For “Club and Community”: The Timbers Army Took on MLS Over Political Speech in Stadiums

On a crisp October morning in downtown Portland, Oregon, a woman named Sheba Rawson greets me wearing a massive pair of bright green circular plastic earrings. A couple of months ago, before I moved to this city, I had no idea what the icon at the center of those earrings—three arrows angled downward to the left—represented, or why it mattered so much to the Timbers Army, the group of nearly 6,000 motley supporters of the city’s Major League Soccer team for which Rawson serves as president of the board of directors. I want to ask Rawson about the significance of that very symbol and how it became a metaphor for the Army’s concerns about both the future of their team and the future of their city.

Rawson is an elementary school principal and self-proclaimed “soccer mom.” At first, she went to Timbers games to chaperone her children when they were too young to attend alone. But in the mid-2000s, when the Timbers played in the second-division United Soccer League, Rawson found her eye wandering more and more toward the north end of the stadium, where a raucous group of fans gathered for every game to chant and sing songs. “I was like, ‘Wow, what are they doing?’” she says. “I started to learn the chants and cheers, and I’d sing along and clap. And at one point, we’re sitting on the west side of the stadium, and one of my sons points and says, ‘Mom, wouldn’t you rather be standing over there?’”

I meet Rawson inside the Fanladen, a clubhouse fashioned out of a storefront around the corner from the Timbers’ stadium, Providence Park. It’s a Sunday, a couple of hours before the Timbers’ final regular-season game against San Jose, a game they needed to win or draw in order to slip into the playoffs. (They won, 3-1, and will face Real Salt Lake in an elimination game on Saturday night.) Franchise memorabilia and declarations of the Timbers Army’s overarching philosophy decorate the walls of the Fanladen: a signed jersey from former Timbers player Mikaël Silvestre hangs next to a keg fridge with a “Fight Fascism” bumper sticker on the handle; yellowing pennants dangle above a window with a sign declaring that entry to the Fanladen would be refused to “intolerant groups and individuals.”

This commitment to what one Timbers fan, Shane Mount-Rubenfeld, termed “radical inclusiveness” has long been the ethos of the Timbers Army, the largest supporters group in MLS. The members of the Army in those north stands are loud and unruly and sing occasionally profane songs and jeer referees even as they unfurl massive banners known as tifos that often preach messages of tolerance. Walk through the stands before a game, and you’ll see a metaphoric reflection of Portlandia: hip, weird, culturally diverse, often unpredictable. Part of the Army’s charm, Rawson says, is that you don’t know what they might do next.

The Timbers Army constructed itself around the very idea of Portland’s embrace of its own unconventionality. That energy helped team owner Merritt Paulson when he made a bid to move the Timbers up from the USL to MLS; they were granted entry in 2009 and became the 18th MLS franchise in 2011 as part of the league’s expansion into the Pacific Northwest. At that point, the Army formed a trust, the loose equivalent of a college alumni-booster club that also helps fund charitable causes in the community. Rawson joined the board of directors of the trust; eventually, she wound up as its president.

The Timbers Army exemplifies the paradigm MLS hopes to foster. A crowd came together spontaneously, priding itself on its cultural diversity, in a league that has long sought to appeal to a culturally diverse fan base. As SB Nation writer Kim McCauley notes, the pinned video at the top of MLS’s YouTube page is an advertisement for MLS fandom as a melting pot where “everybody’s welcome.”

But something happened last March, just before the season began: MLS updated its Fan Code of Conduct to prohibit what the league considered to be “political” speech “on any sign or other visible representation.” The symbol dangling from Rawson’s earlobes had become a flashpoint, banned on large displays and banners for the majority of the year—at least until the league reversed course under heavy pressure from the Army itself. In September, MLS agreed to rescind the ban until the issue could be studied further heading into the 2020 season.

Those three downward-angled arrows date back to the 1930s, to an anti-fascism movement in Europe known as the Iron Front. Until this season, several fans told me, the symbol had been displayed in the stands at Providence Park for years without many people paying it much notice. But to MLS, “political” speech included the Iron Front symbol because it had become associated with antifa, the anti-fascist protest movement that rose to prominence in the wake of the Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville—where the Iron Front symbol was on display. And a handful of antifa groups have extended roots in Portland.

The problem, Rawson says, was that MLS hadn’t considered the implications for a place like Portland, whose fan base thrived in large part because both the league and the Timbers organization allowed it to develop organically and police itself. A few years back, for instance, says longtime Army member Shawn Levy, the Army chose to let go of one of its more vulgar chants. But this was different. To many members of the Army, this felt like a cautious attempt to restrict the very spirit they’d built themselves upon.

Fan groups for both the Timbers and the city’s professional women’s soccer team, the two-time NWSL champion Portland Thorns, are a useful proxy for understanding the city’s underlying anxieties—about its fears of gentrification and corporatization as the city’s population swells, and about its checkered racial history. In an era when the line between sports and the real world has become increasingly blurred in the public discourse, the leaders of the Timbers Army don’t see any good reason for that line to exist; they view the Iron Front flag to be of a piece with their overarching ideology. “For many supporters,” Mount-Rubenfeld wrote in an open letter to Paulson after the ban, the Army’s “commitment to radical inclusiveness—more than goals, players, or trophies—is what cements our love for and loyalty to this club.“

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And so instead of complying with the ban, the Timbers Army refused to let go of what it considered its fundamental principles. Multiple supporters were suspended from attending games for flying Iron Front flags in defiance of the ban; others continued to wear the Iron Front symbol on T-shirts or other items of clothing, which was technically permitted under the ban.

