California’s Central Valley has a rich fútbol history. Now you can help tell that story

Whether you call it fútbol or soccer, if you’re a fan of the sport, a group of historians is coming to Fresno to hear and collect your stories and memorabilia.

The Other Football archive project focuses on documenting the history of fútbol in California. Organizers are visiting Fresno on Friday at the Let’s Roll ice cream shop for an afternoon of conversation, documenting and screening collected memorabilia.

Interested community members — and those wanting to share their stories — are encouraged to attend and bring photos, yearbooks, newspaper clippings.

Organizers want to meet with futboleros and futboleras, football players and fans, to hear about their experiences to document the sport’s history and presence in California’s central San Joaquin Valley.

Fresno State’s Valley Public History Initiative partnered with Claremont Graduate University and the University of California Press’ Boom journal to create the archive titled “The Other Football: Tracing the Game’s Roots and Routes in California,” in 2018.

Romeo Guzmán, leader of the project and former director of Fresno State’s Valley Public History Initiative, said the archive launched as national fútbol teams prepared for the FIFA World Cup in Russia and the now-defunct Fresno Football Club made its debut.

Now, four years later, Guzmán and the archive return to the Valley as the 2022 FIFA World Cup takes place in Qatar. A fútbol player himself, Guzmán saw his love for the sport and expertise for documenting Latino-American history as a perfect match.

“For me, there’s a lot to be learned by looking at the history of soccer and fútbol in the Central Valley,” he said. “It’s a different kind of way to think about local history, but also a different kind of way to write the history of migration.”

To football or to fútbol

Though it isn’t talked about as much as American football and the NFL are in the United States, fútbol has been the most popular sport across the world for decades, if not centuries.

The 2021 Super Bowl averaged 91.6 million viewers in the United States and somewhere between 30 to 50 million viewers internationally, according to data from Nielsen and media viewership reports.

With an approximate total of 140 million viewers, the NFL’s audience falls short next to FIFA’s more than 500 million viewers worldwide for each final match.

Beyond professional teams and players with ties to the Central Valley, Guzmán knows there are more fútbol stories living in the community that are yet to be told.

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Antony “Tony” Garcia is the co-owner of Fresno Indoor Soccer on Cedar Avenue. He opened his business 21 years ago with Tom Gleason, a former Fresno State and professional soccer player.

When they opened their business, “we knew that Fresno had nothing like this indoor soccer,” Garcia said. Since then – and in his own experience playing still at 57 years of age – Garcia has seen how the sport has grown across the city.

Like Guzmán, Garcia talked about the history and importance of the sport in the Valley. He said his father was a soccer coach and part of the Clovis Junior Soccer League founders (now called the Clovis Crossfire Soccer League).

“He and his friends didn’t know much about soccer, other than when they went ahead and played when they worked out in the fields,” Garcia said. “But they went ahead and tried to coach us, they went ahead and they brought the love of soccer.”

Garcia is now doing for the community what his father did for him and his friends — providing a space where kids and adults can play the sport and also form a community around their love for soccer.

The Other Football archive is looking for these kinds of stories — of migration, community and sport — that illustrate the creation of the fútbol community in California

“I think in general, the Central Valley is not written about as much as it should be,” Guzmán said.

“And what’s pretty amazing about fútbol is that it can really tell you the history of a place, about politics, migrants, about the ways in which folks build community,” he said, “about the ways in which helps build pipelines and networks.”

How to participate in the fútbol archive

In their visits to the Valley this week, archive organizers are inviting community members who want to help, contribute and hang out to meet with them while talking about the beautiful game.

At the moment, most of the archive lives in a digital cloud storage space, Guzmán explained. For more material to be public and accessible online, organizers need help transferring files from the cloud to the archive’s website. Students and alumni from Fresno State and Claremont Graduate University will be on-site to teach people who want to help how to do so.

“We’ll have a digital scanner and if folks bring a photograph, we’ll scan the photograph and we’ll return the photograph to the person,” Guzmán said. “And then, that digital item will go into our cloud system, our storage, and then eventually will make it into the archive.”

He also assured that those willing to share their stories in Spanish can do so; he and archive organizers will help translate and interpret as needed.

After visiting Fresno, archive coordinators will head to Tulare County and meet with the community at the 1852 Visalia football facility on Saturday. Both in Fresno and Visalia, friendly matches are planned.

If someone can’t make it to the in-person sessions in Fresno or Visalia, Guzmán confirmed anyone across California wanting to participate can reach out to him for further details via email at romeo.guzman@cgu.edu.

Know N’ Go

Who: The Other Football archive project

When: 3 p.m. Friday, Dec. 9

Where: Let’s Roll ice cream shop, 403 W. Olive Ave., Fresno

More info: email Romeo Guzmán at romeo.guzman@cgu.edu.