St. Louis Central Breweries. Its win in the 1935 tournament clinched a three-peat for the club.
The St. Louis Major Soccer League would kick off with a bang in 1948, sending St. Louis-Simpkins Ford to the tournament. Simpkins-Ford not only won during its 1948 appearance, but claimed a second cup in 1950. The latter squad would become famous for the five St. Louis players that played on the 1950 U.S. National Team that beat England, 1-0, at the FIFA World Cup: Bob Annis, Gino Pariani, Charlie Colombo, Frank Borghi, and Frank Wallace.
The 1950s remained prosperous for St. Louis, with Kutis S.C. appearing in the U.S. Open Cup finals in 1954 before winning the tournament in 1957. That victory came in the midst of Kutis’ six straight U.S. Amateur Cup titles.
St. Louis hosted the U.S. Open Cup finals six consecutive years from 1984 to 1989 at St. Louis Soccer Park. Kutis and St. Louis Busch Seniors each won the tournament once during that span. Those years were among the last before MLS launched in 1996, turning loose its collection of top-tier teams on the tournament and seeing an end of lower-division clubs reaching the final. Since 1996, only the Rochester Rhinos, Charleston Battery, and Sacramento Republic have managed to navigate their way to the finals.
Although the current era doesn’t quite hold the same level of parity, it has featured plenty of “cup-sets” in the earlier rounds. The former Saint Louis FC knew all about it. Saint Louis FC, which played in the USL, made noise a few times during this era, knocking out MLS sides Chicago Fire and FC Cincinnati en route to reaching the tournament quarterfinals in 2019.
Now, it’s St. Louis CITY SC’s turn. It’s been 35 years since the region last fielded a team that won the whole thing. Tuesday night’s 5-1 victory over Union Omaha was a good first start. A CITYPARK capacity crowd of 22,423 watched as CITY delivered St. Louis’ latest U.S. Open Cup win. It was the largest crowd for a third-round contest in tournament history, and the 10th-highest attendance in any round of the event.
“They show up every time; this time it’s a Tuesday night,” Yaro says. “It’s an Open Cup game and it’s the first round of the Open Cup, and we had 22,000-plus fans show up. So from that standpoint, the atmosphere was great.”
