It is common knowledge that indoor soccer was a creation of the seventies and eighties. The sport was the inevitable result of the U.S. soccer fan’s need for a faster-paced, higher-scoring version of the game. When the old NASL self-destructed, indoor soccer was there to take its place as the only form of the game that Americans would find palatable.

But, that anecdotal version of the sport is woefully near-sighted. The history of indoor soccer stretches back into, at least, the early part of the 20th century. Other than cup ties, the winter months are usually a slow time on the soccer calendar. That was especially the case in the northeast during the early years of the game due. Inclement weather often made play impossible on snowbound or icy pitches. Even back then, clubs and owners looked for ways to fill open dates and indoor soccer was one of the experiments.

A Boston Globe article from December 30, 1909 notes that Amos Alonzo Stagg, at the time coach at the University of Chicago, planned to try indoor soccer. The notion was that professors and students could try out the relatively new sport indoors during the winter months.[“Stagg to Try Indoor Soccer”, The Boston Globe, Dec 30, 1909, page 7]

On May 1, 1926, an indoor soccer doubleheader was held by the Empire State Football League in Manhattan. The first match was between picked teams from the Empire State and German-American leagues. The second match was between Vasco F.C. of the International League and Galicia F.C. of Spanish Leagues. A reported crowd of 1,000 was on hand to watch Vasco defeat Galicia 3-1.

A photo of St. Louis Arena in 1929. (image courtesy of St Louis Post-Dispatch)

The first indoor night soccer game staged in St. Louis was held at the St. Louis Arena in late December of 1929. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted that it was the first time an attempt was made to play indoor soccer with 11 players on each side. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle later opined that, while there was plenty of action, the small size of the field led to a “mob scene”. The article notes that the indoor game could not sold the cold weather problem because there were no fields of standard size in the U.S. to play pro and cup soccer matches. It also states that Cleveland had held an indoor soccer tournament “with some success” but that the game was played seven-a-side. A final quote is prescient: “But that is a strictly American product, for the Old Country boys would turn up their noses at anything so radical as seven-man soccer.” [“Indoor Team Is Soccer Problem”, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec 29, 1932, page 2C]

On March 31, 1932, two American Soccer League clubs, Boston S.C. and Pawtucket Rangers, played an six-a-side match at the Rhode Island Auditorium in Providence. At the time, both clubs were already out of the National Challenge Cup. And, with only four teams in the league due to the withdrawal of three New York-area clubs, the ASL itself was at the tail end of a shortened six-game spring schedule. The two New England clubs attempted to shore up their schedules, and bottom lines, by taking the game indoors.

The exhibition had three 15-minutes periods with no corner kicks and unlimited substitutions. Boston took the match 6-5 with inside forward, Johnny Ballantyne, scoring a hat trick. The Boston Globe noted that the game was the first ever indoor match staged in Rhode Island.

The endeavor was successful enough for Pawtucket to hold another six-a-side indoor match. On April 20, a few days after then end of the ASL spring season, the Rangers hosted the New Bedford Whalers at Rhode Island Auditorium. After three 20-minute periods, Pawtucket prevailed 11-10 over New Bedford. Robella scored six goals for the losing side.

In the late 1930s, indoor soccer was popular enough in New York that the State Football Association began sanctioning a six-a-side indoor tournament during the winter months. Following the association’s lead, other metro leagues put on their own indoor soccer tournaments. In January 1939, 40 teams took part in the annual New York State Football Association’s six-a-side indoor championships held at the Second Naval Battalion Armory.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle (February 11, 1941)

On February 10, 1941, indoor soccer made its debut in Madison Square Garden when the four New York clubs of the American Soccer League played a tournament. The first two games were played with 20-minute halves. The winners of the opening bouts played in the final that evening. That game had 15-minute halves.

In the first matches, Brooklyn Hispano defeated the New York Americans 3-1 and Brookhattan beat Brooklyn’s St. Mary’s Celtic 2-0. In the final, Brookhattan and Hispano battled to a 1-1 draw. Nearing midnight, a five-minute overtime was unable to break the tie.

The 10,000 fans in attendance were presented with a helping of soccer combined with hockey when the Brookhattan and Celtic match broke out to a scrum. Brookhattan’s goalkeeper, Johnny Bryndza, got the worst of it coming out of the tussle with a swollen eye and needing four stitches before he could resume the match.

