The most prominent U.S.-born FA Cup winner – and his little-known predecessor

New York Times

16-05-2025

Tim Howard is arguably the greatest goalkeeper in U.S. men's soccer history, and when he thinks of the FA Cup, memories come flooding back.
There are the obvious ones, like his championship in 2004 and his heroics in the 2009 semifinals, when a pair of penalty saves guided Everton by Manchester United, his former club. But Howard has others, too, amassed during a decade-long career in the Premier League, to this day a rare feat for an American. Speaking to the U.S. men's national team legend, it becomes obvious the tournament is special to him.
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'I've had some good fortune and some sad days,' Howard said. 'But having been to three Cup finals and winning one, it is just an incredible day out. The pageantry to the Cup final. You get a new suit, the stadium is brimming with fans from both teams, which you don't really get in England frequently – it is half and half, fans from both sides. I have so many dear memories of those finals, and they are so lasting because of how special the FA Cup is to people in the UK. There is still a magic to the FA Cup there.'
That atmosphere is something a pair of Americans – Crystal Palace's Chris Richards and Matt Turner – will get to experience, in varying degrees, in the 2025 final Saturday at Wembley Stadium. Other U.S. internationals have appeared in an FA Cup final, but winning it has proved rather elusive. John Harkes' Sheffield Wednesday forced Arsenal into a final replay before ultimately succumbing in 1993, while current U.S. star Christian Pulisic was a runner-up for three straight seasons with Chelsea and even scored in the 2020 final defeat to Arsenal. Should Palace beat Manchester City, Richards and Turner will join Howard as the only American men in the modern era to win the trophy.
There is, though, one other U.S.-born man who tasted FA Cup glory. Over 150 years ago, Boston native Julian Sturgis won the second edition of the tournament with Wanderers FC, an amateur side that took its name from the fact that, well, it did not have a home ground. In 1873 – a full 134 years before Howard won his FA Cup with Manchester United – Sturgis became the first American-born player to win it.
That was news to Howard.
'Even back then when I won it,' said Howard, laughing, 'I thought I was the first American to do it. But I guess not. It still feels good to be in a class with very few.'
The paths the two players took to win the trophy could not be more different.
Howard arrived at Manchester United in 2003 after a dominant first stint in MLS. At the time, the $4 million paid for him was a king's ransom for an MLS player, and Howard's early performances at Old Trafford did not disappoint. He was instrumental in helping the club win a Community Shield, and he started the 2004 FA Cup final vs. Millwall, a 3-0 United triumph.
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Howard had briefly lost his starting spot in '04 to Roy Carroll, and an erratic start in '05 saw him supplanted once again by the Northern Ireland international. Howard played a pair of early-round cup matches but did not figure in the 2005 final, forced to start the game on the bench.
But United coach Sir Alex Ferguson did favor Howard in penalties, and prior to the match, the American was told to remain ready should the encounter with Arsenal end in a draw.
'Because I'd had some success with penalties prior – in the Community Shield the year before for example – there was a thought that we'd switch up the goalkeeper, make a sub late on in extra time, to kind of get me in the game if it got to that,' Howard said.
Howard remembers being told to warm up. He trotted down the touchline to prepare for his entrance.
'The final whistle blew and I was like 'What happened?'' Howard said. The answer he got from Ferguson feels, to this day, a little unbelievable.
I forgot.
'And we lost,' Howard said, with a laugh. 'It was always a big 'what if' for me. What if we'd won again? What if I'd made the game-winning save? What if I could have been a two-time FA Cup champion? But it obviously wasn't meant to be.'
Two years later, Ferguson had moved on from Carroll and Howard, with the American finding himself at Everton. Though Howard holds little resentment toward United, the club that brought him to Europe, the semifinals of the 2008-09 FA Cup presented the American with a chance to close the door entirely on his time at Old Trafford. A matchup with United seemed the perfect opportunity.
'Any athlete who wants to compete will have a bad taste in their mouth (when a club moves on),' Howard said. 'United didn't do anything to me, they helped boost my career beyond measure, but as a competitor, there was part of me that just wanted to slay that dragon, to put that whole situation to bed. On this stage, and against this opponent, it was my opportunity to exorcise those demons. If I could perform against Manchester United, I could prove something to other people and mostly to myself.'
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Howard certainly did so. A tense 0-0 affair was followed by penalties, offering Howard the opportunity he so badly wanted. Everton's efforts started auspiciously, with Tim Cahill putting the club's opening effort over the bar. But the American kept things level with a stop on a poor effort from Dimitar Berbatov. Howard's second save, on Rio Ferdinand, was far more memorable, perfectly read and executed. By the time Howard watched Everton defender Phil Jagielka send Evertonians into bedlam with the winner, the demons had been fully exorcized.
'God that felt good, man,' Howard said. 'I remember we went into the dressing room, I put a towel over my head and I was just sobbing. The outpouring of emotion – it was just like, 'It's done now.' I didn't have to question if I was good enough anymore. That chapter was just done. It felt incredible.'
Howard remains an Evertonian to this day, as he will proudly tell you. The magic of the FA Cup, that persists for him as well.
'There's a history to the tournament,' Howard said. 'There have been so many giant-slayings. Teams that should never have ever graced the pitches of the biggest teams in the world go get to play there. There is a prestige to that, because of how special football is in the UK. It's just incredible.'
