The city of St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States is home to more than a dozen professional, semi-professional, and collegiate sports teams. The Sporting News rated St. Louis the nation's "Best Sports City" in 2000[1] and the Wall Street Journal named it the best sports city in 2015.[2]
The most recent team to begin play in St. Louis is St. Louis City SC, a Major League Soccer expansion team that started play in 2023. St. Louis has an extensive history in soccer, contributing at least one participant to each FIFA World Cup contested by the United States men's team. The city is the birthplace of corkball.
St. Louis is represented in Major League Baseball by the Cardinals, founded in 1882 and playing in the National League since 1892. The team won its first World Series in 1926 and its 11th and most recent in 2011. The team plays at the 43,795-seat Busch Stadium (the third ground to bear that name), which has a view of the city's Gateway Arch.
On August 20, 2019, Major League Soccer announced it had approved St. Louis as the league's 28th franchise. The franchise, St. Louis City SC, was initially expected to join in the 2022 season, but its debut was put off to 2023. It plays home games at CityPark, located next to Union Station., which opened in 2023.[10]
City SC's reserve side, St. Louis City SC 2 (aka City2), began play in 2022 as one of the 21 inaugural members of MLS Next Pro, a third-level league consisting almost entirely of.reserve sides of MLS clubs. In its first season, City2 split its home schedule between Hermann Stadium at Saint Louis University and Ralph Korte Stadium at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, but all home games were moved to CityPark in 2023.
St. Louis has long had a reputation as being one of America's soccer hotbeds, and is home to arguably the richest soccer history in the nation. The city has a strong tradition of prep and select soccer, which is followed very closely by many area residents. St. Louis has contributed at least one participant to each FIFA World Cup contested by the United States men's team. The Saint Louis University men's soccer team has won 10 national championships, appeared in 16 NCAA Final Fours, and consistently ranks among the top-10 Division I soccer teams by attendance.
In 2013, Chelsea and Manchester City played to a sellout crowd of 48,000 at Busch Stadium.[11] Later that year, on August 10, the Edward Jones Dome hosted a friendly between Real Madrid and Internazionale before 54,184 fans, who set a St. Louis record for attendance for a soccer match.[11]
St. Louis is the former home of several professional teams, including the St. Louis Stars, which played in St. Louis from 1967 to 1977 in the North American Soccer League. St. Louis also was the home of the St. Louis Steamers, an indoor soccer team that played in St. Louis from 1979 to 1988. The Steamers averaged over 17,000 fans during their peak, outdrawing the St. Louis Blues NHL team.[13] The St. Louis Ambush stole the scene from 1992 to 2000. Featuring mainly local talent, the team won the 1995 NPSL championship, which was and still is the only professional soccer championship in the history of St. Louis.
The St. Louis Soccer Hall of Fame, established in 1971, is located at the Midwest Soccer Academy and includes a museum with various exhibits.[14] The first annual dinner was held in 1971.[14]
The first NHL team to call St. Louis its home was the St. Louis Eagles. The franchise moved from Ottawa in time for the 1934–35 NHL season. The Ottawa Senators had played in the NHL from 1917 to 1934. During that time the team had won the Stanley Cup in 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1920, 1921, 1923, and 1927. Following the Cup win in 1927 the team went on a sharp decline and in December 1933 rumors surfaced that the Senators would merge with the equally strapped New York Americans. This information was denied by Ottawa club president Frank Ahearn, who had sought financial help from the league. The team played the full 1933–34 season, transferring one home game to Detroit. Near the end of the season, reports surfaced that the club had entered into a deal with St. Louis "interests" to move the club. The team lost its last home game by a score of 3–2 to the Americans on March 15, 1934, before a crowd of 6,500. The final game of the season was a 2–2 tie with the Maroons at the Montreal Forum on March 18, 1934.
The Eagles would survive only one season, as the team continued to lose money due to high travel costs. At that time, the league only had nine teams, with St. Louis playing in the Canadian Division. The division consisted of two teams in Montreal (the Canadiens and Maroons), one team in Toronto (Toronto) and the New York Americans. The American Division hosted the Boston Bruins, Detroit Red Wings, Chicago Black Hawks and the New York Rangers. The Eagles would finish with a league-worse record of 11-31-6.
