CHARLOTTE, N.C. — After an emotional week for the Charlotte Football Club, Anton Walkes’ family and friends and the team’s supporters, a dedicated group of fans, started work on a pregame tradition for next month’s home opener.
In a month, Charlotte FC will take the pitch to kick off its second season in Major League Soccer. A few minutes before the game starts, a large banner, called a "tifo," will rise in front of the supporters’ section.
“For our first year we went really big, right? We were doing a tifo for every single home game,” says tifo committee member Will Jones.
But while reading this you might be asking, “What is a tifo?”
A tifo is a giant banner, raised before soccer games, in which fans can show their passion and a creative way to intimidate the week’s opponent. The tradition started in Europe in the 1970s, before spreading the globe, according to Jones. Now, it has become a hallmark before Charlotte FC home games, as the fans made one for every game of the 2022 home calendar.
“At the beginning of the game you have the teams lining up, you have the national anthem, and then you have that tifo raise up. Everybody gets really excited for what it is. Everybody’s talking about it. It gets people interested in what’s going on,” Jones added.
Jones, who is in his second year on the tifo committee, says a dedicated group of fans representing many of the team’s supporter clubs works hundreds of hours to make the large displays.
They meet each Wednesday night for 3-4 hours at a time, cutting, sewing, painting and finalizing huge designs on stretchy fabric. Before some of last year’s games, Jones says they sometimes had to work through the night to finish the huge projects.
“Most teams will have one or two really big ones throughout the season. So, that’s going to be a big focus of this year is trying to not have one for every single game, but taper down to have really good ones, as we go forward,” Jones explained.
For the home opener, the design is a closely guarded secret, and Jones and his fellow soccer artists declined to give any sort of tease. However, they did say the first banner of 2023 will be 40 feet by 60 feet.
Also, the usual fun of the designs will have a more somber tone to start 2023 after player Anton Walkes died tragically this month.
“Anton is a great man. He’s a great father. He’s a great leader, and we saw it on the field,” Jones said. “We want the tifos to get everybody excited for games, but we also want to find a really nice way to remember Anton.”
But Jones says they think they’ve reached a good balance for the first tifo of 2023.
“I think we found a really cool way to do so. I’m not going to spoil it, but I think people are really going to like it,” he said.
Overall, there could be a lot of change on the horizon for 2023. Jones said he hopes the team can make the MLS playoffs in its second year, and hopes they finish work on a long-discussed headquarters on the eastern side of Charlotte.
“This year, not only are we building on some of those blocks that we already had, but we’re adding in some serious quality,” Jones said about the 2023 roster. He added he hopes work finishes on the construction for the team’s headquarters, “There was rumors about it a little bit throughout the year, but it’d be really good for us to have a home, especially in that area.”
The tifo committee says it hopes to make at least a dozen tifos for this year’s home schedule, while keeping the team’s “Anton Forever” motto in mind throughout the year.