The Society for American Soccer History (SASH) is pleased to announce the identification of what is currently the oldest surviving moving picture footage of soccer being played in the United States.
The footage, approximately two minutes in length, was filmed on November 13, 1921, in San Francisco. It features a match at Golden Gate Park Stadium between San Francisco’s Italia Virtus club and a team from the crew from the visiting Italian Navy cruiser RM Libia.
Identified in the archives of Cineteca di Bologna in Italy, the two minutes of footage comes from a 31-minute-long film called “La visita dell‘ Incrociatore Italiano Libia a San Francisco,” or “The visit of the Italian cruiser Libia to San Francisco.” The Libia was visiting San Francisco as part of a world-wide cruise after the end of the First World War. The film was commissioned by the Italia Virtus club to document the Libia‘s visit to San Francisco.
Remarkably, the film was directed by legendary US filmmaker Frank Capra. According to Capra biographer Joseph McBride, it was “the first film Capra directed that received a public exhibition.” The film was screened at the Crescent Theater on November 26, 1921, about a week and a half before the Libia departed San Francisco on December 4.
SASH has licensed the soccer footage from Cineteca di Bologna and it is now available for viewing on the SASH YouTube channel.
Italia Virtus was playing its second season in San Francisco’s University and Club Soccer League when it played the Libia team. Italia Virtus continues to play to this day as the San Francisco Italian Athletic Club. In 1976, SFIAC won the US Open Cup, defeating New York Inter-Giuliana. The SFIAC competes in the San Francisco Soccer Football League, which was founded in 1902 as the California Football Association.
While newspaper accounts have been found dating back to at least 1913 describing the filming of soccer matches in the US, the newly identified footage is currently the oldest known footage of soccer played in the US that has survived to the present day. Previously, the earliest surviving footage of soccer in the US came from 1924.
The new discovery is part of the Society’s ongoing efforts to enrich the visual history of soccer in the United States.
In 2020, SASH identified and licensed even earlier footage of US soccer teams, but the footage shows US teams playing in Europe. That footage was found in the archives of the Swedish Film Institute and shows the US Men’s National playing its first ever match at the start of the team’s 1916 tour of Sweden and Norway. SASH also identified and licensed footage from the Swedish Film Institute of the first visit to Europe by a professional US soccer team. That footage shows two matches featuring Bethlehem Steel FC during the team’s 1919 tour of Sweden and Denmark. Additional footage was identified in the holdings of the National Archive showing US troops playing soccer in France and Germany in 1918 and 1919 after the end of the First World War.
The 1916, 1918, and 1919 footage can be viewed on the SASH YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF9oL3yRaMyw6xtVDXj1jbD5mNAPj2ta0
SASH has also catalogued links to nearly sixty newsreel clips in US and European commercial film archives related to soccer in the US between 1924 and 1984. Those links are organized by archive under the Video tab of the main menu on the SASH website homepage at https://www.ussoccerhistory.org/.