St. Louis has been the home of four National Football League (NFL) franchises. Three years after the NFL was founded in 1920, it accepted the St. Louis All-Stars as a franchise for the 1923 NFL season. The team finished 1–4–2 in league play, and a 2–5–2 overall record while finishing fourteenth in the standings. The team's first NFL game was on October 7, 1923, and it ended in a 0–0 tie as they played on the road against the Green Bay Packers. A week later they played to another 0–0 tie in their first home game, against the Hammond Pros, a traveling team from Hammond, Indiana. St. Louis played at Sportsman's Park, a facility that also hosted both of the professional baseball teams in the city: the Cardinals and the Browns. Their sole victory came on November 11, 1923, when they defeated the Oorang Indians (from LaRue, Ohio), 14–7.
The second franchise was the St. Louis Gunners. The Gunners were an independent professional football team that played the last three games of the 1934 National Football League season, replacing the Cincinnati Reds on the league schedule after the Reds' league membership was suspended. They won their first game against the Pittsburgh Pirates (now Steelers) 6–0, but lost the last two to the Detroit Lions (40–7) and the Green Bay Packers (21–14). Six of the Reds players joined the team for the last two games. The team was headquartered at the St. Louis National Guard Armory, which accounts for its nickname the 'Gunners'.
The third franchise was the St. Louis Cardinals and they played in St. Louis from 1960 to 1987. They advanced to the playoffs just three times (1974, 1975 & 1982), never hosting or winning in any appearance. In 1987, the team moved to Phoenix, Arizona and became the Phoenix Cardinals; the team changed its geographic location name to Arizona in 1994. Before moving to St. Louis, the Cardinals were based in Chicago. The Chicago Cardinals played there from their founding in 1898 until their move to Missouri in 1959.
The fourth franchise was the St. Louis Rams who played in the city from 1995 to 2015. Founded in 1936 in Cleveland, Ohio, the Rams won the pre-mergerNFL Championship twice, in 1945 and 1951. After playing in Los Angeles from 1946 to 1994, the Rams moved to St. Louis in 1995. The team appeared in 2 Super Bowls while based in St. Louis, defeating the Tennessee Titans 23–16 to win Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000, and losing 20–17 to the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XXXVI in 2002. The team's home in St. Louis, the Edward Jones Dome, hosted 66,965 spectators.
On January 13, 2016, it was announced that NFL owners voted 30–2 to allow Rams ownership to move the team back to Los Angeles for the 2016 season.[15][16]
In December 2018, it was announced the XFL would place a team in St. Louis. The St. Louis BattleHawks began play in February 2020 and played their home games at the Dome. The XFL season was ended prematurely by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the league soon folded and filed for bankruptcy. After a group led by Dwayne Johnson bought the league out of bankruptcy, the league resumed play in 2023, with the BattleHawks returning.
St. Louis has several recreational corkball leagues. A variant of baseball, corkball is played with a 1.6-oz. ball and a bat whose barrel is 1.5" wide. It has many of the features of baseball, yet can be played in a very small area because there is no base-running. Invented on the streets and alleys of St. Louis in the early 1900s, the game has leagues around the country, thanks to servicemen who introduced the game to their buddies during World War II and the Korean War.[20]
Individual sports
St. Louis was home to four prominent twentieth-century boxers: Sonny Liston, Henry Armstrong, and brothers Leon and Michael Spinks. The Spinkses are the first of only two sets of brothers to have captured the heavyweight boxing title. Leon's son Cory Spinks has also held a world title.
The Metro East region, across the Mississippi River in Illinois, is home to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE), whose teams play as the SIU Edwardsville Cougars in the Division I Ohio Valley Conference (OVC). Like SLU, SIUE does not sponsor football, but unlike SLU has never had a football program. SIUE is also known for its men's soccer program, and has an active rivalry with the Billikens. The men's soccer team joined the OVC, which previously sponsored soccer only for women, in 2023 when that conference launched a men's soccer league for the first time.
