Marston says the club was active between 1862 and 1865, before American football had taken its modern shape. He describes its sport as the “Boston Game”, a hybrid kicking contest played with a round ball.
Players could handle the ball in limited situations and appear to have tackled to some degree, but the game lacked the line of scrimmage and rigid stop-start structure later associated with American football. Its emphasis on open play and kicking, Marston argues, made it closer in spirit to modern association football.
That distinction matters. Calling Oneida the first organised football club may be technically defensible, but it does not mean the players invented the code now recognised as American football.
The monument’s design adds another layer to the dispute. The carved ball is oval and laced, while the club’s original ball was reportedly round and is now held in a museum. Marston sees that choice as more than an artistic detail.
The report says he links the imagery to the social repositioning of the game. By the late nineteenth century, association football was increasingly connected with immigrant and industrial communities in parts of New England. The Oneida players, drawn from Boston’s Harvard-educated elite, instead aligned themselves with the amateur college tradition that developed into American football.
In that reading, the monument commemorates not only a club but also a later attempt to place its members inside a more prestigious sporting lineage.
The memorial, unveiled in 1925, was commissioned and presented by surviving members of the club. That makes it a powerful piece of institutional memory - but not necessarily a neutral account of the game itself.
The next chapter in this debate will be decided by how historians, museums and football supporters explain the difference between being the “first organized football club” and founding modern American football. Oneida’s story may be less tidy, but it is far more revealing for it.