The FC Cincinnati supporter base is as diverse as it is passionate. That is, in part, the nature of the world's game coming to and growing in Cincinnati. While the North American soccer audience is still budding – and the bloom is looking more full every year – the world has been on soccer as their game for generations and that passion (for some) feels more ingrained in their DNA than it does as choice of what they do to spend their time and money.
For others though it is not as much their connection to soccer that helped them come to FC Cincinnati. For some it is as simple as their civic pride for their home. And while the Reds and Bengals and the local universities are undoubtedly staples in the community, many feel that the history they have been there to help build, and be a part of, makes for an experience they more closely relate to. One they feel they have more ownership of, compared to the historic ties other teams in the community bring to the city.
For the first time, FC Cincinnati will celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Night at TQL Stadium this Saturday night when they take on Austin FC. The day will feature pre-match festivities in Washington Park (including Asian food vendors, information tables and dance performances) and in-match activations will include a halftime performance by “Âu Lạc lân Lion Dance,” a rally towel giveaway presented by Mercy Health, and a custom poster for the match created by local artist “Chunk of China” available at the TQL Stadium Team Store. The Bibigo concession stand by section 103 will also be giving away free freezer bags and seaweed snacks to the first 100 patrons to the stand.
The game will celebrate the AAPI community in a tangible way, but for those in the community, they have been celebrating their heritage in tandem with FC Cincinnati in impactful ways beyond this one match.
To celebrate the cultural heritage match, I spoke with several members of the FCC fan base who also have ties to the AAPI community on a wide range of topics. Some of these fans are current day Season Ticket Members, and have been for many years. Others have seen the team grow with them as they enter new phases of life.
The people who sat down with me are civil servants and former service members, they’re community members in OTR and they’re small business owners in the far reaching suburbs of the city. But the resounding theme of all of these conversations, and the conversations that these fans told me are happening, is that FCC and its supporter culture are places they feel safe and welcome to be part of something bigger than themselves, while being themselves in every way.
“I am as Cincinnati as they come, and I grew up in the city, I live in Hamilton, and I didn't really understand the world game significance of soccer until I was older. But now, I feel much more at ease at FC Cincinnati as an Asian American,” Billy Guinigundo said in a Zoom call from his office.
Billy, along with his brother Mike, have been Season Ticket Members with FC Cincinnati dating back to the early days of the club and both attended the opening home match at Nippert Stadium. Billy, an attorney, and Mike, a Certified Public Accountant, are of Filipino descent. Both have been active in the Asian American community and FCC supporter group scene as leaders in the Asianati organization and as members of Die Innenstadt SG.
“I have never felt anything other than part of the community from the start. When I was a member, when I was new, I always felt like this is somewhere that I can belong,” Billy continued. “Maybe that's part of soccer culture in general. But that carries into the feeling that I get in TQL Stadium. There’s a feeling that at any given game I go to, I may know a lot of people around me and see a lot of friends, but even if I don’t know anyone, I know everyone around me, because we are all just supporters and part of the club. They are me, even if they may not look like me.”
Billy’s introduction to soccer came after years and years of Cincinnati sports love, where he was born and raised in Cincinnati, and can very easily recite the Reds of his youth and the success they had. But without a major soccer team to support in the early 90s, Team USA runs in the FIFA World Cup were early introductions to American soccer. Then, after going to college in Chicago, he found himself attending the first ever Chicago Fire match at Soldier Field and could sense the growing soccer culture in America.
“I always wanted to support the hometown team,” Billy explains. “So when I was in Chicago, I supported the Fire, but when I moved back to Cincinnati after school that faded. But I did continue to follow MLS, even without a team to really latch onto.”
Years passed, a passion for Cincinnati sports continued now back in Ohio, but eventually, now a more fully formed adult, the 2016 FC Cincinnati squad took the field and the opportunity to follow a hometown team re-emerged. But there was suspicion still. With the club starting in USL and not the highest division in MLS, it wasn’t clear what exactly this soccer team would be.
Those doubts were quickly resolved.
