Less than forty miles separate Levi’s Stadium from the Crocker-Amazon Soccer Fields, but on a chilly Sunday morning in late June, the World Cup felt like a very distant spectacle. A damp fog had settled over San Francisco’s southern edge, insulating it from the global mega-event and allowing attention to settle on the mid-table clash between Inter SF and SF City reserves unfolding on the artificial turf in front of us. As fifteen or so well-wrapped spectators looked on, coaches from both teams barked instructions at their players, urging them to “pinch in” or “mark up” to gain an edge in a fast-paced game.
In the end, it was Inter who headed for the warmth of their cars in a better mood, a first-half goal making the difference in a 1-0 win. Still, their opponents weren’t too downbeat. “It was a hard-fought, competitive game,” SF City center-back AJ Heckmann reflected. “Ultimately we were on the wrong side of it, but it was a fun game to be a part of.”
The two teams were battling for a playoff spot in the Premier Division of the amateur San Francisco Soccer Football League (SFSFL), the oldest existing soccer competition in the United States. Founded in 1902, the SFSFL has helped soccer retain a foothold in the City by the Bay for over a century, enduring even as several professional clubs failed to gain traction and folded. Throughout that long history, the league has been a hub for good soccer on the West Coast, SFSFL clubs having won four U.S. Open Cup titles. It has also provided the kind of camaraderie that only sports can to help newcomers to San Francisco find their feet through play.
The history of soccer in San Francisco is nearly as old as the city itself. A mere dot on the map with 200 inhabitants in 1846, San Francisco was transformed virtually overnight from a somnolent fishing village in the dunes to a bustling boomtown following the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills in 1848. By 1870, the city’s population had swelled to nearly 150,000, the waters of San Francisco Bay crammed with ships transporting goods and people to and from the busiest port on the West Coast.
A significant number of those disembarking in San Francisco were immigrants, attracted by reports of the fortunes on offer in California. As early as 1852, more than half of the city’s male residents came from abroad, largely from the British Isles. Thousands of miles away from their native land, those immigrants sought to retain a sense of home by forming social clubs where they could hang out with their compatriots and live out old traditions in the new country. Among the pastimes those clubs partook in was soccer, the rules of which had been codified in London in 1863 and which by the late nineteenth century was entrenched as Britain’s most popular sport. In 1892, the city’s first soccer competition arrived in the form of the short-lived Pacific Coast Association Football League (PCAFL), which boasted fifteen sides at its peak before disbanding in 1895.
Though the PCAFL didn’t last, San Francisco’s appetite for organized soccer had been whetted, and in 1902 the SFSFL was formed to satisfy that hunger. Known initially as the California Football Association, the new league’s principal constituency remained the British expatriate community. According to San Francisco soccer historian Sean McGeever, who has exhaustively documented the SFSFL’s history, the players who filled the rosters of the league’s eight founding teams in its inaugural season were “practically all English or Scottish.” Several of those early teams were organized by local ethnic social clubs, including the Scottish Thistle Club– catering to immigrants from north of Hadrian’s Wall– and the American-British Rifles, champions in the league’s first season.
Those British-aligned clubs dominated the SFSFL in its first two decades, a trend which began to shift in the 1920s. The end of World War One and the roaring American economy brought a new wave of immigrants to San Francisco, who took with them a zeal to play their favorite sport in their adopted home. A raft of new, ethnically-based clubs entered the SFSFL in the interwar period, including Teutonia (a German club), Mercury (Russian) and Club Perú; by 1927, there were enough sides to add a second division.
The appeal of ethnic soccer lay partly in its familiarity. As Derek van Rheenen, a professor of education at UC Berkeley and author of multiple articles chronicling SFSFL history, told me recently over Zoom, soccer “offered an opportunity for individuals to both assimilate into the new country while also retaining their pride of culture and of identity.” Playing alongside compatriots and speaking their native tongues, soccer helped new arrivals bridge the distance between their homelands and their unfamiliar surroundings. It was also a counterpoint to the pervasive xenophobia of 1920s America. While the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act– which heavily restricted immigration from Eastern Europe and Asia– had been passed in a bid “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity,” the diverse makeup of the SFSFL allowed the league to flourish between the wars.
While soccer in the U.S. has often been seen as a tool of exclusivity, a way for immigrant communities to keep themselves at a distance from the American mainstream, it could also serve as a method of integration. Take the example of the San Francisco Vikings. The Vikings, founded in 1922 by the local Danish community and whose red-and-white uniforms mirrored the colors of the Danish flag, had a roster which was “purely Scandinavian” in its early years, according to McGeever, the SFSFL historian. Yet as the 1930s wore on and the Vikings’ original crop of players began to age, the club began to relax its roster policy, scouting for players from local colleges regardless of whether they were of Nordic descent.
It was a move which bore fruit. The Vikings won the prestigious California State Cup in 1936 with Gus Donaghue, a Scotsman enrolled at the University of San Francisco, playing a starring role. He was joined by at least three other college players, none of them Scandinavian, who in McGeever’s telling “were the nucleus of the Viking team” which unexpectedly claimed the state title.
The Vikings were not the only SFSFL club to benefit from ladling a hearty scoop of the American melting pot onto their roster. As Van Rheenen puts it, there is a strong “relationship between inclusion and competitive levels” in soccer. In other words, the more open a team is to talent irrespective of ethnicity, the better they’re likely to perform.