The biggest culprit wasn’t the players but the playing surface. The matches were literally played on the terrazzo concrete surface of the Garden’s floor. Players were constantly slipping, sliding and falling. Fergus Hunter, the Celtics goalkeeper, broke a finger sliding for a ball and needed hospitalization for that and other arm injuries. Brookhattan’s center forward, Rudie Kunter, limped off after a bad kick to the leg and was out of the lineup for weeks. More seriously, Mike Briscoe, Brookhattan’s left halfback, needed to spend the night in hospital due to concussion sustained during a scrum.

These games were a real success and a double-header between ASL clubs was held the evening of May 6 at Madison Square Garden. Brooklyn Hispano took on St. Mary’s Celtic which was followed by the ASL champions, Scots-Americans of Kearny, N.J., meeting an all-star team made up of the New York Americans and Brookhattan clubs.

The clubs learned their lesson from the winter exhibition and installed a rolled dirt surface over the Garden’s hard flooring. In addition, padded walls were added for further protection. Competitive rule changes were also made. The penalty area and offsides were removed and unlimited substitutions were allowed.

Celtic defeated Hispano 4-1 in a game marred by a three-minute fight. In the second match, the Brookhattan-New York Americans aggregation defeated the Scots-Americans 3-2. Around 9,000 were in attendance to watch the festivities.

While smaller indoor soccer tournaments continued, big-time indoor soccer never took hold in the mid-twentieth century. But it wasn’t lack of interest that caused the downfall. Experiments to come up with a coating for the Madison Square Garden flooring were unsuccessful. And, plans were indefinitely put on hold because rubber matting was unobtainable due to war-time rationing. Without an answer, American Soccer League clubs were not willing to play on the hard surface because of the risk of injury.

The popularity of the indoor game wasn’t limited to New York. In spring of 1950, the amateur National Soccer League of Chicago held a 13-week indoor soccer season between the six top Chicago clubs. Three games were played each Sunday afternoon and were televised on channel 4 by WBKB, the local CBS affiliate.

While other amateur leagues held indoor tournaments or leagues, the NSL’s competition was the most successful indoor soccer league at that point in the history of the game and regularly drew crowds in the 1,000 to 2,000 range. After the first couple of years, the number of clubs grew to over a dozen and the league was split into two divisions with promotion and relegation between them. Games continued to be broadcast Sundays on WGN-TV. The NSL’s indoor league lasted at least through the mid-1960s.

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It wasn’t until March 1971 that the old NASL got into the indoor soccer game when they held the “1971 Hoc-Soc Tournament” at the St. Louis Arena. Four clubs took part: Dallas Tornado, Rochester Lancers, St. Louis Stars, and Washington Darts. The fifth active club at that time, the Atlanta Chiefs, did not join. The league called their variant of indoor soccer “hoc-soc” due to the combination of hockey and soccer rules. The arena’s NHL hockey rink, including surrounding dasher boards, were the dimensions and the surface was covered in AstroTurf surface. With 5,060 in attendance, Dallas defeated Rochester in the final 3-0 with the St. Louis Stars taking the third place game 2-0 over Washington.

A few years later, in February 1974, the Soviet Red Army of Moscow club took part in three exhibition games with NASL clubs: a NASL All-Star team; the St. Louis Stars; and the then-champion Philadelphia Atoms. While the Red Army clubs crushed their opponents, the interest in the game was high with crowds close to 12,000 for each games.

These matches against the Red Army team are commonly seen as the stimulus for the modern age of indoor soccer. The next year the NASL launched the first league-wide indoor soccer tournament and held three more smaller tournaments over the next four years. It was then in the 1979-80 offseason that both the NASL and the newly-formed Major Indoor Soccer League began holding full indoor soccer seasons.

While received wisdom might tell us that indoor soccer in the US began with those two eighties leagues, a deeper understanding shows that the sport stretches back well over a century. Those modern leagues didn’t arrive out of the ether but were the next evolution of a long-standing game.

- Dan Creel

If you enjoy this article, check out the rest of Protagonist Soccer’s Halloween Week Special, Cracking the Crypt.

