St. Louis Soccer League

The St. Louis Soccer League was based in St. Louis, Missouri and existed from 1907 to 1938. At its founding, it was the only fully professional soccer league in the United States.

St. Louis teams, which began competing in citywide leagues in 1890, organized the Association Foot Ball League in 1903. In 1907, the St. Louis Soccer League was established as a rival to the AFBL. In 1908, the two leagues merged. Typically, the league featured four teams each season.

The merger brought St. Leo's from the AFBL into the SLSL, where the team, the league's only fully professional squad, dominated the standings for seven years.

In an attempt to undermine St. Leo’s, several individuals involved in the league attempted to remake the SLSL as an amateur league. The effort was defeated but it led to split. Those teams dedicated to full professionalism joined St. Leo’s in the Federal Park League while the amateur teams moved to Robison Park. The split brought the Ben Millers into the Federal Park League. When the two leagues reunited in 1915, Ben Millers replaced St. Leo’s as the dominant team.^[1]

While the two leagues crowned separate champions during the 1913-1914 season, the 1914-1915 saw a city champion when the top team in each league, St. Leo’s from Federal Park and Innisfails from Robison Field, played for the title. Innisfails won the championship, replacing St. Leo’s as the city’s top team. Following the 1914-1915 season, the two leagues reunited.

In 1916, the newly established U.S. Football Association assembled a team of U.S. players for a Scandinavia. These games became the first in the history of the national team. Of the players on the U.S. roster, only Matt Diedrichsen from Innisfails was selected from outside the north east U.S.

The entry of the United States into World War I drained all four teams by drafting players into the military, with St. Leo’s affected the most.

In 1926, the SLSL briefly expanded to include Chicago Sparta, but the team did not complete the season, withdrawing on November 11, 1926. In 1935, the SLSL began a period of instability which led to its eventual dissolution four years later.

In 1939, the league expanded to include teams from Chicago and Cleveland. Teams from these two cities and St. Louis had competed against each other from time to time, but this year, the SLSL decided to formalize the competition, which was called the “Inter-city Soccer Loop”. The league, which had experienced considerable internal strife including lawsuits between teams over player tampering had finally collapsed.^[2] The St. Louis Municipal League, which ran the lower St. Louis city divisions, became the only league. As such its top division became the de facto St. Louis first division until the creation of the St. Louis Major Soccer League in 1948.

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