100 years of Eintracht and New York

At the official opening of the office in New York last January, Eintracht’s management underlined the club’s ties with New York on a number of occasions, and indeed, SGE’s history in the Big Apple goes back even further than the famous 1951 Goodwill Tour – almost 100 years, as it happens. What better US home away from home, therefore, for the Eagles?

New York Eintracht

In the 1920s and 1930s, Germans who had emigrated to the USA were involved in the forming of soccer clubs in New York, and in 1933 one was created that even bore the Eintracht name. S.C. Eintracht was founded by German immigrants, industrial workers and labourers in Astoria in the borough of Queens. The amateur club still plays to this day in the Cosmopolitan Soccer League, featuring clubs from in and around the city. New York Eintracht, as they are better known, enjoyed their heyday in the 1940s and 1950s when they won the league five times and scooped a further seven regional titles.
August Steuer is thought to have played a role in New York Eintracht getting off the ground. A passionate Eintracht fan, he emigrated to the USA in 1923 and once in New York, he founded FC Austria as well as being active in the German-American Soccer Association (DAFB). This meant that he was heavily involved in Eintracht being part of the 1951 Goodwill Tour. This series of events was not all about football – the main priority was to foster understanding between nations in the post-war era and to promote soccer in the USA at a time when it was struggling for popularity.Eintracht visited the USA for the first time in the summer of 1951 to take part in eight matches. Three of them took place in New York, and with plenty of other big-name teams involved, the Goodwill Tour was an unqualified success.

Supporting the rebuilding of the Riederwald stadium

It was an incredibly positive experience for Eintracht in a number of different ways. The club received a warm welcome and were invited here, there and everywhere, and they certainly were model ambassadors on the other side of the Atlantic. New York had never seen a team “as well-mannered and humble as Eintracht”, the press enthused, adding that the club’s “presence saw them create any number of friends wherever they went, and not just among the German-American community but also in the upper echelons of US society”. Eintracht received praise and plenty of souvenir gifts to take home with them to Frankfurt, and also a cheque for the princely sum of 50,000 dollars – money raised with the help of Steuer to help towards the reconstruction of the Riederwald stadium. Players from the team that went on to win the league a few years later in 1959 saw this as the basis for their success, meaning that the seeds for Eintracht’s biggest national title were sown in New York! Steuer passed away in 1969, with German chancellor Willy Brandt, US President Richard Nixon and Eintracht President Rudolf Gramlich (who called him “our best friend”) sending their condolences.Eintracht returned twice to New York in the 1960s. In 1962, the Eagles defeated a DAFB select team 4-1, before taking on Saloniki, Ukrainians New York and Fiorentina on the US east coast three years later.To mark the anniversary of the Goodwill Tour, Eintracht will send their first-team squad over to the Big Apple in 2021. At the start of this year, the club already opened its New York office as part of the club’s ‘Building Bridges’ globalisation strategy to create links between the past and the future, and to give it a genuine point of contact for its activities in the land of opportunity.