ST. LOUIS, Mo. – Sixteen clubs remain in the 2019 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup going into this week’s Fifth Round, all of which would love to bring the Dewar Cup to its fanbase this September.

Of all the cities that remain in the 106th edition of the historic tournament, though, it’s hard to imagine a soccer community that would embrace its club raising the trophy more than those who follow Saint Louis FC.

Since Ben Millers became the first St. Louis-based team to win the tournament in 1920 to St. Louis Busch Seniors becoming the most recent in 1988, the city has had a strong ongoing relationship with the tournament that goes back almost a century.

“When I did the book I would interview somebody about the Kutis team of 1957 that won the Open Cup, I’ve talked to people who could name the entire starting lineup and they vividly remember watching those guys play,” said Dave Lange, author of ‘Soccer Made in St. Louis: A History of the Game in America's First Soccer Capital’. “Then you’ve got the generation from the 1980s that remember the Kutis team and the Busch Seniors team and those guys, and a lot of those guys are still in St. Louis, so there’s a lot of emotional connection with the Open Cup.

“A lot of people remember those teams, they know the players, guys like Harry Keough, who coached Saint Louis University, he had such a profound impact on all those guys who played at St. Louis U and went on to become great players at the national team level like Al Trost and guys like that. They remember those people, so there’s a connection there.”

A longtime writer about soccer in St. Louis prior to his book on the city’s history with the sport published in 2011, Lange has seen much of the modern history of soccer in one of the nation’s hotbeds of talent. His research found competitive games dating back to 1875 at the Grand Avenue Ball Park through archived newspaper articles, although it can be presumed the sport had been played even longer ago than that thanks to a large immigrant community derived from the United Kingdom that settled in the region.

Unlike other cities where immigrants looked to assimilate and adopted American sports of the time, St. Louis continued its tradition of soccer in large part thanks to the city’s sizeable Irish community.

“In a lot of cities, the first wave of immigrant groups and their kids gravitated more to baseball and the more American-style sports,” said Lange. “In St. Louis, [soccer] was passed down from one generation to another, especially because there’s a very strong network of Catholic church parishes in St. Louis where the sport was brought in by the religious order that staffed some of the schools. Because of that, I just know from growing up you just played soccer as well as baseball and other sports. It wasn’t thought of as a foreign sport, it was thought of as a hometown sport. It’s part of the fabric of the city.”

That history resulted in success when St. Louis clubs first began to enter the National Challenge Cup, as it was known then. The 1920 win by Ben Millers – sponsored by the Ben W. Miller Hat Company – was the first edition of the tournament in which clubs from St. Louis took part, and St. Louis Scullin Steel claimed the title two years later, the second of three consecutive finals the club reached between 1921 and 1923.