Lindenwood University, located in the suburb of St. Charles, is represented by the Lindenwood Lions. Since the start of the school's transition from Division II to Division I in July 2022, most Lions teams have competed in the OVC. The football team plays in the Big South–OVC Football Association, a football-only alliance between the OVC and the Big South Conference that started play in 2023. Even before the Lions' move to Division I, three Lindenwood programs in sports not sponsored by the OVC competed as effective Division I members in sports that have no Division II national championship, with two still active. The women's ice hockey team competed in College Hockey America before the conference's 2024 merger with the Atlantic Hockey Association that created Atlantic Hockey America. The women's gymnastics team competed in the Midwest Independent Conference until the team was shut down after the 2023–24 season (see below), and the men's volleyball team plays in the Midwestern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association. Five other Lindenwood teams that had competed in the school's former D-II home of the Great Lakes Valley Conference joined other D-I conferences in 2022, all in sports not sponsored by the OVC. Men's and women's lacrosse joined the Atlantic Sun Conference (with men's lacrosse being dropped after the 2023–24 season), while men's soccer and men's and women's swimming & diving joined the Summit League. Men's ice hockey, which was added as a varsity sport in 2022–23, competes as a Division I independent. Men's soccer moved to the OVC when that conference began sponsoring the sport in 2023–24, while both swimming & diving programs were eliminated after that school year. Lindenwood's rugby program, despite having started only in 2011, is one of the top ranked rugby programs in the country.[22]
On December 1, 2023, Lindenwood announced it would eliminate nine NCAA teams and 10 in all at the end of the 2023–24 school year — the coeducational club sport of cycling, women's field hockey, women's gymnastics, men's lacrosse, men's and women's swimming & diving, men's tennis, men's indoor and outdoor track & field, and men's wrestling.[23]
Lindenwood also operated a sister campus on the Illinois side of the river in Belleville from 2009 until that campus was closed in 2020. The Belleville campus had been a dual member of the NAIA and USCAA in its first season of varsity athletics in 2011–12, and then fully aligned with the NAIA, remaining in that organization until the campus' closure.
The Ohio Valley Conference (OVC) is a collegiate athletic conference which operates in the Midwestern and Southeastern United States. It participates in Division I of the NCAA; the conference's football programs compete in partnership with the Big South Conference in the Football Championship Subdivision, the lower of two levels of Division I football competition. The OVC has 11 members, six of which compete in football in the conference.
The Summit League, or The Summit, is an NCAA Division I intercollegiate athletic conference with its membership mostly located in the Midwestern United States, from Minnesota in the east, to the Dakotas, Nebraska and Colorado to the West, and Missouri and Oklahoma to the South. Founded as the Association of Mid-Continent Universities in 1982, it rebranded as the Mid-Continent Conference in 1989, then again as the Summit League on June 1, 2007. The league headquarters are in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
NCAA Division I (D-I) is the highest level of intercollegiate athletics sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the United States, which accepts players globally. D-I schools include the major collegiate athletic powers, with large budgets, more elaborate and nicer facilities and a few more athletic scholarships than Divisions II and III as well as many smaller schools committed to the highest level of intercollegiate competition.
The Great Lakes Valley Conference (GLVC) is a college athletic conference affiliated with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) at the Division II level. Its fourteen member institutions are located in the U.S. states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri. There are also three associate members who participate in sports not sponsored by their home conference.
Sports in Louisville, Kentucky include amateur and professional sports in baseball, football, basketball, horse racing, horse shows, ice hockey, soccer and lacrosse. The city of Louisville and the Louisville metropolitan area have a sporting history from the mid-19th century to the present day.
NCAA Division I independent schools are four-year institutions that compete in college athletics at the NCAA Division I level, but do not belong to an established athletic conference for a particular sport. These schools may however still compete as members of an athletic conference in other sports. A school may also be fully independent, and not belong to any athletic conference for any sport at all. The reason for independent status varies among institutions, but it is frequently because the school's primary athletic conference does not sponsor a particular sport.
The Saint Louis Billikens are the collegiate athletic teams that represent Saint Louis University, located in St. Louis, Missouri. The Billikens compete in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) as a member of the Atlantic 10 Conference. The school has nationally recognized soccer programs for men and women. The school has heavily invested in its on-campus athletic facilities since the 1990s with the creation of Hermann Stadium and Chaifetz Arena. Chris May is the current director of athletics of the St. Louis Billikens.
