The Oneidas: Boston’s earliest soccer legacy returns to the spotlight

BOSTON — Boston’s rich and sometimes debated soccer history is coming into focus as the city prepares to host matches for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

A monument in Boston Common recognizes that first American team to play a version of the game on a continuous basis.

Erected more than 100 years ago, the Oneida Football Club monument stands between Beacon Street and Frog Pond.

Boston 25 soccer analyst Julian Cardillo explained the Oneidas, “were a team of 52 kids, mostly from wealthy families who lived around Beacon Hill, and they played a variant, a precursor to the game that we now know as soccer.”

But everything they were doing may not be what we consider to be rules in soccer now.

“There was an offside. There was scoring goals,” said Cardillo. He continued, “We do think that there are some early rules from what we now know as American football and rugby being played in this game.”

The Oneida team started playing in 1862.

Cardillo explained, “At the time on Boston Common, it had actually recently been outlawed to graze cows. For a long time, this is sort of an open pasture and then it starts to take on the form of a public park more in the sense that we know it today. The reason why the Oneida boys like this field so much is because it was big enough to have boundaries. So, it wasn’t just a pickup game that you would play on the street. You could actually have real rules, real regulations, an actual field to play on.”

Mike Cronin, Academic Director of Boston College in Ireland, wrote a book on the Oneida Football Club with co-author Kevin Tallec Marston.

“If you ask me to put my money on the table and say, what were the Boston boys doing? They weren’t playing soccer as we understand it now. but the game they played was dominantly kicking in the way they described it,” said Cronin.

In “Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth,” Cronin and Marston dive into the team, their monument, and how the story has changed over the years.

Cronin commented, “What we’re really talking about the Oneidas playing is that kind of muddy sort of prehistoric soup of a game that isn’t yet soccer, isn’t yet rugby, certainly isn’t American football, but does have some of those key kind of kicking skills that soccer will have.”

Cronin also said the Oneida’s story is a contested one about what they were doing and how people choose to memorialize and remember it.

“It’s the only monument on the whole of the common that’s put up by people still living, paid for, and in memory of themselves.” Cronin continued, “Part of the thing we became really interested in is why this group of very rich men, seven of them towards the end in the 1920s, why are these very aged men, so keen to memorialize and commemorate a game of football they played when they were teenagers? Of all their life’s achievements, they could be commemorating. Why that one?

Cronin added, “What did they themselves memorialize in 1925? Football, American football, college football. What does somebody cheekily do in the 1990s? Is they kind of recast it as a soccer memorial?”

The top of the monument has what appears to be a football engraving, but it was changed to a soccer ball in 1994 when the US hosted the World Cup. Years later, it was changed back to a football.

Cronin said, “I think the Oneidas, unbeknownst to themselves, fell perfectly into that need to say there is a first, there is an origin point. America has. Maybe not been successful at running a domestic league or internationally, but it’s actually been playing this game for a very long time, that these boys, 1862 to 1865, were playing their game as the first organized football club a year before the rules of football came out of London.”

Whether or not soccer has had a long history in Boston, starting with the Oneidas or other teams later on, a new Boston soccer history will be made in 2026 with the FIFA World Cup.

Cardillo points out it’s a big deal for France to call Boston home for the first part of the World Cup tournament.

“To have the best team in the world right now, a stone’s throw literally from where the first organized team ever played a variant of soccer in the United States, I think is really special,” said Cardillo.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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