Gothic Horror made its way into popular fiction as early as the end of the 1700s with works by English authors Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis—by the mid-19th century, serial pieces and novels by Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, and Charles Dickens were readily available throughout western culture. Vampirism was very much an early component of Gothic writings with pieces by John William Polidori (The Vampyre, 1819) Rymer and Prest (Varney the Vampire serials, 1845-47), or Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire work (Carmilla, 1871-72). This creature of the night was fast becoming one of Gothic Horror’s most well-known archetypes.

Often, a literary goal of working with these archetypes (Scapegoat, Villain, Temptress) was more meaningful than simply telling a spooky story, there was an element of revealing darker sides of humanity to the reader, almost with a didactic sensibility. As these works of fiction became increasingly available, they also became increasingly influential for new waves of writers as well as readers. By the 1890s, the word vampire had taken on a meaning beyond that of a literary sense and began to permeate everyday vernacular. Even in the farthest-flung cities of western civilization, like San Francisco, creatures from Gothic writings were now portrayed in daily media.

In regards to an issue we can relate to in modern times, this 1882 political cartoon portrays the landlords of San Francisco, as Vampire bats, looking to drink the tenants dry. These Vampires, of course, ate and drank merrily; however, ended up in hell for squeezing every last cent out of their renters. At a certain point, those privileged enough to be in a position of this level of mockery, begin to own it—they would rather on-board the titles of “Scrooge” or “Vampire” than succumb to social pressure and give up their positions of leverage. Calling oneself a Vampire in these terms becomes a bit of self-scathing or sardonic humor, and maybe simultaneously allows them to explain away not knowing how to sleep at night.

The game of association football, or soccer, had been played in Britain for centuries, but had only been codified for a relatively short period of time--1863. As Britannia spread their literature and financial system around the world, they brought with them the laws of their exciting new sport; wherever sailors travelled, be it to continental Europe, South America or even the port cities up and down California, they brought with them the game of football and all of its glorious Victorian Era laws. While sailors came and went, the clerks, merchants, bankers or property managers might stick around longer and since they might have been members of Cricket Clubs or Yacht Clubs back home, this budding white-collared class set up similar clubs in their respective new locales.

Organizations, such as the San Francisco Yacht Club or the Encinal Yacht Club were forming as early as 1890, all around the San Francisco Bay. They would throw elaborate social events and parade their decorated yachts for onlookers to see. Popular destinations around the bay to sail to were fellow Yacht Clubs like San Leandro, Redwood City and San Francisco’s Corinthian YC. Simultaneously massive athletic clubs, like the Olympic Club in San Francisco or the San Francisco Italian Athletic Club were assembling to provide common areas for athletic competition and fraternization. As football became a larger part of life in the late 19th centuries, these existing athletic organizations added soccer teams to their organizations in the late 1890s. From this you get some of the most historic clubs in Bay Area soccer history: Pastimes, Pickwicks, Thistle, Albion Rovers, Pacific Wanderers, and even a club from Alameda calling themselves the Vampire Association Football Club.

Initially, there were only four clubs, we know of, founded as early as 1892 and played a bit of a round robin for two years; however, the economic boom of the gilded age (1870s to end of the 1880s) came to a screeching stop just before 1894, in what is referred to as the “Panic of 1893.” These clubs didn’t stop playing soccer, it was just more intermittent for several years; they would have to find competition against teams of visiting sailors or travel by rail to play clubs some distance away. Shortly after an economic recovery, Vampire Association Football Club was formed in either 1896 or 1897—it very well could be 1896 and they simply didn’t play their first matches until the following year.

Unlike some of the bigger clubs in San Francisco, Vampires were based out of Alameda, about a 45-minute drive from The City nowadays; however, the Bay Bridge wasn’t constructed until 1933 so in order to play away matches, they would have to take a ferry off the Alameda Mole to cross the bay. VAFC seem to initially have hosted their home matches at the Alameda Cricket Club grounds and a few of the cricketers played for the new football side. Other members of the Vampires team came from the San Francisco Yacht Club and most of the team were English expats. “… and they generally had money,” Brian Bunk tells us in his SoccerHistoryUSA podcast, “… this makes them a bit different than most of the soccer hotbeds in the United States, where the players tended to come from more blue-collared type occupations. The Vampires, on the other hand, were mostly white-collared workers; clerks, bankers, and accountants.”

