Sept. 14 (1877)

In one of the earliest known soccer-like games in St. Louis, two teams christened East Side and West Side meet on the fifth day of the annual St. Louis Exposition. The match is played in a 12,000-seat amphitheater, the largest in the United States at the time of its construction, on land that would become Fairground Park. The first team to score two goals wins. Goals are scored by kicking the ball through stakes 24 feet apart, the same width as today’s soccer goals. Twenty men make up each team, but an account in the Sept. 14 edition of the St. Louis Dispatch is unclear on how many players are allowed on the pitch. The East Side starts the match by advancing the ball halfway down the field, but, “by an unlucky blunder, ten men had their legs kicked from under them and fell in a heap,” according to an unnamed reporter writing in the Dispatch. The West counterattacks. “By a splendid kick Capt. Donohoe sent the ball ahead of him and following up the advantage soon landed it home amid loud cheers from the spectators,” reports the Dispatch. After a 15-minute break, the West scores again to win the game “after a hard contest, many of the east side men dropping out from sheer exhaustion.” The match happens a little more than two years after the first known newspaper report of a soccer-like game on May 28, 1875, at the Grand Avenue Base Ball Park, later renamed Sportsman’s Park.