This new league, named the American League of Professional Football (ALPF), would feature the Baltimore Orioles, Boston Beaneaters (now the Atlanta Hawks), Brooklyn Bridegrooms (now the L.A. Dodgers), New York Giants (now the San Francisco Giants), Philadelphia Phillies, and Washington Senators.

As you can tell by the league’s name, “soccer” as the preferred American name for the sport had not caught on yet. Both Gridiron football (American football) and soccer were called football. To be clear though, this was a soccer league.

Newspapers from the time reported that the ALPF charter declared that the new league would follow the English rules of football, with some very minor changes. Most of these slight changes are believed to relate to uniform and substitution rules. Home teams were required to wear white kits with black socks. When away, they had to wear dark colors with light socks.

These reports also detailed that the ALPF clubs planned to play in a 10-game round robin tournament from October 1, 1894 through January 1, 1895.

The newly-founded league kicked off with a match between the Phillies and Giants at the old Philadelphia Baseball Grounds on October 6, 1894. The Giants played again less than a week later on October 11, 1894 against Brooklyn in the first ever professional New York derby match. Both matches had very poor attendances.

Only 500 spectators showed up in Philadelphia to see their new home-town team lose 5-0 to the visitors from New York. However, according to the Philadelphia Enquirer, despite the result, Phillies fans were left entertained by the match.

A player named Charlie Reilly particularly dazzled fans in Philadelphia on that day. The “red-headed and fast” club captain also played third base for the Phillies baseball team. Reportedly, his kicks and tackles “surpassed even that of the experts.”

Besides Reilly, the entirety of both Philadelphia and New Yorks’ rosters were either English or Irish. Some players were even recruited specifically from the British Isles to play soccer in the newly formed ALPF.

The Baltimore Orioles, the namesake for the unrelated modern-day MLB team, was the most professional of the ALPF’s six teams. The O’s hired A.W. Stewart, an actual football manager, to lead their side. Most other clubs were managed by the baseball team’s manager. Stewart, a soccer man through and through from the Northwest of England, was the club’s starting goalkeeper, club captain, and player-manager.

He also played a key role in bringing players to the club. Stewart said that Baltimore also invested twice as much money into their team compared to other ALPF clubs. Most of this money was used to import British players from abroad using Stewart’s connections.

While none of the baseball clubs, including the Orioles, were really interested in doing more than drawing in fans during the offseason, Baltimore did seem committed to putting together a good soccer team that would last. The other clubs were not.

On October 23, 1894, Baltimore destroyed the Phillies 6-1 in front of less than 500 fans in what would be the last match in ALPF history. The league folded after just two weeks of action.

The Brooklyn Bridegrooms, who later became the LA Dodgers, had the most wins and were crowned league champions. The Orioles claimed they were rightful champions since they were the only team to finish the season undefeated. The O’s also pushed to restart the league in the spring.

The Orioles did not disband their soccer team and began a regional tour against other notable teams of the time. Washington joined Baltimore in wanting to restart the league in spring. League president and Phillies boss Arthur A. Irwin called the ALPF an “unhappy and unprofitable…experiment” that would not be repeated.

Irwin won out in the end. The ALPF never returned, and the six National League owners never tried their hand at soccer ever again.

Other American soccer leagues would come and go in the decades following the ALPF’s short-lived first season. Few have failed quite as spectacularly as the first professional in soccer league US history though. So why exactly did this ambitious experiment fail so gloriously? Well, it failed for many of the same reasons soccer continues to struggle in the United States today.

When it comes to soccer in the US, poor match attendances, league infighting, and conflicts with the national federation are as American as apple pie.

Let’s start with poor attendance figures.

Being baseball men, the ALPF club owners scheduled many of their matches during the middle of the week. While common for baseball games, early American soccer fans came from more working-class backgrounds and could not attend these midweek games. The sort of scattershot nature to the league’s schedule also did not help things.

In general, even though they had to compete with college football games, weekend matches were the most highly attended ALPF matches. However, the highest attended match in the ALPF’s short history was actually a weekday game between the Orioles and Senators at Baltimore’s Union Park that drew around 4,000 fans. Most other ALPF matches attracted less than 1,000 spectators.

The Philadelphia Enquirer reported that the Phillies made just $9.22 in their two matches against Brooklyn. In 2024, that’s the equivalent of a few hundred bucks.

There’s an argument to be made that the ALPF could have survived these poor attendance figures. After all, other competitions have. A simple switch to weekend games also could have helped negate the ALPF’s attendance problems. Surviving this rough patch would have required commitment and collaboration. As is the case today with MLS and USL clubs, the ALPF teams chose to fight amongst themselves instead.

After a string of dominating performances by the Baltimore Orioles, other ALPF clubs reportedly alerted the United States Treasury Department to the Orioles’ employment of imported foreign professional players. It is unclear what happened following the government investigation into this. According to the Orioles though, the complaint was nothing but sour grapes from the other clubs.

Soccer club captain Stewart and Orioles baseball team player Ned Hanlon went as far as to accuse the Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and New York clubs of going out of their way to cut Baltimore down at the knees just as the Orioles were asserting their dominance in both baseball and soccer. In 1894, Baltimore had finished top of the National League baseball league standings and finished runner-up in the Temple Cup, an early precursor to the World Series.

Beyond the intra-league infighting and poor attendances, the ALPF was doomed due to lack of support from the federal governing body.

The American Football Association (AFA), founded in 1884 in collaboration with the English Football Association, wanted to maintain their strict control of soccer in the United States. The New York Times described the AFA as feeling like the ALPF and its baseball owners were “encroaching on its territory.”

