Fútbol Culture in the Magic City

Officially founded in 2018, Inter Miami CF became the latest club to join Major League Soccer in 2020. Alex Hess talks to some of the team’s loyal fans who supported the club before a ball was even kicked.

November 2020

You have probably heard plenty about Club Internacional de Fútbol Miami – Inter Miami for short – the glamorous new arrival on the scene of Major League Soccer. Almost a decade in the making, the club has now completed its inaugural regular season, represented on the field by players like Blaise Matuidi and Gonzalo Higuaín, and off it by club president David Beckham. You have probably heard less, though, about the club’s supporters, who even before the surrealism of the Covid-19 pandemic belonged to one of the strangest and most distinctive fanbases in football – perhaps even one of a kind.

For over a year now – which is to say, well before they ever had a team to cheer – Inter Miami fans have been cultivating not just a community but a full-on fan culture. They have three well-established official supporters' groups (one based around inclusivity, one more family-friendly, and one aimed at replicating the South American ultras-style atmosphere), each with a songbook of chants, signature pyrotechnics, and a range of branded merchandise. Many months before a ball was due to be kicked, these groups were holding sing-along sessions, mass cookouts, and various other public events in order to recruit new fans, and to drum up community and comradeship among existing ones. All of this helped create one of the more bewildering sporting spectacles of recent years when a small army of raucous Inter ultras – replete with flags and flares – turned out to cheer on the under-13 team last September. It was at that time one of the club’s few existing teams, and the full-throated support on show made for a thoroughly heartwarming sight, albeit a rather bizarre one.

The bigger oddity, though, is that this is a fan culture that has come into existence in the opposite way to that of every other club. The traditional fan, whether they follow Liverpool FC or Lokomotiv Moscow or Luton Town, will have become part of their fraternity over many years: attending games, settling into a matchday routine, singing songs about famous moments from the past, having a mythology passed down to them by their misty-eyed elders. The more modern fan – or indeed the less well-off one – might turn to digital equivalents: poring over archive footage on YouTube, or seeking out their club’s contingent of online supporters, taking the team to task on message boards rather than in pubs. But the principle remains the same: fan culture is in essence an accumulated past, a series of rites of passage, and a form of mass expression that springs up slowly and evolves over time. Inter Miami supporters have had none of this to draw from. No shared history of support, no lionised teams of yesteryear, no club legends, no terrace heritage. Their mission was to build a fan culture from nothing – and from the outside looking in, they have succeeded.

“The fútbol culture already existed in Miami,” said Marco Galarza, a leading member of one of the fan groups, when I spoke to him earlier this year, “partly because of the Latin American population and also because of the fact that there used to be an MLS team here – Miami Fusion, which folded in 2001 and left a lot of fans hanging. But it’s not like we stopped watching football. The culture is there, all we’re trying to do is give it guidance.” Certainly the fact that the fans in question – all of whom are volunteers – have been centrally involved with the club throughout its formation, at council meetings, planning-permission consultations and executive summits, stands in marked contrast to the dynamic at most major clubs, where the growing gap between the supporters and the boardroom has caused endless disillusionment. “I’ve drunk shots with [co-owner] Marcelo Claure, I’ve shaken Beckham’s hand, I’m on first-name terms with [co-owner] Jorge Mas,” says Max Ramos-Paez, another fan group leader. “This club doesn’t just feel like something I follow, it feels like something that I’m a part of.”

There is no doubting these supporters’ commitment to the cause, nor indeed the club’s commitment to them. But the question remains: does the sheer suddenness of this fanbase’s genesis make it any less organic, any less authentic?

The long road to a first game in front of fans

An already strange situation was made doubly so by the sudden onset of the pandemic. After all, the whole project described above – the barbecues, the sing-alongs, the frantic social media drive – was all geared towards a very specific moment: the team’s inaugural home game, and the accompanying mass turnout of support in the stands. Coronavirus put paid to all that, arriving with perfect timing almost exactly as Inter Miami were due to make their much trumpeted bow, in an exhibition match against Beckham’s former club LA Galaxy. The game, a sell-out weeks in advance, was called off with just two days’ notice. “The club has commemorative towels for that fixture which are now a collector’s item,” laughed Ramos-Paez over the phone. “A weird memento for this huge event that never took place.”

Instead, the fans had to make do with giving their players a socially-distanced send-off as they boarded the team coach for the short trip to the MLS is Back Tournament in Bay Lake in July. Masking up to wave your team off to Disney World: such is the strange reality of MLS fandom in 2020. In the meantime, virtual watch-parties have been the fans’ go-to means of assembly – a meagre stand-in to the flesh-and-blood intensity of the classic matchday experience. “We’ve thought of this club almost as cursed at times,” says Ramos-Paez. “We’ve dealt with everything under the sun and never even played a full game in front of our own fans.”

But then, in late October, the day finally came. After a scaled-down trial-run the week before, Inter Miami’s game against Orlando City was attended by 3,000 or so season ticket holders, strewn around in small sections, to witness their team on home turf for the first time. Their patience was rewarded when Argentine centre back Leandro González Pírez headed home in the 89th minute to complete an unlikely comeback win, and unleash a strange kind of bedlam: various tiny pockets of irrepressible revelry scattered throughout an otherwise empty stadium.

“It was lively, it was loud, we were singing the entire time,” says Ramos-Paez. “You sense a lot of the fans are still feeling themselves out. There is still a lot of work to be done, but people were definitely taking out many months of frustration, in the voices, in the music, in the way we all celebrated at the final whistle.” In a strange way, then, this prolonged denial of the fans’ central staple – a mass gathering – has granted them another such staple: a shared experience. More specifically, shared disappointment. As any football fan will tell you, nothing unites supporters like misery. Has being kept apart somehow drawn them closer together?

“There is definitely a bond that has grown among fans,” says Ramos-Paez. “I see the conversations that happen, even the small things like getting excited about transfer rumours. And you saw when we scored the winner [against Orlando]: everyone lost their mind. We were all there, in pink and black, singing club songs. There’s no doubt these were Inter Miami fans.” Galarza adds: "We've been with the team through thick and thin. We've put in work behind the curtain, building the club and the culture. All that energy canned inside of us just burst that day.”

Listening to them talk, you would never know these are fans whose team has only existed since March. All the traits of the long-suffering supporter are present: the obsessive memory for detail, the knowing jokes at their own club’s expense, the instinctive exasperation with the players. Even a spiky animosity towards their local rivals. “It was classic us,” says Ramos-Paez, “letting in an early goal and having to fight back. But because it was against Orlando, it was huge.”

Inter Miami is a singularly strange case study that raises a simple, apparently unanswerable question: what is fandom? A connection to a club, a connection to other people, or a connection to the past?

Inter Miami supporters can certainly claim the first one, and on recent evidence the second one, too: witness not just the mutual joy in the stands but also the food drives and support for sick members that fan group volunteers have laid on during the pandemic. As for the third one, well, perhaps these fans have more history than you might think. As Ramos-Paez says: “I’ve been a fan of this club since it was announced, since day one: seven years of fandom.” And unlike fans of other clubs, who arrive into a ready-made world of history and tradition, these guys have had to build their own, putting in serious legwork. If the whole enterprise seems slightly inorganic, slightly man-made, then that is because it is exactly that. Whether that makes it inauthentic, though, is another question entirely.

“You could sense a lot of people had been waiting for this,” says Ramos-Paez of his team’s first real home game. “It’s not just entertainment – it means something.”

Words: Alex Hess | Imagery: Imago; Instagram