The soccerhall.org archive

From the late 1990s until 2010, soccerhall.org was the website of the National Soccer Hall of Fame and Museum in Oneonta, New York. It held one of the deepest collections of American soccer reference material ever put online. When the museum closed, the site went with it.

This is not the National Soccer Hall of Fame. This site is an independent archive of the retired soccerhall.org website, and has no affiliation with the Hall of Fame, U.S. Soccer, or FC Dallas. The Hall of Fame is alive and well at Toyota Stadium in Frisco, Texas — visit nationalsoccerhof.com for the current museum, inductees and enshrinement news.

This archive preserves the structure of the old site: 3,199 pages are catalogued here at their original addresses, each one identifying what stood at that address and linking to the Internet Archive capture where the original can still be read in full.

Browse the archive

Hall of FamersBiographies of the players, coaches and referees elected to the National Soccer Hall of Fame, as they were published on the Hall’s own site.BuildersThe administrators, organisers, coaches and journalists inducted as Builders — the people who built the game off the field.American Soccer HistoryWorld Cup records, national team history, the NASL, and the research columns of Hall of Fame historian Colin Jose.Player RegistriesAll-time registries of players who appeared for the United States national teams, in the NASL, and in MLS.Induction & ElectionsBallots, eligibility rules, election procedures and induction weekend programmes.News ArchivePress releases and the Hall’s monthly history column, as published between the late 1990s and 2000s.Walk of FameThe engraved donor and honouree bricks of the Walk of Fame that surrounded the Oneonta museum.Museum & EventsThe Oneonta museum itself — its virtual tour, exhibits, tournaments, events and museum store. Full indexEvery recovered page, listed by its original address.

What the Hall of Fame site held

The National Soccer Hall of Fame was founded in 1950 by the Philadelphia "Old-timers" Association, a group of former players who wanted American soccer achievement recorded somewhere permanent. Its museum opened in Oneonta on 12 June 1999, and closed to the public on 10 February 2010 after several years of financial difficulty. A new museum opened at Toyota Stadium in Frisco, Texas on 20 October 2018.

During the Oneonta years the Hall published far more online than a museum normally would. Alongside the inductee biographies it maintained all-time player registries for the United States national teams, the North American Soccer League and Major League Soccer; year-by-year World Cup records going back to 1930; and a long run of research columns by the Hall's historian, Colin Jose. Much of it existed nowhere else, which is why so many of these addresses are still cited today.

One episode the archive documents well is the 2005 induction of the Magnificent Five — Tommy Fleming, Alex McNab, Johnny Nelson, Werner Nilsen and Fabri Salcedo — five players whose careers all took place before 1950 and who had been overlooked until a large body of historical records reached the Hall. Their biographies are in the Hall of Famers section.

How to use this archive

If you arrived from a link or a citation pointing at an old soccerhall.org address, that address still works — it will show you what was published there and take you straight to the archived original. If you are looking for something specific, the full index lists every page, and About this archive explains how it was assembled.