For decades, St. Louis was America’s soccer capital. At one time, every big company in town sponsored a club team, several of which won the National Challenge Cup. Ben Millers and Scullin Steel each won once; Stix Baer & Fuller won three years in a row. In 1950, five locals were among the Americans who beat England 1–0 in the World Cup, one of the greatest upsets in sports history. Between 1959 and 1973, Saint Louis University dominated college soccer, winning 10 national championships. And the National Soccer Hall of Fame is loaded with St. Louisans.
“Any degree of popularity, newfound awareness, a new cachet that the sport of soccer enjoys in our country today is directly attributable to what St. Louis started back in the late 1800s,” says Bill McDermott. “That’s a fact.”
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.
We will never send spam or annoying emails. Unsubscribe anytime.This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
The secret to that success was the city’s Catholic Youth Council soccer program. Bill McDermott learned the game at St. Philip Neri, where Monsignor Louis Meyer wanted kids to grow up playing in the shadow of the church. Intense rivalries formed between parishes on the North Side and those on the south. McDermott played on SLU’s championship teams in ’67 and ’69 and has become known, through his longtime work as SLU’s public address announcer, as Mr. Soccer. “Any degree of popularity, newfound awareness, a new cachet that the sport of soccer enjoys in our country today is directly attributable to what St. Louis started back in the late 1800s,” he says. “That’s a fact.”
It’s also a sad irony. St. Louis dominated the soccer world when few Americans cared about the sport. Now that soccer is hot, St. Louis has largely fallen off the national map. Make no mistake—that doesn’t have anything to do with a decrease in soccer hysteria. Fans have turned out in droves for our upstart minor-league team, Saint Louis Football Club. Two locals, Lori Chalupny and Becky Sauerbrunn, helped the U.S. win the Women’s World Cup last summer. But our place in the soccer universe comes down to money. In the past, we haven’t had anyone rich enough who wanted to pay the $100 million expansion fee for a Major League Soccer team. But at press time, following the Rams’ departure, momentum was building for bringing a team to St. Louis. We might just replace football with fútbol.