There was very little prestige involved when Sturgis won the tournament in 1873. The game of football itself was borderline unrecognizable back then – Sturgis' taste of glory came just 10 years after the official establishment of the game in the UK and just six after the introduction of the first offside rule, which stated that three defenders must remain ahead of the ball at all times. Matches were crude and violent and played on muddy pitches. Tactics remained an afterthought, chucked aside in favor of brute force and the long ball.
This was the context for Sturgis' club, Wanderers. Founded in 1859, right around the time that Darwin published 'The Origin of the Species' and Dickens penned 'A Tale of Two Cities,' Wanderers culled their entire team from local private schools in their early years. They were founding members of the Football Association in 1863, and by the time Sturgis debuted a decade later, they'd become a dominant force in English football.
Sturgis himself was born in Boston in 1848, the fourth son of a merchant and lawyer. His father did business with China and just seven months into Julian's life, the affluent family relocated to London.
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Sturgis attended Eton and was a standout athlete there, participating in both of the school's varieties of football – wall and field. The Eton 'wall game,' still played at the school to this day, shares little to no resemblance to the modern game of football, while the school's field variety feels a little more familiar – you aren't allowed to handle the ball, for example – but seems more aligned with rugby.
Sturgis' athletic ways continued at Oxford, where he excelled on the college's rowing team. After graduating, he began working towards a career as a barrister; as a pastime, he joined up with Wanderers, a fully amateur side.
Wanderers had actually won the FA Cup a year prior, in 1872, though the tournament was then known as the Football Association Challenge Cup. The format of the tournament back then was also vastly different, with the prior year's champions being granted automatic entry into the next year's finals, a format which would be abandoned by 1874. As the previous year's winners, Wanderers were also allowed to select the venue for their title defense, another rule thrown away just a year later.
Calling Sturgis the tournament's first American is a bit of an understatement, actually. He was not only the first American to participate in a final, he was the first foreigner to appear in any phase of the tournament, which had previously been populated exclusively by English, Irish or Scottish nationals. Sturgis was likely not perceived as an American back then, and no newspaper clippings or match reports mention his nationality, as he'd spent the vast majority of his life in the UK. We'll have to assume that any trace of a Boston accent had been wiped away.
Like so many other bits of football history, the number of people who were in attendance at Lillie Bridge Stadium in Fulham (demolished in the late 1800s) is hard to pin down. Some accounts put the number at 3,000, while others claim only 150 people attended the 11 a.m. match.
The formation of both teams serves as a testament to how much things have changed, with both teams lining up in a traditional 1-1-8. One fullback, one halfback and eight forwards. Oxford controlled the opening phases of the match, but Wanderers surged ahead on a 27th-minute strike from Arthur Kinnaird, by most accounts the man of the match. Wanderers' 1873 Cup title would be Kinnaird's first of five titles, a record that stood until 2010 when Ashley Cole broke it. His nine FA Cup appearances remain a record to this day.
Moments later, William Kenyon-Slaney – another standout for Wanderers who a year earlier had become the first player to score for England at the international level – appeared to double the lead for Wanderers, but the goal was waved off for an offside infraction.
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Oxford pushed for an equalizer but was reduced to 10 men after losing a player to injury (the use of substitutes, which was pioneered in the U.S., was still many years away as well.) Instead of playing a man down, Oxford chose to pull its goalkeeper, a rash decision that was immediately punished. The 2-0 final score sent Sturgis home as the first American to ever win the FA Cup.
Sturgis would make the Cup final again in 1876, scoring the only goal in the semifinals to push his new club, Old Etonians, to the brink of glory. Though they lost that match, Sturgis was influential in nearly every edition of the tournament in which he participated, scoring a hat trick for Etonians in 1878. The press described him as 'clever,' 'brilliant' and always 'working hard from first to last.' The Christmas Eve 1866 edition of the Pall Mall Gazette describes Sturgis as 'most conspicuous.'
Sturgis' playing career drew to a close in the late 1870s, but his second act feels like the sort of story unique to that era, the sort of jack-of-all-trades, P.T. Barnum tale made impossible by modern life. By the time he debuted for Wanderers, Sturgis was already an accomplished rower, football player and debater, and by the end of his career a decade later he was a well-regarded lawyer. He became a British citizen in 1877 and in the years that followed he became a well-known librettist – one who writes lyrics and accompanying text for an opera.
His work as a novelist and librettist continued until the turn of the century. When Sturgis died in 1904, little was made of his football career, as he'd long surpassed it. Renowned novelist Henry James wrote of Sturgis' 'beautiful, noble, stainless memory, without the shadow upon him, or the shadow of a shadow, of a single grossness or meanness or ugliness – the world's dust on the nature of thousands of men.'
While Howard is, for now, the only American male to have won an FA Cup in the modern era, it's undeniable that Sturgis did so considerably earlier. And while Howard has gone on to great things in his post-playing days – he is an accomplished pundit and remains around the game – it's highly unlikely that any FA Cup winner anywhere will ever touch Sturgis' life off the field.