A Soccer Game Becomes an Anti-Fascist Demonstration in Portland

The silence was stunning. Portland Timbers soccer matches are renowned for their raucousness, but the first 33 minutes of the Timbers’ match against their archrivals, the Seattle Sounders, were eerily quiet. No singing, no chanting, no drumming, no signs of the collective joy that typically accompanies their matches.

The unnerving hush that thrummed through the stadium was the brainchild of the Timbers Army, the team’s supporters’ group. They organized with the two supporters’ groups from Seattle—Emerald City Supporters and Gorilla FC—to express their dissent over a new rule instituted by Major League Soccer that bans the anti-fascist Iron Front symbol on banners and flags at games because it has been deemed “political.” The league’s new Fan Code of Conduct states that such political symbols on signs “represent a threat to the safety” of matches.

Supporters groups across the country have taken issue with this new rule’s being implemented at a time when fascists and white-power racists feel free to flex in public. This is especially the case in Portland, a city that journalist Arun Gupta has dubbed “the epicenter of far-right violence.” Only a week ago, the city was engulfed by a hodgepodge of far-right groups like the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, and the American Guard, a neo-Nazi group with a violent track record.

The Timbers Army decided enough was enough, and worked behind the scenes with supporters of their archrivals to develop a protest plan. The Timbers Army refused to construct a tifo—a display of gigantic banners hoisted up by rope and pulley that is an iconic feature of rivalry matches. For Timbers faithful, the curious absence of a tifo was jarring. All they offered for 33 minutes was the silence of their protest—a white-noise murmur on the verge of bursting.

The Iron Front symbol matters in the city of Portland. It was the emblem of a paramilitary organization created by socialists and the Social Democratic Party in 1930s Germany as a rebuke to incipient fascism under Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The Nazis banned the Iron Front in 1933, which accounts for the decision to start the match with precisely 33 minutes of silence.

Today in Portland the Iron Front symbol has emerged as a ubiquitous emblem of anti-fascism. But the new Major League Soccer rule—the only of its kind among the major sports leagues in the United States—has converted the symbol into contraband.

The Portland Timbers’ owners, former treasury secretary Henry Paulson and his son Merritt, issued a statement earlier in the week asserting that they “stand steadfast against fascism,” while also backing the league’s rule against political speech on banners and signs.

But the Timbers front office then let slip the real target of the rule: antifa. It fretted that the Iron Front symbol is “widely associated with its frequent use by antifa, often in the context of violence at protests or counter protests,” adding that “Major League Soccer believes the Iron Front symbol is inherently political because it has been co-opted by antifa.”

Their political commitment—or lack thereof—was seen after the game when Merritt Paulson was spotted throwing a tantrum, blaming the protesting Timbers Army as responsible for the 2-1 loss. As Timbers fan Jeffrey Ball tweeted, “I was one that he was yelling at… I yelled ‘Merritt Fight for us!’ He said ‘You can yell Anti-Fascism all you want but you fucked this team tonight!’”

Merritt Paulson is wrong. Regardless of the final score, the Portland Timbers and their fans stand as the big winners. They showed the city of Portland and the country that they will stand resolutely against fascism, efforts to divide the anti-fascist movement, and a president who equates such displays of unity in the face of racist violence with “terroristic” threats. This was a tremendous—and important—collision of sports and politics: a showcase of the power of dissent and solidarity. It was about restoring anti-fascism into the most public possible of public squares, and given recent events in Portland, it could not have been more welcome.