“I had a Bailey seat that first night, and just the fact that there was a Bailey made things feel different,” Billy explained. “ This felt like, and it still feels like, something you are a part of. It makes for a unique experience. It makes you feel close to the game. It’s unlike anything else we had.”
During the interview Billy reached to a far wall of his office and unhooked a scarf to show off proudly on the zoom. The scarf he had purchased that afternoon prior to the first match while wandering Findlay Market looking for merchandise. He remarks that it was a summer scarf despite that first match being in cooler weather, but looking back it remains something very close to him.
The Guinigundo would attend “just about” every home match that season as FC Cincinnati began to make waves in the city.
Later that season, elsewhere in that same Nippert Stadium, Ted and Sulin Yang attended their first FC Cincinnati match. Ted and Sulin, both originally from Ohio, had moved all over the world with Ted serving in the US Army. After serving, they settled down back in Cincinnati for jobs in the area, and moved into the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood – where they remain to this day.
“We really weren’t expecting to come here again and weren’t really sure what we'd find in Cincinnati. I wasn’t really expecting anything different from what I had experienced growing up,” Sulin said in a Zoom call. “That was until a coworker invited us to that FC Cincinnati game and that really, really turned us on to them as our Cincinnati team specifically. It was such a homegrown team and everybody was super involved. It was one of the first things that I was genuinely excited about coming back to Cincinnati.”
Ted and Sulin attended their first FC Cincinnati game and have seen the team grow into their community. When TQL Stadium was built they remember remarking on its construction, taking note of what was new and what was changing, and have seen the neighborhood grow around it.
The couple would initially go to every match they could, walking from their place to join the supporters’ march at both Nippert and TQL Stadium, but as their family has grown, their ability to attend has become more complicated. Still, appointments with MLS Season Pass on Apple TV can not be missed as they watch “their boys in Orange and Blue” every weekend, and make sure to clear their calendar to do so whenever possible.
“It became such a bigger thing so fast. It was like ‘oh, my god, we're watching this team grow and evolve, and those are our boys,’” Ted added. “It's constantly part of the community now, it's really cool to see the level of success that they've grown, and it feels like we got to be a part of that.”
“A little bit of an underdog story there too,” Sulin, the Cleveland native, added. “Being from Ohio, and then also being people of color in Ohio, I'm always going to root for the underdog, and so to be able to support this, budding, growing team, where we would go to the local college – we sit in a football stadium, it's not even a soccer stadium – and rub shoulders with our neighbors who live down the street…it was just so different.”
The history the other Cincinnati professional sports teams own are unique and special for their own reasons and provide fans something to latch onto in their own ways. The Cincinnati Reds, the oldest professional sports team in America, has been inviting Cincinnatians to the ballpark since the Harrison administration and the Bengals are going on 60 years of kickoffs in the Queen City. Generations of fans have passed down the stories of their heroes from parent to child, and that generational knowledge (and sometimes trauma) becomes a part of your community identity.
For many who are new to the city, or don’t have those historic cultural ties to baseball or football, it is a lot of history and culture to have to grasp to feel connected to the team. To feel on the inside, to feel a part of it. FCC have, according to some, created a space for the newer generation of Cincinnati residents to gather around. A place that many in the AAPI community feel they can continue to, and expand to, celebrate their local sporting pride.
FC Cincinnati are carving its own new path. So for people like Ted and Sulin, there is a history being created for them to build from like the eras of fans before them did for their families. But for people like the Guinigundo brothers as well, who have more of that generational tie to the city with their father moving to Hamiliton to start his own accounting firm in the late 60s, the history being built now feels more tangible and thus, more of their own.
“Being there from the beginning, I think it makes a difference,” Billy explained. “The Reds are kind of the ingrained history, sure, and the Bengals certainly are newer, but for the younger crowd, they won't necessarily remember Paul Brown, right? Or even Forrest Gregg. I know those names from stories, but I don't necessarily remember those players. I don't necessarily remember the Big Red Machine, but I remember where I was when Djiby Fall scored against the Columbus Crew. I remember ‘Mitch Says No.’ That's the thing. I was part of those moments, and the club made me feel like I was a part of it.”
