Recap
The city of St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States is home to a number of professional and collegiate sports teams. The Sporting News rated St. Louis the nation's "Best Sports City" in 2000. and the Wall Street Journal named it the best sports city in 2015.
St. Louis has two major league sports teams. The St. Louis Cardinals, one of the oldest franchises in Major League Baseball (MLB), have won 11 World Series, second only to the New York Yankees' 27. One of their titles was played against the old cross-city rival St. Louis Browns in 1944. The St. Louis Blues of the National Hockey League (NHL) won the 2019 Stanley Cup, appeared in three championship finals from 1968 to 1970, and made 25 consecutive playoff appearances from 1979–80 to 2003–04.
The most recent team to begin play in St. Louis was the St. Louis BattleHawks of the XFL. The city is slated to get another major professional team with the arrival of St. Louis City SC, a Major League Soccer expansion team to begin 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 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.
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 St. Louis Blues are a professional ice hockey team in St. Louis. They are members of the Central Division of the Western Conference of the National Hockey League (NHL). The team is named after the famous W. C. Handy song "Saint Louis Blues", and plays in the 19,150-seat Enterprise Center in downtown St. Louis. The franchise was founded in 1967 as one of the expansion teams during the league's original expansion from six to twelve teams. The team won the Stanley Cup in 2019.
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.
