The USL side lost every game of the 2013 season, based in a hotel and playing every game away, but their fighting spirit earned their opponents’ respect

Football, as the saying goes, is a results business and teams are prepared to rip up blueprints and burn through personnel in order to get them. Losing runs can act like a virus, stripping confidence and cohesion from even the most stable side, but one way or another they end eventually – most of the time.

In 2013 Antigua Barracuda played 26 matches in the United Soccer League (USL) – then the third tier in the US – and lost them all. It was the club’s third and last full season, fleeting even by the standards of North America’s unstable development leagues. They are one of only a handful of professional sides to finish a season without a single point but, more than anything else, theirs is a tale of wasted potential.

The “Cudas” were Antigua and Barbuda’s first full-time professional team, founded by the Caribbean nation’s FA with the aim of developing national team players and bringing crowds back to the Sticky Wicket, the stadium forever associated with the infamous fraudster Allen Stanford.

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In their first season the team won nine games and Gordon Derrick, then head of the FA, warned visiting fans they “may not want to return home – after all, Antigua is the last stop before heaven”.

In 2012 the ambitious project was brought crashing to earth. The team won five league games and were left isolated as sister teams to Sevilla and River Plate, based in Puerto Rico, fell by the wayside. Opponents were no longer willing to travel thousands of miles to play in front of dwindling crowds. The USL proposed a drastic course of action – the team would relocate to the mainland and play all of the next season’s matches away from home.

By the time Adrian Whitbread took over as manager in June 2013, midway through the summertime season, they were pointless, penniless and fighting to complete their fixtures. Whitbread, a former Premier League player with Swindon and West Ham, sensed problems at his first training session when none of the players knew who he was. It turned out to be one of the team’s better days – at least they had somewhere to train.

I tried to get new players in, but a lot of them didn't like what they saw straight away Adrian Whitbread

The team had no home, save for a modest hotel in Tampa, Florida. The new manager had to lean on his own contacts, and upcoming opponents, to find training facilities. When there were no other options the squad would resort to a kickabout in the hotel car park. This was in a division that included Orlando City, a team who would join MLS and sign Kaká a year later. The Barracuda put a season-high two goals past them in an early fixture – but conceded seven.

Before his first fixture in charge, at the Richmond Kickers, Whitbread found out his team would not be flying to Virginia. Instead the team’s entire personnel – 18 players and four backroom staff – squeezed into minivans for the 10-hour journey. They lost 4-0, climbed back into the minivans and drove through the night to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. After waiting for hours at the hotel to check in they lost their next game 3-1, reaching the halfway point in the season without a point.

Beyond these extraordinary day‑to-day challenges the long-term outlook was bleak. “The players hadn’t been paid for God knows how many months,” Whitbread says. “Some left because they needed to send money back to their families. I tried to get new players in but a lot of them didn’t like what they saw straight away.” Even the team physio walked away, while in one particularly embarrassing episode the squad had to walk from their hotel to a game in LA when they couldn’t afford hire cars. “After a while,” Whitbread admits, “you want a home game just so you can sleep in your own bed. I knew there was no way the team was going to survive.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Antigua Barracuda faced Orlando City, now an established MLS side, twice in their 2013 campaign. Photograph: United Soccer League

The coach tried to embrace the challenge regardless but often had to dip into his own pocket to cover costs and ended up joining the players in waiting patiently to be reimbursed. The Barracuda players, physically exhausted after a season of long road trips and unsure if they would ever get paid, would have been forgiven for losing interest in results, but George Dublin, the captain, insists that was never an issue. “As a player, every game you go into you want to get a win. There were games we thought we should have won – competing, ahead after 80-something minutes, but by the 90th minute we had lost.”

Dublin accepts that off-field issues meant the team were fighting a losing battle. “We were on the road all the time, sleeping in hotels, driving for hours,” he says. “Plus we had families to support. We all tried to win and wanted to win games but you get to a point – 16, 17 losses in a row – you realise it’s not ever going to go right.”

The team never got the necessary result to avoid an unwanted place in history but two weeks before their final fixture Whitbread and his players finally got paid. It was a happy ending of sorts and, looking back nearly five years later, both the coach and captain are philosophical. “I will never take it as a negative,” says Whitbread, who is now working at Barnet in League Two. “Going through those struggles has made me stronger and wiser.”

The team was a good idea. There is nothing that’s perfect in the world George Dublin

The side’s sense of togetherness helped the margins of defeat grow slimmer and earned their opponents’ admiration and respect. “The players stuck together and wanted to better themselves. Their spirit was unquestionable,” Whitbread adds. “When word got around about what was going on, the other teams couldn’t believe the spirit we had. After a game in Arizona [a 1-0 defeat to Phoenix FC] the home fans even invited the players to have a beer with them.”

The project at least achieved one objective: improving the national team. In 2012 Antigua and Barbuda progressed to the second round of Concacaf World Cup qualifying, narrowly lost their first competitive matches against the USA and broke into the world’s top 100. For a nation with a population similar to Andorra it was a striking achievement.

That legacy has sadly been overshadowed by Derrick’s six-year suspension from football, handed down by Fifa’s ethics committee last September.

When asked to explain Antigua Barracuda’s nosedive into the history books, Dublin and Whitbread pinpoint the financial restraints that so often affect sport in the Caribbean. “A lot of these teams really do run on a shoestring budget,” Whitbread says.

As part of the national team that broke new ground Dublin had hoped sponsors would move in to back the club side financially. Instead they were left high and dry – but there are lessons to be learned from their slow decline. “It was definitely difficult,” says Dublin. “But it’s something we all learned from – something that was meant to happen. There is nothing that’s perfect in the world. I still think the team was a good idea but when people invest in Caribbean football they want instant results.” They are not the only ones.