An undeniable part of the experience shared by those interviewed is that, unlike so many parts of their lives, when they come to support FCC they feel more themselves and less part of a minority group. That part of their lives obviously never leaves them, but at least in part the baked-in multiculturalism of soccer has provided a larger umbrella for people of color to gather. The world's game, by its very nature, invites the world to play the game and cheer for it. Which in part creates a domino effect.
Billy and Mike, both of whom once helped organize supporter culture through the SGs but have since retired from those leadership roles, expressed a belief that because of the more welcoming and multicultural community, folks who otherwise wouldn’t be soccer fans in the AAPI community have joined the fanbase. A regular recommendation they provide for newcomers to the city, both in the AAPI community and out, is to seek out an SG as a measure of making new connections in the city.
“We love our community, we love that culture, that like real neighborhood feeling. We feel like it’s ours, but not ours, it's eveyones, but we get to be a part of it,” Sulin explained. “And listen, it's grown so much, it’s commercialized and has become something wholly new. And let's face it, OTR has changed so much, but one of the things that hasn’t changed, that hasn’t been replaced, is the affection that we have for the team and the team clearly has for us. So it's really, really nice seeing them play on the big stage, and still, feel like they're right here in the backyard.”
Ted and Sulin moved back to Cincinnati at, by their own description, the perfect time for them. Their return to Cincy corresponded perfectly with the club's inaugural season and they have since grown with the team.
Last fall, Ted and Sulin welcomed their first child to the world, a little boy. While pregnant and searching for a name, the couple had trouble settling on an name for their soon-to-arrive son and went back and forth for months. The desire was to have something strong to build from, while also giving him something uniquely his own. It’s a challenge all parents have to consider when providing the first gift they give to their child, but one uniquely so for those with cultural and linguistic heritages to consider. How do you provide your family a name that both resonates with your history, while also assimilating to the world you live in now.
Ted says he was leaning on names with historical significance while Sulin was keeping an open mind, waiting on the right bit of inspiration to appear.
“Ted really liked names like Apollo, or Aries,” Sulin laughed. “And I was like ‘I’m not naming my kid after a Greek God.’”
Eventually the pair seemed to come around on a name like Alexander, like ‘Alexander the Great.’ But even that didn’t fit. “With a name like Yang, if you take any traditional name you end up with 1000 little boys with that same name, you’ll never get a unique email address or anything” Sulin explained with a hint of a laugh.
That left the door open for inspiration.
“I think it was during the playoff game, where we had just won in the shootout against the Red Bulls and Roman (Celentano) he just blocked a goal and he did that infamous, like, hand shrug back to the stand,” Ted explained. “So (Sulin) looked over at me, and she was like, ‘what do you think about the name Roman?’ And I had to play it super cool but in the back of my head I was like ‘YES YES YES! Roman and FCC it’s perfect!’”
So in the early part of 2024, Sulin and Ted welcomed their son, Roman, to the world. A coming together of their worlds.
“I mean, it helps that Roman Celentano himself is not a diva,” Sulin interjects. “He’s like the nicest guy, really humble and sweet. So I was like, ‘Yeah, I don't mind naming my son after him,’ or being inspired by his name.”
The Asian American and Pacific Islander community in Cincinnati continues to grow, and nearly in tandem the support for FC Cincinnati within that community. Some of that comes with the multicultural nature of soccer, but some of that also comes from the community activism done by those within the AAPI Community who care about FC Cincinnati. The crossover of those involved with Asian heritage groups and FC Cincinnati supporters is strong.
Saturday night at TQL Stadium will be a celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage, a first of its kind for FCC. But for those in the community, many have been celebrating FC Cincinnati for years, making it part of their Cincy experience since the club's kickoff 10 years ago. And for many – perhaps most uniquely represented by Roman – future generations can be introduced to FC Cincinnati like generations of locals were introduced to their teams before them.
photos provided by Billy Guinigundo and Sulin Ngo
