Soccer has often been called the sport of communists and socialists, but nowhere is this connection more evident than … the USA? Indeed, Steven Wells of the Guardian says communist soccer clubs and leagues have sprouted up like mushrooms across the suburban U.S., where you can find “uncountable hordes of them” competing in unsuspecting places like Duluth, Minn., and Cape Cod, home of the Commie Soccer League and the Socialist Saturday Morning Sandy Soccer League (its Web site plays the old Soviet national anthem), respectively.
In big cities you can find big commie clubs. Philadelphia, for example, is home to the RASH, “Red Action Skinheads,” and SPAR, “Skins and Punks Against Racism.” In Baltimore, it’s no accident the anagram for the “Charm City Cunt Punchers” is CCCP, something politicos and feminist groups alike might take offense to. Then there are annual tournaments and festivals. Chicago hosts the annual “Matches and Mayhem” tournament, which caters specifically to left-leaning soccer clubs, while in New York, leftist hipsters have for years organized games in Tompkins Square Park.
Unsurprisingly, anarcho-commie soccer’s unofficial American home is San Francisco, which hosts the biggest tournament of them all: BADASS, the Bay Area Direct Action Soccer Series, part of a larger anarchy conference run by the Berkeley student organization, BASTARD. Wells says the highlight of this competition is the anarchy derby between Left-Wing Futbol Club and the further-left Krondstadt FC, whose team anthem, “Agitate! Agitate! Score a goal and smash the state,” he describes as “the stuff of leftist sporting legend.”