How Inter Miami built an army of hardcore fans… without playing a single game David Beckham’s ‘expansion franchise’ will begin their inaugural MLS campaign in 2020 to a backdrop of pyrotechnics and bouncing crowds

When Inter Miami’s under-13s ran out onto the field for a big game last September, they were met by a small army of hardcore fans, a wall of noise complete with flares, flags and choreographed chants.

This sort of surreal sight – a game between pre-teens taking place to a backdrop of pyrotechnics and bouncing crowds – is unusual but not unprecedented: eastern European fans in particular have been known to turn out en masse for big academy fixtures. But here’s where things get especially odd: Inter Miami are an all-new club whose first-team were not scheduled to play their inaugural fixture for another six months. They were, for all intents and purposes, fans of a team that did not yet exist.

“Being a fan when there isn’t even a club – it’s interesting!” admits Max Ramos-Paez of The Siege, one of Inter Miami’s three official supporters’ groups. “But the owners have said to me that without the fans, they probably would not have gone ahead and created this club.”

Inter Miami (an “expansion franchise”, in local parlance) will be joining MLS for the impending 2020 season. It is a longstanding project brought into existence by, among others, David Beckham, who serves as the club president. Eight years in the making, and ahead of their first ever league fixture this month, Inter Miami look a lot like your average fully-fledged MLS club: there’s a manager, a backroom staff, a high-pedigree first-team squad and a burgeoning academy setup, as well as a newbuild stadium and training complex in the works. There are also fans. Lots of them.

If Inter Miami is a club that’s been built from the bottom up, their fanbase has been created from the top down. Central to this drive has been the fan groups – non-profit organisations formed and run by local volunteers in partnership with the club – who have been present throughout the club’s nascent stages: at council meetings, planning-permission consultations and boardroom summits. Ramos-Paez says the aim has been to create a fanbase that reflects the unique demographic and cultural heritage of south Florida.

“Miami is an insane melting pot of people – many from Central and South America – and historically they haven’t felt like American soccer spoke to them,” he explains. “In this country, the sport has always been pretty Anglo-focused, very rah-rah middle America. This is a club with Hispanic owners, in a largely bilingual city. So what we’re trying to do is to emulate that Latin fan culture. For a start we call it futbol, not soccer.”

The bilingualism has been a huge part of the fan groups’ social-media drive. Go on The Siege website and you’ll find an extensive songbook of Inter Miami chants, which have already been committed to memory by the group’s 300-plus members during organised evening singalong sessions.

“We’ve adapted a few songs from South American terraces and also Latin pop songs,” says Ramos-Paez. “We’re trying to take the cultures we come from in terms of football support but add a Miami flavour to it. Really, we want to make ourselves a unique voice, because we feel like for a lot of MLS clubs, you can ‘plug and play’ the fan culture of each one without being able to tell the difference.”

That may be so, but surely this model of fan culture – one that’s been cultivated and coordinated semi-officially, rather than having sprung up organically over time – is open to accusations of inauthenticity?

“All we’re trying to do it give the culture guidance,” says Marco Galarza of another fan group, Southern Legion. “The futbol culture already existed in Miami, partly because of the Latin American population and also because of the fact that there used to be an MLS team – Miami Fusion, which folded in 2001 and left a lot of fans hanging. But it’s not like we stopped watching football altogether.”

Galarza and his fellow Southern Legion members have spent the last few Saturdays fine-tuning their prospective matchday routine. “We get together, 30 or 40 of us, and in the morning we play football. Then we have a cook-out – with our kids, our wives, our husbands. So there’s barbecue and beers, and while that happens the band get going, and suddenly we’re singing. It might look weird because we don’t have a team yet, but the idea is for us to introduce that culture before the games start, so we can bring it into the stadium for that first game. Because no matter what happens on the field, the heartbeat of any club is the fans, right?”

Right. The curiosity here is a fanbase that lacks all the traditional tenets: there is no shared history of support, no great teams of the past to get misty-eyed about, no terrace heritage passed down from parent to child. Does this make it any less genuine? Speaking to those involved, it clearly does not make it any less keenly felt.

Plus – for now at least – these fans have something many of their peers around the world do not: a voice. “This is a billion-dollar project,” says Ramos-Paez, “but I’ve drunk shots with [co-owner] Marcelo Claure, I’ve shaken Beckham’s hand, I’m on first-name terms with [co-owner] Jorge Mas. This club doesn’t just feel like something I follow, it feels like something that I’m a part of.”