What was jarring about the appearance of an anti-fascist flag in the front row of the Colorado Rapids’ first game of the season, against the New England Revolution at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, wasn’t that it occurred at a professional soccer game. It’s that it happened at a Major League Soccer game.

Soccer stadiums have historically been hotbeds of political sentiment. The world over, views from all points on the ideological spectrum have found a place on the terraces, where every imaginable political view is voiced and channeled through support for the local team.

Sometimes, it has gone further. The Egyptian revolution of 2011 was fueled in large part by soccer supporters, who organized at games, created a force forged from rival fan factions and manned the front lines of the Tahrir Square protests that helped to overthrow dictator Hosni Mubarak.

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But this has been much less true in North America, although, in the early days of MLS, leftist New York MetroStars supporter groups pushed out a nascent right-wing element trying to shoulder its way in.

Yet, quietly but surely, “antifa” – as the anti-fascist movement is broadly referred to – is on the rise in American soccer stadiums. This is a direct reaction to the current political climate in which the far right has made very visible inroads since the election of President Donald Trump.

That such groups need to exist at all, more than seven decades after fascism was ostensibly defeated in Berlin, is telling in and of itself. But what is even more striking is how discreet and careful the new antifa groups, usually embedded within existing and well-established fan groups, really are.

Yahoo Sports was able to identify and confirm the existence of four specific and active antifa groups in North America, within the fan bases of the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League and MLS’s New York Red Bulls, Montreal Impact and FC Dallas. New York City FC, also of MLS, appears to have had an antifa group that has gone dormant.

One of the official supporters groups of MLS champion Seattle Sounders, Gorilla FC, also describes itself as antifa because it “expresses our anti-racist, [anti-]sexist and [anti-]homophobic values,” according to its vice president, Andrew Drake. Los Bandidos, the fan group of the United Soccer League’s Phoenix Rising FC, says it is a regular supporters group that likewise “aligns and identifies with antifa,” said a spokesman. Neither of those groups is strictly antifa, though, but rather a regular supporters group that sympathizes.

Meanwhile, antifa flags have been spotted in the fan sections of Orlando City SC and the aforementioned Colorado Rapids, where one of the capos of the Centennial 38 fan group hangs the flag in solidarity with the anti-facism message.

The strictly antifa groups are guarded in their communications, even though, counterintuitively, the point is to publicly demonstrate resistance to a right-wing societal current. All four were initially willing to speak to Yahoo Sports, but only two – the ones for the Cosmos and Red Bulls – actually did. The other two went silent. The Cosmos and Red Bulls groups agreed to do interviews through Twitter (via direct message) and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety and professional concerns.

It is significant that opposition to something so un-American as fascism is now such a delicate and combustible topic that the principals of this movement don’t want their names out there.

Yet the apparent need for an antifa groundswell seems to be demonstrated not just by the soaring election-linked hate-crime statistics but also by the emergence of a right-wing presence in soccer itself. Such an element has seemingly crept into New York City FC supporters’ sections in the form of a group calling itself the Empire State Ultras and several others accused of fascist views, all fashioned after similar fan groups in Europe. They make up a tiny minority of the NYCFC fan base, but they exist nonetheless.

Or, at least, they did. One prominent member of the club’s dominant Third Rail supporters group wondered if the ESU is still an active group, noting their absence from the supporters section in Yankee Stadium and a lack of game day activity or digital presence.

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