The Tampa Bay area is home to many sports teams and has a substantial history of sporting activity. Most of the region's professional sports franchises use the name "Tampa Bay", which is the name of a body of water, not of any city. This is to emphasize that they represent the wider metropolitan area and not a particular municipality and was a tradition started by Tampa's first major sports team, the original Tampa Bay Rowdies, when they were founded in 1975.
The Lindenwood Lions and Lady Lions are the intercollegiate athletic teams that represent Lindenwood University, located in St. Charles, Missouri, in intercollegiate sports as a member of the NCAA Division I ranks, primarily competing in the Ohio Valley Conference for most of its sports since the 2022–23 academic year.
The U.S. state of Florida has three National Football League teams, two Major League Baseball teams, two National Basketball Association teams, two National Hockey League teams, two Major League Soccer teams and 13 NCAA Division I college teams.
The SIU Edwardsville Cougars are the intercollegiate athletic teams of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE), located in Edwardsville, Illinois, United States. The Cougars' athletic program is a member of the Ohio Valley Conference (OVC) and competes at the NCAA Division I level. The SIUE mascot is Eddie the Cougar #57, and the school colors are red and white. Cougar teams have won seventeen NCAA national championships in five sports.
The St. Lawrence Saints are composed of 33 teams representing St. Lawrence University in intercollegiate athletics, including men and women's alpine skiing, basketball, cross country, golf, ice hockey, lacrosse, nordic skiing, riding, rowing, soccer, squash, swimming, tennis, and track and field. Men's sports include baseball and football. Women's sports include field hockey, softball, and volleyball. The Saints compete in the NCAA Division III and are members of the Liberty League for all sports except ice hockey, which competes in NCAA Division I, as a member of ECAC Hockey.
Sports in Atlanta has a rich history, including the oldest on-campus NCAA Division I football stadium, Bobby Dodd Stadium, built in 1913 by the students of Georgia Tech. Atlanta also played host to the second intercollegiate football game in the South, played between the A&M College of Alabama and the University of Georgia in Piedmont Park in 1892; this game is now called the Deep South's Oldest Rivalry. The city hosts college football's annual Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl and the Peachtree Road Race, the world's largest 10 km race. Atlanta was the host city for the Centennial 1996 Summer Olympics, and Downtown Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park was built for and commemorates the games.
The Southern Indiana Screaming Eagles are the athletic teams that represent the University of Southern Indiana, located outside Evansville in Vanderburgh County, Indiana, in NCAA Division I intercollegiate sports. The Screaming Eagles compete as members of the Ohio Valley Conference. Southern Indiana had previously been a member of the NCAA Division II Great Lakes Valley Conference from 1978 to 2022, when the school announced it would reclassify to NCAA Division I.
The SIU Edwardsville Cougars men's soccer team represents Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) in the Ohio Valley Conference (OVC) of NCAA Division I soccer. The Cougars play their home matches on Bob Guelker Field at Ralph Korte Stadium located in the southwest corner of the SIUE campus in Edwardsville, Illinois.
Buffalo, New York and its greater metropolitan area is currently home to two major league sports teams, the Buffalo Sabres & Buffalo Bills. Buffalo is also home to several other major and minor league sports teams, including the Buffalo Bandits, Buffalo Bisons, Buffalo eXtreme and FC Buffalo. Local colleges active in NCAA Division I athletics include Canisius University, Niagara University, St. Bonaventure University and University at Buffalo.
The city and metropolitan area of Rochester, New York, has several sports teams. Rochester was named the top minor league sports market in the country by Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal in July 2005, the number 10 "best golf city" in America by Golf Magazine in 2007, and the fifth-best "sports town" in the country by Scarborough Research in September 2008.
Soccer in St. Louis, which dates from 1882, includes pro, college, select and prep soccer teams in St. Louis, Missouri, collectively forming one of the nation's richest municipal soccer heritages.
↑ Taylor, Phil (October 31, 2011). "Where's The Boo In Booster?". Sports Illustrated. Retrieved 2011-10-28. Redbird Nation's reputation as the most knowledgeable, loyal and, above all, friendly fans in the majors .... 'Our fans are the best because they're just as passionate as anywhere else...but they're probably a little more fair-minded,' says St. Louis manager Tony La Russa.
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