At its annual meeting in New York in September 1894, the AFA enacted a rule designed to curtail the ALPF’s encroachment. The rule stated that any player who signed a contract with an ALPF would not be able to take part in any AFA competitions. At the time, the AFA ran the only national cup competition in the US as well as several other popular regional cup competitions.

This rule essentially meant ALPF clubs were unable to recruit top talents from early American soccer hotbeds like Fall River, Massachusetts; Pawtucket, Rhode Island; and Kearny, New Jersey. These primarily immigrant, working-class communities already had strong clubs who dominated AFA-sanctioned competitions. The AFA’s ban especially hurt the New York, Brooklyn, and Boston clubs who were located close to these strong soccer communities.

These sorts of conflicts between leagues and the country’s soccer federations are affectionately known by many US soccer fans as “Soccer Wars.” Like with most wars, nothing good comes from them. Disputes between leagues and/or soccer federations have repeatedly set soccer in the US back decades. In fact, the AFA itself collapsed after a series of disputes with the American Amateur Football Association, which is now the United States Soccer Federation.

Before all that though, the AFA took on the ALPF in arguably the very first Soccer War in American history. To me, this conflict was also the most impactful.

The late 1800s was a period in history where the sport of soccer was just starting to explode. The British Empire had spread the game all around the world and the industrial revolution had created new urban centers with hundreds of thousands of people densely packed together looking for new forms of entertainment.

Some of the most iconic clubs in the world were founded during this period of rapid growth. In 1894, when six baseball team owners embarked on their bold experiment to form a professional soccer league in the United States, Leeds United were in their first year of existence. 1894 was also the year when reigning Premier League champions Manchester City rebranded from Ardwick Association Football Club to their current name.

Outside of England, top national leagues were popping up all around the world. The Argentine Primera División was founded in 1891, just three years before the ALPF. Italy’s Serie A, the Swiss Super League, and the Belgian Pro League were all founded within five years after the ALPF played its first match.

It is impossible to say whether the ALPF would have survived like those other top leagues did, had the AFA not cut the league down at the knees from the start. It is not likely that the ALPF would have gone on to become one of the best leagues in the world. However, you can make a strong argument that the ALPF would have survived in one form or another had it not been plagued by the constant conflicts that seem to always bring down US soccer.

Beyond the context of soccer exploding internationally, the US in the 1890s was an ideal place for a professional soccer league to grow.

One of the biggest problems with soccer in the US today is that it has to compete with other, more popular sports. This was a problem in the 1890s, but it was not as insurmountable in 1894 as it is in 2024.

Like in England, professionalism in sports was a taboo subject in the US. American athletes were expected to be amateurs and play for the love of the game as opposed to for money. As with so many things in the US involving money though, the Americans embraced professional sports far before the English.

While the FA and other footballing organizations in England were debating the merits of professionalism in the 1870s, the Americans were establishing multiple professional baseball leagues. By the time the FA decided to allow professionalism in 1885, the National League, which still exists today as a part of Major League Baseball, had been a professional league for nearly a decade.

Baseball’s early adoption of professionalism is one of the reasons it became “America’s Pastime.” Traveling professional barnstorming teams helped spread the game outside of urban centers where it was already popular. Once there were enough fans, and enough money to be made, there was a greater incentive to organize the sport and its leagues compared to purely amateur endeavors.

Even if the ALPF had full support from the AFA and its own teams, soccer may have never caught on in the US like baseball did. However, having a well-organized professional league going into the turn of the century could have done wonders for raising the game’s standard compared to other popular sports in the US.

In the 1890s, Gridiron football (American football) was still almost exclusively an amateur sport. It was primarily played among elite Ivy League schools before spreading to other US universities. The first semi-national American football league comparable to the ALPF wasn’t founded until 1902. The NFL didn’t get its start until 1920.

Basketball was not even invented until 1891. Furthermore, it would not become the game it is today until decades later after numerous rule changes were made to Dr. James Naismith’s original 13 rules of the game. For one, the original basketball was actually a soccer ball.

It's worth remembreing that the American sports landscape in 1894 was not nearly as well-defined as it is today or even compared to the US just 27 years later when the first American Soccer League was founded in 1921.

Soccer would have likely never been the most popular sport in the US, but had the ALPF survived even just a few years, it could have forever ingrained soccer’s popularity in the US. Instead, it set the tone for all the failures that would follow.

The American Soccer League (ASL), founded in 1921, was the next full-professional soccer league in the United States. It lasted until 1933, so it was absolutely a more successful league than the ALPF, but it did end for many of the same reasons.

ASL clubs almost immediately were at loggerheads with the United States Football Association (now the USSF) about having to take part in the National Challenge Cup (now known as the US Open Cup). Teams cited financial difficulties and travel burdens due to having to play cup matches during the regular season.

After multiple ceasefires and negotiations, things finally reached a boiling point in 1928 when ASL clubs decided to boycott the Cup. The USFA declared the ASL an outlaw league and the league itself fractured with many of its clubs splitting off to join other leagues. The ASL died five years later in 1933.

I could go on and tell a similar story for just about every professional soccer league that has ever existed in the US. This includes Major League Soccer, which has a reputation for encroaching on the territory of USL clubs and is itself right now in a battle with the USSF over participating in the US Open Cup.

Unlike the ALPF and ASL, MLS will likely survive its conflict with the USSF. However, if it does not learn from the past and start embracing the game instead of picking fights, soccer may never be a truly big sport in the US.