The recent, critically acclaimed Mike Birbiglia movie Don’t Think Twice talks about the relative ephemerality of improv theater. It’s created out of impulse, unfolds on stage in an instant, and if works well (or spectacularly doesn’t), it lives on through people’s memories.
In soccer culture, you could say that tifo boast a lot of those qualities, too, with more in common with improv than with other brands of visual art. Social media’s helped preserve some notable tifo displays in recent years, but for the most part, tifo are created in secret, displayed in a few seconds before a match, and then rolled up and taken away.
But then where do old tifo wind up after all that? The answer, unsurprisingly, varies by their creators.
For a number of the supporters’ groups, old works become new tifo, with the cloth repurposed and layered over with paint until it can’t be used anymore.
“We have an extreme hoarder mentality with our tifo,” says Morgan Hughes. He’s one of the primary organizers behind a Columbus Crew SC supporters’ tifo-making collective, bringing volunteers together under the #TIFOSWEAT social media hashtag.
Hughes notes that even though they’re “gigantic, heavy, and take up a lot of space,” the #TIFOSWEAT creatives push their canvases to the limit, with as many as 15 layers of paint on a single canvas. Essentially, they keep recycling until they determine that the canvas can no longer be painted over, stitched through, or otherwise refashioned into other displays.
Because of their size and their weight, Hughes notes that the Crew tifo couldn’t be displayed anywhere short of “an airplane hangar owned by Crew fans.”
But, on occasion, tifo do get to live on beyond their original lives. Lexi Stern, a member of Portland’s Timbers Army, says that most of their tifo displays get painted over for new ones. But some do find new forms.
“Reused pieces have also been used for crowd overheads, or cut into smaller pieces to turn into banners,” she says. “At various times we've also made used fabric pieces available to supporters to take and turn into their own banners or two-sticks.”
In 2012, Timbers Army contracted with a company to convert the Legends display — and a companion piece celebrating the Portland Thorns — into hundreds of bags then sold to fans.
Generally, though, such “upcycling,” as Stern terms it, is rare. Yes, even the Freddy Krueger that Diego Valeri painted a star on, from this year’s “Legends Never Sleep” display, will be (or already has been) painted over.
On the other side of Cascadia, the Vancouver Whitecaps supporters’ group Vancouver Southsiders also repurpose materials as much as possible. That’s for what the group’s director of stadium operations, Marisa Barbetta, says are both environmental and cost reasons.
“We collect color cards or panels after the match, and those that aren't too beer-soaked or mustard-stained will be kept for the next panel display,” says Paul Sabourin-Hertzog, the Southsiders’ vice president and director of internal communications. “Some of our larger displays have been stitch-ripped to be resewn in other large displays, or cut up into smaller pieces for a second life as railing banners, flags or two sticks. Our flag displays see the most use, as the poles and flags are kept in our sections as loaners for those that want something to wave at home games.”
Meanwhile, one of MLS’s tifo pioneers, Srdan Bastaic of D.C. United supporters' group District Ultras, says that while they made early efforts to save tifo, those old tifo were never reused, and they deemed that not cost-effective.
Now most of their tifo displays get retired to the trash, though they have passed some of them on the team. “Some players have asked for specific pieces, and the D.C. United front office hung some of them on the lower walls of RFK,” Bastaic says.
Meanwhile, Hughes and the #TIFOSWEAT crew recently had to move the site of their tifo-making operations – and the industrial bins full of the few remaining old displays. They now live in bins on MAPFRE Stadium grounds, but after that, he says, he doesn’t know where they might finally rest.
“I’m leaving it for the next generation,” Hughes says. “They can figure out what to do with it.”
Photo courtesy of Morgan Hughes
