KQED’s Silicon Valley Unseen is a series of photo essays, original reporting and underreported histories that survey the tech capital’s overlooked communities and subcultures from a local perspective.
L
et it be known: Silicon Valley is soccer country.
Here, our love of the net isn’t just limited to venture capitalist goals. Our passion and skills can also be seen on our soccer fields, where goals and nets of another kind abound.
Take Fair Oaks Park in Sunnyvale, for example. Located off Hwy. 101 near Hwy. 237, it’s where you’ll find taqueros, paleteros, birthday parties, bootleg bartenders and even live mariachi bands setting up next to a gorgeous stretch of renovated turf fields. Despite being meant for football and baseball, it’s where soccer reigns supreme.
In maverick fashion, these players run — cutting straight down the clearly demarcated lines — as if to repurpose America’s pastime into a site of pilgrimage for renegade fútbolistas who might otherwise go unnoticed in suburbia.
Everyone shows up
As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize that this kind of public soccer display in America is not so much about getting physical exercise as it is about exercising a sense identity through communal gathering. Everyone shows up to watch, to hang out and to feel a sense of home, even when home might actually be across another, more hardened boundary. And maybe that’s part of what makes the game such a necessity.
Nowhere else in the Bay has the same level of collective devotion and fanaticism for this sport as Silicon Valley. In my own daily life, it’s fervently rampant. I did, after all, grow up in a home with a single immigrant dad who revered the holy sport.
My dad, who migrated to Silicon Valley from Mexico and serendipitously landed a career in tech during the ’80s, has participated in pick-up soccer games and company-funded leagues all over the Bay’s southern coastline for almost 40 years. In his later stages of playing, he belonged to a diverse group of diehards who played at a park in Mountain View every Saturday morning.
Throughout college and into my adulthood, I would drive down from the East Bay, sometimes with friends of my own, to join in. Afterwards, we’d all go to a nearby Mexican restaurant to eat, drink and watch whatever international soccer matches were being aired on television that day.
My dad was a regular of that group — as much a surrogate family unit of ragtags as they were soccer addicts — until he was over 70 years old, before finally hanging up his worn-out boots and giving way to the next crop of young footballers. (My dad likes to point out that an 80-year-old Italian man, known locally as “Tony the Tiger,” continues to play).
That kind of affinity for the sport isn’t uncommon in Silicon Valley, which boasts a population of immigrants, youth groups and local teams flourishing in the area. On a pragmatic level, there’s simply more terrain and literal space to kick the ball around Santa Clara Valley than in the more urbanized parts of the Bay.
Perhaps that’s why Silicon Valley has become Northern California’s unofficial capital of soccer, where FIFA, Major League Soccer and other notable entities have established their global presence.
A storied soccer history
In 1994, Silicon Valley — not Oakland or San Francisco — was selected to host World Cup games at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto. The region’s world cup committee, led by local soccer advocate Derek Liecty, who formerly captained Stanford’s varsity team, deemed it the best soccer venue in all of the region from his playing days. It would establish a tradition of international soccer in Silicon Valley that continues to this day, where Copa America and World Cup qualifiers are still commonly held at nearby Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.
Currently, PayPal Park in San Jose is the home of the Bay Area’s only Major League Soccer squads for both men and women: the Earthquakes (formerly Clash) and Bay FC. Prior to that stadium’s opening in 2015 (which, by the way, includes the world’s largest outdoor bar that offers a gorgeous, eye-level view of the field), San Jose State University’s soccer complex has long represented a mecca of West Coast soccerdom.
In 1996, Major League Soccer held their first-ever game in San Jose at Spartan Stadium between the Clash and D.C. United.
I’ll say that again: the first official game in MLS’ national history was inaugurated in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Out of any site they could’ve chosen as the axis of a burgeoning soccer renaissance in the United States — Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Houston — MLS founders designated San Jose as the ideal destination to kick off their newly formed league. (San Jose’s team defeated D.C. with an 89th-minute Eric Wynalda goal to become the first-ever team and city to notch an MLS victory.) For years after, the Brazilian men’s soccer team made Los Gatos, on the furthest edge of Silicon Valley, their preferred home base.
An early home for women’s soccer
It’s not just men’s soccer that has been cradled in Silicon Valley, either. According to Soccer History USA, the first-ever U.S. Women’s National Team appearance in this part of the country took place in San Jose.
Later, in 1999, the Women’s World Cup semifinals (featuring the United States against Brazil) would transpire in Palo Alto. The U.S. won. In the very next game, Brandi Chastain scored the U.S. a game-winning penalty shot in the final against China. As destined by the Bay Area soccer gods, Chastain — a Women’s World Cup hero — just so happens to have been born and raised in San Jose.
Three years after, in 2001, riding the success of the Women’s World Cup, the country’s first women’s professional soccer league — the Women’s United Soccer Association — launched. Guess where the start-up league decided to add its first and only Bay Area squad? In San Jose. The Bay Area CyberRays (later renamed San Jose CyberRays) would win the league’s first championship in dramatic penalty kicks against Atlanta. Unfortunately, the WUSA shuttered in 2003.
The CyberRays’ spiritual inheritors, FC Gold Pride, followed in 2008, a short-lived franchise that The Guardian once dubbed “women’s soccer’s forgotten dream team.” The clubhouse featured some of the best women players from around the globe, including Brazilian legend Marta, a five-time FIFA Women’s Player of the Year who led Gold Pride to a national championship in the squad’s final season. The team started out playing by games in — you guessed it — Silicon Valley. They were owned by Silicon Valley tech CEO Brian NeSmith and his wife, Nancy, whose daughters played soccer locally. NeSmith ran a Sunnyvale-based cybersecurity company, which he compared to launching his soccer team in the fledgling league.
And the list goes on. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the San Jose Earthquakes were originally founded in 1974, preceding the MLS by 21 years and making them among the nation’s oldest still-active soccer clubs at the professional level).
Full-circle, but even better
When I think back on growing up in Silicon Valley with my soccer-loving dad, it all makes sense. He often took me and my older brother to games at Stanford Stadium and Spartan Stadium to see international matches and the San Jose Clash. (My dad attended a 1994 World Cup showdown, albeit without me or my brother at his side).
And now, decades later, with a toddler of my own, I’ve taken my dad and son to San Jose to root for the Bay FC, the splashy new expansion team in the National Women’s Soccer League. It was the first women’s pro soccer game my dad ever attended — a sign of the sport’s continued growth, popularity and evolution. Attending such games wouldn’t feel nearly as feasible if we had to make the commute from San Francisco, Berkeley or the North Bay.
Luckily, we have it all right here in our backyard.