They came from Yacht Clubs, Cricket Clubs, Athletic Clubs and the white-collared business professionals who brought with them the understanding of football, were privileged enough to have had access to some of the aforementioned Goth literary classics during their formative years. Vampire Association Football Club were established, perhaps, shortly after Bram Stoker’s seminal novel Dracula had been published in May of 1897. Rudyard Kipling’s Poem, The Vampire, was also released in 1897—which makes the year an oddly influential year for Gothic Horror and vampirism. Considering the players for Vampires, were clerks, bankers, accountants and independent business owners, it’s likely they ran in the same circles as landlords and property investors—those who would laughingly take ownership of the socially derogatory expression “Vampire” and use it as a mascot for a newly formed football side. There’s no way to know if this is true, but its as good a guess as any. There’s also the likelihood that they came to consensus, while inventing a name for their side, that Vampires just sounded good and scary.

According to The History of Soccer in the San Francisco Bay Region website, maintained by David Litterer, “… soccer first made its appearance in Northern California in the late 19th Century; soon the California Football League, Western League and other circuits were founded, which eventually led to the formation of the California State Football Association in 1902.” Just two years later, the State FA would launch the State Cup as well as the Bellis Perpetual Trophy. Vampires were amongst the early powerhouses of these competitions, along with names like Union Works, Burns, and of course, they’re local rival, the Barbarians—who can boast having won the State Cup three times and the Bellis Trophy once. Litterer provides the lists of silverware in the Vampires’ case: State Cup in 1907, 10, 14 and the Bellis Trophy 1910 and 11… and looks like they did the triple in 1910.

In their centenary celebration, the San Francisco Soccer Football League released a 20-page document, making a list of the league winners available. The Vampires from Alameda managed to win the league in both 1908 as well as in 1910… Barbarians only managed to win the league once, in 1923. Sean McGeever, author of a lengthily bit of history content provided in the league document, tells us “Founded in 1902, the SFSFL is, in fact, one of the oldest semi-professional leagues in the United States… One of the early teams in the league, the Vampires, sported a bat on their jerseys, and rumor has it, drew first blood every game!” This, and the few remaining team photos, can confirm the jersey recreations by Brian Bunk are accurate (Shown above, courtesy of @SoccerHistoryUS).

Prior to the turn of the century, the ethnic composition of San Francisco’s immigrants, and by default, soccer teams, was primarily of English or Scottish descent; however, “The 1920s proved to be a pivotal decade in the establishment of a new generation of soccer teams due to the influx of immigrants from Germany, Russia, France, and other countries where the Great War had caused cataclysmic changes,” says McGeever. These newly minted Americans looked to form their own Athletic Clubs and soccer teams too—so much so, that a second division had to be added to the SFSFL. While the Vampires won their second State Cup in 1909-10 and won it again in 1913-14, ten years would go by before another of the region’s founding clubs would win the league title. McGeever tells us, “The Vampire’s State Cup success in 1914 proved, in retrospect, to be the end of an era.” The Vampires would not win any more titles for their remaining ten years in the league, and in 1924-25 they were replaced in the league by Unione Sportiva Italiana, the “Soccer Champions.”

Vampires’ 1923 season was a disaster, according to J.N. Young’s report in Spalding’s Soccer Football Guide of 1923, “From the start, the competition was keen and Olympic and Union Iron Works were generally considered as the most likely contenders. Yet it could not be said that they dominated the other teams which, with the exception of Vampires and later Burns, kept well in the fighting line...” The club from Alameda finished dead last, they showed no fight all year and were bottom of the table with no wins and gave up thirty more goals than they scored. On the other hand, they fought hard in the State Cup, forcing replays in the first and second rounds, as well as in the semi-finals. After each draw, they would follow up with a win in the replay. Vampires even, somehow, forced a reply in the Cup Final, drawing newcomers McKinley Park 3-3 away. On the home leg, they lost the final 1-3 and that may have been the proverbial stake in the heart for the Vampires in the City.

If the club vanished into thin air or put itself to rest in a coffin, Vampire Association Football Club was not mentioned in any available sources after 1924. For a short while, however, the frightful club from Alameda California haunted the football grounds of the Bay Area and even made a meal of their competition. There is every chance that several of Vampires’ players were not done playing soccer just because the team didn’t show up for any more seasons in the SFSFL, and they might have found somewhere else to play. The San Francisco Soccer Football League is still up and running, with many current clubs who can trace their lineage back, through mergers and moves, to the clubs of yesteryear and maybe… just maybe there was a vampire or two who played for them too.

- Josh Duder