11 July 26
On Local Fandom
We have eight days left in the World Cup, and already I am wondering about being bereft of football once it ends. What will I follow to get my footie fix? The end of summer is when professional clubs in many leagues start their season again — should I adopt a club? I did try that after either the 2010 or 2014 World Cup and started casually following Tottenham Hotspur. At the time they were consistently a 5th or 6th place side in the Premier League; since then they’ve gone through many managers (including Mauricio Pochettino, whose future as head coach of the U.S. Men’s National Team is under debate right now) and just had their worst season in a long while, barely escaping relegation.
I am thinking now that trying to be a fan of a side in a top-flight far-off league is just not a good strategy. I don’t have attachments to the places where these sides are located. (Our Davis sketching buddy Pete Scully is a huge Tottenham fan, but that is because he grew up in North London.) What if I find a local team to support? Looking into this matter has just led me into all the swirling discussion and debate over the future of soccer in the United States.
The first team that came to mind was Sacramento Republic FC. They have been around since 2012. I mention this to Pica; she says something about being interested in women’s footie. Well, there’s Bay FC, which was founded in 2023 and plays in the National Women’s Soccer League, the top women’s league in the country. But their stadium is in San Jose, which is too far for me to consider it local. (The identical logic applies to the MLS (Major League Soccer) team the San Jose Earthquakes who play in the same stadium).
I then discover the California Storm. How did I not know about the California Storm? They are an amateur women’s team that play in the Women’s Premier Soccer League. The WPSL was founded in 1998 and is the largest women’s soccer league in the world, with 150 or so teams in it. The California Storm are the winningest team in the league both in terms of number of championships and overall win-loss record. They are based in Davis, California.
But they are not the only WPSL side in Davis. There is also FC Davis. FC Davis is a semi-pro soccer club in Davis founded in 2017 with both men’s and women’s sides. Their founder in 2018 posted a fascinating account of FC Davis came to be. From its introduction:
“Start-up soccer” is a concept gaining momentum around the country as a growing number of communities are looking to break from the current mold of US Soccer and build a more intimate and organic soccer experience in their hometowns.
Due to the constraints of the US soccer pyramid (no promotion/relegation), you don’t start a semi-pro team for money or notoriety. You do it to create a vehicle for helping thousands of players in your community and to provide soccer crazy fans in your local area a team they can call their own.
The article is extremely critical of MLS and its closed system without promotion/relegation. MLS teams only exist where billionaires decide the market is big enough for them.
(Sidenote: Pete Scully has a couple of nicely illustrated blog posts about FC Davis.)
Returning to Sac Republic FC, it turns out they sit at the cusp of the debate over what direction soccer in the United States will go. They play in the USL (United Soccer League) where they have been since they were founded. The intention was that they would build a fan base and join the MLS as an expansion team. This almost came to fruition with Sac Republic FC signing an agreement to join MLS in October 2019, but 16 months later their main investor gets cold feet during the middle of the pandemic and pulls out of the agreement.
But this hasn’t deterred Sac Republic FC from continuing to build their team. They are constructing a new stadium close to downtown, and in November 2024 the Wilton Rancheria located in southern Sacramento County became the majority owner of the team, becoming the first Native American Nation to hold a majority interest in a men’s pro sports team. Meanwhile USL has their own expansion plans, and intends to start a three-tiered promotion/relegation system in 2027.
I very much like the notion of organic bottom-up growth of local teams and regional competition, which is how fandom works across most of the world. Teams remained tied to their community. To take an English example, it is virtually impossible to imagine the Bolton Wanderers up and leaving for Sheffield because they got a better stadium deal there. Relocations happen with major sports franchises in the United States with regularity, which as an East Bay native is something I am bitter about. Oakland no longer has a top-tier professional sports team, with the Oakland Raiders (football) leaving in 2019 and the Oakland Athletics (baseball) leaving in 2024. But they now have a USL team, the Oakland Roots, founded in 2018. The Oakland Roots play Sac Republic FC regularly.
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