Van Rheenen would know. Before embarking on his academic career, he played for the Greek-American Athletic Club of the SFSFL, helping lead them to U.S. Open Cup glory in 1994. Started in 1949 by brothers John and Jim Rally as a social outlet for recent immigrants from Greece, the Greek-Americans fielded an all-Greek roster in their early seasons, only integrating their squad beginning in the late fifties. By the time Van Rheenen joined the club, however, the makeup of the roster had changed completely. None of the players on the 1994 squad– coached by former USMNT manager Lothar Osiander– were of Greek heritage; the team’s biggest name was Nigeria international Godwin Odiye, while future U.S. national team player Paul Bravo also featured.
Interestingly, the lack of Greek players on the field didn’t diminish the San Francisco Greek community’s identification with the team. Van Rheenen recalls how fans would travel to support the club away from home, even accompanying the Greek-Americans to Mexico for a Concacaf Champions Cup tie against Pumas. “I think they [Greek-Americans] were super-proud of the fact that these brothers were running a team that was kickin’ ass,” he told me, chuckling. Success, it seems, was sweet as baklava to everyone associated with the club.
The 1994 Open Cup victory was one of several shining moments for the SFSFL on the national stage. In a pre-MLS era when professional soccer was either fledgling or non-existent in America, local amateur leagues often provided the best caliber of play in the country. The SFSFL ranked among the best of those competitions, and, in 1976, it claimed its first major national prize as the San Francisco Italian Athletic Club won the Open Cup (essentially the U.S. equivalent of England’s FA Cup). There was more silverware to come: the Greek-Americans prevailed in the Open Cup in 1985 and 1994, while C.D. Mexico (now El Farolito) earned the trophy in 1993.
The trophy cabinet doesn’t lie. As the four Open Cup titles show, the SFSFL has long boasted a high standard of competition. Van Rheenen, who played college soccer at Cal in the nineteen-eighties before starring for the Greek-Americans, said the quality of San Francisco’s league surpassed the NCAA in his playing days. “I learned way more about soccer and how to play soccer in the SFSFL than I did at Berkeley,” he told me.
While the level of college soccer has since improved, the SFSFL has been buoyed by an influx of former college players. Speaking after his team’s narrow loss against Inter SF, SF City’s gray-tracksuit-clad captain Jared Rist, who served as coach in that morning’s matchup, expressed his view that “at its best, this [the SFSFL] is absolutely collegiate-level soccer.” Rist, a member of the Georgetown squad which reached the 2012 College Cup final, highlighted how his teammates have stayed in shape despite only playing part-time. “Guys are fit out here, and take this seriously. So yeah, this is good-level soccer in the Premier Division.”
The league’s quality has also been bolstered by the arrival of former professional players in recent seasons. Matt Fondy, a striker who spent time in MLS with Chivas USA and the Chicago Fire, joined Inter SF after winding down his top-level career as a way of remaining active on the pitch. “I was still coaching, I was still involved in the game, but I still wanted to play,” Fondy explained. Joined at Inter by fellow ex-pros Dylan Autran, Julio Cervantes and Max Ornstil, Fondy helped Inter navigate four rounds of qualifying to reach the Open Cup in both 2023 and 2025.
Fondy’s club Inter SF might provide a glimpse of the SFSFL’s future– showing both continuity and change. Inter were established in 2021, beginning play in the SFSFL’s third and lowest division that season. Their founder Amir Darabi, a doctor originally from Iran who had come to the Bay Area the year before, told me that while he first tried joining another local team, he soon decided to start his own. Though Inter initially also competed in the United Premier Soccer League, an amateur soccer organization with teams spread nationwide, they soon decided to focus solely on the SFSFL. “I think the competition is better” in the SFSFL, Darabi explained. “[There’s] promotion and relegation, and you get a solid 22 games of the season.”
Inter took swift advantage of the promotion system, reaching the Premier Division just two years after their founding. As has been the case for many successful San Francisco clubs through the decades, they did so with a richly multi-ethnic team. The Inter team that marched up the SFSFL pyramid and into the Open Cup was “a complete mix” of nationalities, Fondy told me. The roster was “very representative of the Bay Area. I’d say there were people of Western European heritage, Mexican, Central American, some South American guys… Afghani players, Iranian players, African players.”
That array of different backgrounds on one team is heartening. The picture for ethnic soccer in San Francisco, however, is more complex. While ethnically-based clubs still comprised the majority of SFSFL outfits as recently as 2009, that share has since shrunk, as clubs like the Greek-Americans and Sons of Italy have folded.
That decline in ethnically-based clubs may partly be attributable to gentrification. As San Francisco has become a Mecca for the tech sector, the cost of living in the city has risen exponentially, pricing out many of the working-class immigrants who were historically the backbone of SFSFL rosters. It may also have something to do with a shift in immigrants’ main countries of origin. Although San Francisco still holds one of the country’s highest rates of foreign-born residents (totaling around one-third of the city’s population), the bulk of overseas arrivals now come from China and South Asia, areas not known as soccer hotbeds.
What hasn’t changed is the SFSFL’s role in helping new San Franciscans acclimate to their surroundings through soccer. What started as the bailiwick of British expatriates at the dawn of the twentieth century became a third space for arrivals from across Europe and South America, a way for people new to the Bay Area to feel at home without giving up their cultural identity. And though the ethnic component may have dwindled, playing in the league still helps newcomers build a community. Rist, the SF City captain, hails from North Carolina, and told me that he’s met “some of [his] closest friends in the city” through soccer.
There’s one more reason for the SFSFL’s continued vitality. As Heckmann, the SF City defender, put it, playing soccer “is just a whole hell of a lot of fun.”
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