Athletic supporters, too… but not the kind you wear!

I’ve joined up with a group called Emerald City Supporters. It’s a fan group for the Seattle Sounders.

In the soccer world, you’ve got fans, and then you’ve got supporters. Supporters are your more die-hard fan types, the ones who go to all the games they possibly can. Supporters are the ones who’re singing and chanting and whatnot, often found right behind the goal in the end of the stadium.

It’s stuff like this:

That’s us doing the “pogo”, where we all link up arms over shoulders and sing while bouncing up and down. Try bouncing up and down like that for, oh, 30 seconds or so. It’s a workout!

Here’s what it looks likes from the middle of that bunch:

Here’s our signature song… “Take ‘Em All”. (It’s an old punk rock song, written about the executives in the music business who were pissing off the guys in the band that wrote the song.)

I love the ECS gang. I’m playing soccer with the ECS team and learning a lot about supporter culture that I was only dimly aware of prior to this.

Anyway, one of the things that supporter groups do is called “tifo“. It loosely refers to the signs, banners, flags, and big overhead banners that groups make and display during the game. Generally, your tifo is supportive of your own team, although you might try and mock other clubs’ supporters and team as well.

During a game in Chicago that I went to earlier this year, the Chicago supporter group “Section 8″ had a tifo overhead that looked like the red ring that you get on your Xbox 360 when it dies. Fairly clever.

When Chicago played us here a couple of weeks ago, they had a lot more fans in the away supporters’ section than you usually see. It’s because they recruited a bunch of losers from the Portland supporters group, the Timbers Army, to come cheer for them. Weak. The TA is one of the worst supporters groups in the nation; they’re known for being particularly aggressive and basically being giant assholes. We hate the Portscum.

Anyway, we tried to pull off a really big, three-section tifo. It was going to say “SSFC” (Seattle Sounders FC) down the middle, then say “One City” on one side and “One Club” on the other. That way, it was both supportive of our boys, and a tweak at the Portscum losers who’d go and cheer for a team besides their own simply because they hate Seattle so much.

Here’s how it turned out:

Our upside down tifo overheads

Click for the fullsize shot. It was… upside down. Sigh.

These things happen with tifo. Some of the consistently best tifo by the best supporter groups in the world has been screwed up. Of course, for us, it was pretty embarrassing, but to show we have a sense of humor about it, at our next home game, here’s what we did:

This End Up

We have a sense of humor about it.

ANYWAY… this is all a long way of saying if you were watching the Sounders play against Barcelona the other night, and saw the fans holding those signs… that’s what it was all about.

PS- Underneath that giant overhead, this is what it looked like… this is one of our favorite songs, “The Blue and the Green”…

It’s a song called “Horto Magicko” that supporters groups around the world sing. Here’s a Greek supporters group of a basketball team singing it:

I like ours. It fits right in.

I was surprised at how many Chelsea supporters there were at the Sounders-Chelsea matchup today. Chelsea is a soccer club from London, and while they’re definitely in the top grouping of European superclubs, I just didn’t think they’d have that many fans at this away game.

They are obviously better than our Sounders, but I think the local boys presented a pretty decent face to the world. We played fairly well and had a bit of bad luck in converting a few chances to goals; Sanna Nyassi, in particular, had one gorgeous run but the goalie played it absolutely perfectly and Nyassi couldn’t finish.

I have some video of the match today but my computer is being weird… actually, I think it’s the camera, because the computer has been fine with video before and I kind of beat the camera up over the past year or two.