What This Means
When I was growing up, I fell in love with the Oakland A’s. That relationship started in the early 2000s and was disappointing from the start. In every big game they played, the team never seemed up to the task and by the time 2006 came around I was pretty used to being let down. 2006 was the first world cup I took any vested interest in and was again disappointed by the listless performance by the United States in that competition, despite a spirited draw with Italy.
On June 23rd, 2010, I sat anxiously watching the fate of the US Men’s National team hang in the balance. At that time, the disappointment of how quickly the US bowed out of the 2006 competition was still fresh in my memory. With all of that frustration, I watch as the Yanks struggle with for 91 minutes looking for a breakthrough. Then it happened. From a Tim Howard long throw up the field, the break was on. Clint Dempsey put a shot on frame that the keeper spilled and Landon Donovan tapped in the rebound. All of my previous heart beak was, in that moment, completely erased. It was in that moment I completely fell in love with football.
I was always an soccer apologist, defending the sport against a lot of flak my friends in high school. But up until 2010, I never had a true emotional connection to the sport. After that scrappy goal, I was hooked. My high school science teacher, who is a huge Arsenal fan, recommended Pro Evolution Soccer over fifa for a more “genuine” approach to football video games. So I picked up PES 2011 and they only had two fully licensed Premier League teams: Manchester United, and Tottenham Hotspur. I already knew enough about club football that Manchester United is the equivalent of the New York Yankees, so I picked that Tottenham team. After winning the Champions league with Spurs in the video game (Rafa Van der Vaart is the man), I had a pretty basic understanding of all of the Tottenham players. That October I happened to catch my first North London Derby. At that time I really didn’t understand how important that fixture was but Kyle Walker scored a worldie that sent white hart lane through the roof and I found myself one of God’s most pathetic creatures: a Tottenham fan.
After supporting spurs for a bit, I looked state side for a team to get behind. The year was 2012 and the San Jose Earthquakes were playing swashbuckling football. It wasn’t pretty but it was entertaining as hell to watch.
Now this is a cringy part of my evolution, but it’s an important one…
Some time after that fateful match, my friend let me borrow Green Street Hooligans. Up to that point I never even considered a different type of sports fan than the mindless consumers we have here in the states. Sports have always been bigger than life to me and it was fascinating to see an entire culture dedicated to supporting your team home and away no matter what. It was about this time I found the Away Days series on YouTube which chronicled Dan and Tim and their shinannigans supporting Tottenham around England.
It was something I had to experience.
I had only watched the “Goonies” on TV, but they had a mid September fixture with the Sounders in Seattle. My brother and I bought tickets to support the quakes with the notorious 1906 Ultras.
The match was on a Saturday so we headed north as soon as we got off work from our construction job in Stockton on Friday. We drove through the night to keep the cost down.
This was my first live experience with football and had no idea what to expect but within 90 seconds Simon Dawkins skipped through the mid field and put the quakes up from 25 yards out. I remember my voice going out by about the 30th minute but that match was my next high. Later that year my brother and I were on a van to LA for the first leg of a playoff match and that’s when I really got to know some of the people in the Ultras.
The Quakes won that match through a Victor Bernardez free kick in the 90th minute and there was no going back. I was a football supporter.
I had season tickets for 2013 and made every away match I could from Seattle to LA. I drove an hour and half for tifo painting, the way the ultras have their membership structured is you have to “earn” your scarf.
That was all I wanted for months.
I finally got my scarf just before that fateful game in Portland.
Nothing was the same after that.
My brother joined the Army, The Quakes performance was shit, I was serving a ban I had nothing to do with, and thats when the game got political to me.
I will be the first to say that a lot of the Ultras issues are self inflicted, but 99% of that group are good people. But to see how a “club” and a league could so quickly throw their most passionate fans under the bus never sat well with me.
After the move into Avaya stadium the atmosphere got really sanitized and I became more aware of how supporters were seen as a side show. I eventually only turned up for derbies and rivalry games. At this point in my life, I was working in the south bay and it made it really hard to justify driving all the way to San Jose just to be mad about some douchebag complaining that he couldn’t see the game because I was standing in the supporters section.
