San Diego FC's CEO can turn to a past playbook to fix a new fan problem

New York Times

05-03-2025

San Diego FC CEO and co-owner Tom Penn remembers where he was when the homophobic chants started on Saturday night. He was standing right next to MLS commissioner Don Garber, who had flown in to witness the club's inaugural home match.
The chant, which has been present in Mexican soccer for decades, started out quietly enough, with a smattering of fans belting out the Spanish word 'p**o,' often considered to be a homophobic slur, during opposing goal kicks. Over the course of the match, played against St. Louis City SC, it grew in intensity. By the second half, it became something Penn and Garber could no longer ignore.
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MLS has its own roadmap for dealing with the chant, borrowed from FIFA, global soccer's governing body, and it was enacted late in the match. Fans were warned via the video board and an in-stadium audio announcement to stop doing the chant on three occasions. The last of those warnings added an additional threat that the match could be abandoned.
Standing next to Garber, Penn now says he was 'disappointed but not super surprised' at the presence of the chant. 'We certainly knew it was a possibility given the history and where we're located,' Penn told The Athletic on Tuesday. 'But we didn't know (whether it would actually happen or not).'
There's no confusion anymore. The incidents marred the home debut for San Diego, which played to a 0-0 draw in front of a sellout crowd at Snapdragon Stadium, on the heels of upsetting the defending champion LA Galaxy in their season opener. In many ways, the club cannot be blamed for the presence of the chant, and its head coach and sporting director were both quick in expressing their disgust at the fans who'd taken part in it.
The chants heard toward the end of the match emanated from more than just a small handful of supporters, with large segments of the stadium joining in. After years of pushing Mexican teams to eradicate the chant, it is now MLS's turn to take another swing at one of Concacaf's most vexing issues.
'It is a very complicated issue,' Penn said. 'It's very emotional and it's very divisive. But it's not a difficult position for us to take. Our position is clear: we want to be a club that's inclusive for all, one that is a source of entertainment and joy and fun. And this is the opposite of that in that it creates such a wedge and it's so divisive … (The chant) isn't us. It's not part of what we're going to do. So I think really the first step is us stating that. Now the audience that comes knows that. We didn't pre-state that before our first match, but now we're going to be very clear about that message.'
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Penn and others at SDFC are actively working on a plan of action to combat future use of the chant, which he says the club will roll out soon. This won't be his first rodeo when it comes to dealing with this particular problem. Penn was the president at LAFC in 2018, that club's debut season, and the parallels continue. LAFC was confronted with the chant in its first match, too. And Penn, along with others at the club, were swift to act.
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'We had to circle the wagons around here and try to look at best practices,' Penn told The Athletic in 2019, 'and we started to discover that there aren't any. Nobody had a playbook on this. We determined internally as a club that we were going to be very clear and say this is not us. This is not our club. This is not what we stand for. Therefore this behavior will not be tolerated. What was more impressive was that the 3252 [LAFC's supporters] leadership felt exactly the same.'
Prior to LAFC's subsequent match, Penn, alongside club captain Laurent Ciman and a contingent of supporters, appeared on the field. They pleaded with fans to discontinue using the chant. It worked. Though it returned briefly later in the season, LAFC hasn't had to deal with the issue since.
Other MLS clubs have had mixed results when it comes to combatting the issue. The chant used to be a mainstay at Houston Dynamo games until the club and its supporters mounted an effort to eradicate it. Though it's used less frequently, the chant does at times persist in Houston, as it does in a handful of other MLS stadiums. LAFC's crosstown rivals, the Galaxy, had their own brief battle with it.
The league itself has led efforts to combat the use of offensive language. It successfully eradicated another goal-kick chant that had become customary — one where supporters belted out 'You suck, a**hole!' — some years back.
Globally, successful efforts to end the use of the word used Saturday night typically center around engaging with supporters directly, as Penn and others did at LAFC. In San Diego, Penn says the club's front office has a strong relationship with its fan groups. The club's head coach, Mikey Varas, was quick to mention on Saturday that none of the chants had originated with the club's officially sanctioned supporters groups, which is something Penn eagerly reiterated.
'We were 100 percent engaged with our supporters' leaders both before, during and after the match,' Penn said. 'We talked to them in advance of this match, we know 100 percent that it did not come from the supporters. They are exactly aligned with us on this issue and they would like to not have this be part of our experience. It's not part of our club, it's not part of us.'
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So much of the issue with policing the use of the chant at games is how unpredictable its use is and how difficult it can be to identify individual fans who participate in it. Mexico's football federation, alongside U.S. Soccer, has poured resources and manpower into combatting the issue, with mixed results. The Mexican federation has gone as far as instituting a 'Fan ID' system in recent years, one that is capable of using facial recognition to catch fans in the act.
That sort of technology isn't actively used in MLS stadiums, though some of the league's clubs have dabbled in facial recognition in some form or another. Speaking on Tuesday, Penn was clear enough in suggesting that the club would absolutely remove any fan who can be clearly identified as having participated in the chant.
'We're not gonna reinvent the wheel here, we may very well learn from (LAFC's) success,' Penn said. 'We're considering the specific steps we can take and then the specific communication — the first part is just the communication of what the expectation is. But I would say we will absolutely be enforcing it and we will eject those that are clearly (using discriminatory language). We'll see how all those action steps that we take in our next match work, and then we'll modify from there.'
Penn and many others are hoping that San Diego can mirror LAFC's success. Hopefully it's as easy as having an impassioned conversation with the club's fanbase. For now, though, a problem so frequently viewed as one that encompasses only Mexican teams once again belongs to an American one.
'Our first match was so magnificent in so many ways,' Penn said. 'And we're establishing ourselves as a new product in this market. It was 99 good things, but this is the one thing everybody likes to talk about in the moment.'
(Top image: Illustration by Dan Goldfarb/The Athletic; Photo byfor LA84 Foundation)