KDKA Broadcasts the First Live Football Game on Radio (1921)
On October 8, 1921, Westinghouse-owned station KDKA in Pittsburgh made broadcasting history by airing the first live radio description of a football game, a matchup between the University of Pittsburgh and West Virginia University at Forbes Field. Announcer Harold W. Arlin called the action from a makeshift booth, giving listeners across the region an unprecedented ringside seat to live sports. The broadcast helped establish the template for sports radio and demonstrated the medium's power to unite scattered audiences around a shared, real-time event.
KDKA's Pioneering Beginnings
KDKA had already made history less than a year earlier, receiving its commercial license from the U.S. Department of Commerce on October 27, 1920, and going on the air November 2, 1920, to broadcast returns of the Harding-Cox presidential election. Owned and operated by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, the station operated from a small shack atop a factory building in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Engineer Frank Conrad, whose amateur radio experiments had drawn a following of local listeners, was instrumental in convincing Westinghouse executives that regular, scheduled broadcasting had commercial potential. Within months, KDKA was airing church services, market reports, and musical performances, establishing itself as one of the first stations in the United States to offer a regular broadcast schedule to the public. By the fall of 1921, station management was eager to expand into new programming territory, and live sports coverage presented an obvious next frontier. The technology required for outdoor, on-location broadcasting was still primitive, demanding ingenuity from engineers who had to adapt studio equipment for use in an open-air stadium setting, far from the controlled environment of a broadcast booth.
Did You Know?
Harold W. Arlin, the announcer who called the historic 1921 football broadcast, was not a professional sportscaster at all—he was a Westinghouse foreman who had simply proven himself a capable, clear-voiced speaker during KDKA's earliest test broadcasts.
The Broadcast at Forbes Field
On the afternoon of October 8, 1921, KDKA sent announcer Harold W. Arlin to Forbes Field, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates and also used for college football, to describe the game between the University of Pittsburgh Panthers and West Virginia University. Arlin, a Westinghouse employee who had become one of KDKA's regular on-air voices, delivered a running account of the action using a telephone connected to a transmitter, since dedicated remote broadcasting equipment did not yet exist in refined form. Pitt won the contest 21-13, but the final score was almost secondary to the historic nature of the broadcast itself. Listeners tuning in on homemade crystal sets and early receivers heard, for the first time, a football game unfold in real time rather than reading about it the next morning in a newspaper. The novelty of the experience captured public imagination, and newspapers covering the broadcast marveled at the idea that fans miles from the stadium could follow the game's twists and turns as they happened. The event demonstrated that radio could transmit not just music and speeches but the unscripted drama of live competition.
Legacy and Lasting Impact
The October 8, 1921, broadcast is widely credited as the first live radio broadcast of an American football game, cementing KDKA's reputation as a trailblazer in the history of broadcasting, alongside its earlier achievement with election returns. The success of the football broadcast encouraged other stations and networks to experiment with live sports coverage, and within a few years, boxing matches, baseball games, and other football contests were becoming staples of radio programming across the country. Sports broadcasting soon grew into a major industry, transforming how fans engaged with their favorite teams and athletes, and creating new forms of celebrity for announcers like Arlin. KDKA itself continued to grow in influence, eventually becoming a clear-channel AM station now owned by Audacy, Inc. and serving as Pittsburgh's affiliate for ABC News Radio. Its studios today are located in Green Tree's Foster Plaza, with a transmitter site in Allison Park, and its programming reaches listeners not only over traditional AM airwaves but also via an HD2 digital subchannel on sister station 93.7 KDKA-FM and an FM translator at 100.1 MHz. A century after that pioneering afternoon at Forbes Field, the station's early experiments remain foundational to the modern era of sports media, streaming broadcasts, and instant, widespread access to live events.