In early 2015 my good friend Dexter and I made a pilgrimage to London. Since he was a West Ham fan and I was a Spurs fan, we decided we needed to see their historic stadiums before they were torn down. That trip was for the football, but it was also the trip that introduced me to photography. The matches we went to in London where good fun and all but the gem of the trip was in Glasgow and being able to experience the legendary Celtic Park atmosphere. When I got home the culture here felt even more contrived.
But through all of this negativity, I learned some important lessons about the game.
First- As a supporter, you Must remain independent. I remember when the Angel City Birgade accepted free rides to the California classico and it was promoted by Wingstop and for the rest of the season we sang “You Only Sing for the Chicken”. But once you start letting the Front Office or the League give you free stuff, you put yourself at risk for being taken advantage of. I also saw how MLS only saw supporters and advertisement assets. And that was apparent when the league used a promotional photo of the Portland timers lighting off flares only to find out the league banned the people involved.
Second- I learned that football is about your community. This is probably the key factor behind why I am starting this blog. The Ultras and the Earthquakes were my first exposure to football culture in Northern California. When Sacramento Republic were announced I had a bit of an identity crisis because Sacramento is decidedly closer to where I lived than San Jose. I was interested in what the club had to offer, but I was disappointed to see that they wanted so bad to drink the MLS kool-aid. At that point I was totally disenchanted by what the league stood for. And as MLS expanded it felt disingenuous to require all prospective franchises to have a soccer specific stadium lined up only to arbitrarily look over that to let NYCFC join the league. Currently, the league uses that D1 carrot to make supporters of lower league sides to bend over backwards to show how bad they want to be part of this closed system. Where the league looses all credibility to me is how it looks at supporters as customers by using the term market so frequently. Perhaps here in the states, we don’t know any better. Or thats what the league and federation wants us to think. But looking around the globe, you see that football clubs represent the community they were born in. Fans aren’t there to be entertained, they are there because football is part of their identity.
Which brings me to my last point.
Passion.
When I was apart of the ultras, it never mattered what the score was. We sang for 90 minutes. I paid a lot of money to buy tickets and hotels to get to whatever away games I could. This is where football stands on its own versus any other sport here in the states. Abroad football is literally a matter of life and death. To me, this lack of passion is the root of the problem that afflicts the US Soccer Federation.
When I started to feel like supporting the Quakes didn’t align with my new formed beliefs about what it met to be a supporter, I started to widen my view about what else is around in the Bay Area. I didn’t know much about the scene but dove head first into researching what other leagues where out there and what teams where around. I was interested in checking out the North American Soccer League but no teams existed at the time in northern California. About a month later the San Francisco Deltas were announced. Despite really wanting to support a team in the NASL, I wasn’t a fan of their name.
I spent 2017 changing jobs and never had the chance to make it out to a Delta’s match but was curious how their season was going to end because they were a good team but were struggling with attendance. The Delta’s ended up winning the NASL championship in their inaugural year, but folded shortly after due to their struggling attendance record.
When September rolled around the USSF decided to not give a D2 sanction to the NASL, effectively killing it. The more I read about it the more it appeared that the unholy trinity of USSF-SUM-MLS were holding back the United States as a footballing nation. I knew it was going to take something huge to give me a platform to explain how though.
On October 10th, 2017 I got that platform. The men’s national team did the unthinkable and lost to Trinidad and Tobago. That, in combination with other results, meant that the United States were not going to the world cup. This sparked an ugly race for the Federation presidency.
Ultimately the Vice President of US soccer won, so not much will change in the next four years.
That brings us to today. The football landscape looks bleak if you are not a MLS fanboy. But I am starting this blog to make a difference. Major League Soccer and the Federation would like us to believe that they have a deathgrip on football in the United States. But with the National Team failing so spectacularly, it raised a lot of questions about if what we are doing is working. I believe that the sport belongs to the fans. I believe that there is still a chance to save the game before its completely lost to bored millionaires.
If you made it this far, I thank you for your attention. I definitely don’t have all of the answers but I promise to approach this project as a student and a servant. My hope is that I can help build a culture for my kids (whenever I have them) to have and from that the true potential of football in this country will be born.
“We can always remember the past, but we only get one chance at today. So leave regrets to yesterday”
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