The confusion and frustration stemmed in large part from the word “political” in the MLS Fan Code of Conduct. What, Rawson and others wondered, did that word even mean in this context? The Timbers Army had long flown not only pro-LGBTQ rainbow flags but also banners in Arabic in the wake of Donald Trump’s attempts to ban immigrants from several Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States. Levy tells me the Timbers Army had been flying anti-fascist flags since at least 2003. At one game I attended in September, as a local broadcast TV camera scanned through the crowd at Providence Park, it landed on a fan wearing a “Refugees Welcome” scarf. So what, the members of the Army wondered, was the line? And why, they wondered, should a league get to draw the line rather than the fans themselves?

“If they’re letting us do these kinds of things,” says Duane Schulz, a fan and longtime tech executive who’s attended soccer games in Portland since 1975, “then what the fuck?”

In 2017, a self-proclaimed white supremacist killed two people and wounded another in a stabbing on the city’s MAX train. In August, as Portland’s mild summer peaked, a rally by the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys ended without a major incident, in part because they were outnumbered by nearly a thousand anti-fascist activists. “You’ve had sort of a garden-variety right-wing invasion of Portland,” says Jules Boykoff, a former professional soccer player who’s now a professor of political science at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, 25 miles west of Portland. “You have these protests happening to try to wind up the general population.”

These clashes have become more common in the Trump era, but racist groups are nothing new in Portland. As far back as 1857, Oregon had a clause in its constitution prohibiting blacks from living in the state, and the notion of a Pacific Northwest free of immigrants and minorities endured for decades. In the 1920s, says Randy Blazak—a professor and expert on white-supremacist movements in Oregon—the Ku Klux Klan held rallies on the site of what is now Providence Park, the Timbers’ home field.

By the 1970s, that site, then named Civic Stadium, had morphed into a minor-league baseball park, the home of the quirkily independent Portland Mavericks. In 1975, the North American Soccer League sought to expand to the West Coast, and agreed to put a team in Portland. This was the earliest iteration of the Timbers, and their burgeoning supporters group immediately embraced the city’s spirit: Fans showered referees with beer, and the team mascot, a guy named Timber Jim, swung from light poles on nearby Morrison Street after games. A local politician named Mildred Schwab planted kisses on the players’ faces. It was, Schulz tells me, “a fringe sport for a fringe culture,” and Portland itself soon became known as “Soccer City U.S.A.”

Soccer, Blazak says, was a perfect fit for a place that always saw itself more as a city of the world than a city of the United States. But Portland’s early embrace of globalization also unleashed counterforces inspired by the region’s troubled racial history. By the 1980s, skinhead movements had become prominent in Portland, and by the time the Timbers Army began to form in the early 2000s—and became more formally structured when the Timbers were elevated to MLS in 2011—anti-racist skinhead movements had cropped up to combat white supremacists. Levy tells me that a handful of original Timbers Army members were affiliated with Rose City Antifa, one of the first major anti-fascist groups in the city. “That’s why I didn’t let my kids hang out with the Timbers Army,” Levy says. “I didn’t know there was such a thing as an anti-fascist skinhead.”

In Europe—and even in New York—far-right groups have turned to professional soccer games as places to congregrate and make statements, Blazak says, because of the sport’s historical ties to skinhead movements in Europe. Recent events in Portland, Rawson says, contribute to the Army’s fears over an incursion of right-wing activity in the city.

The Army doesn’t view itself as an inherently political organization; Levy, a longtime member, tells me they would never campaign for specific political candidates or causes. But to the Army, the notion of advocating for human rights and against fascism and white supremacy, isn’t a political cause; it’s what Levy, a journalist and author who was one of the earliest members of the Army, refers to as “communitarianism”—human rights rather than politics. The leadership of the Army believes those ideas can’t be separated from the idea of rooting for the Timbers themselves.

“This isn’t politics,” Levy says. “This is our culture.”

Eventually, after some supporters—including the owner of a local pub who became involved in anti-fascist causes after attending soccer games in Ireland—were banned from the stadium for continuing to display the symbol, the Timbers Army partnered with the fan group of their archrivals, the Seattle Sounders. Imagine Yankee fans and Red Sox fans coordinating on anything, and you get a sense of how improbable this is. There is legitimate contempt between the Timbers and Sounders fan bases; maybe some of that animosity has been heightened by fears that Seattle’s tech boom and affordable-housing shortage are a dystopian vision of Portland’s own future. But at a game between the two teams in late August, fans of both teams stayed silent for 33 minutes, as a nod to the fact that the Iron Front was banned by the Nazis in 1933.

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The sense among the Army leadership was that the Iron Front ban was being driven by MLS more than by the Timbers organization—that Paulson was essentially trapped in the middle between the league and his fans, forced to toe the corporate line. Paulson issued a statement supporting members of the Army who met with MLS officials in September to discuss the ban, saying he was “pleased that our supporters have the opportunity to have their concerns and voices heard by the league.” While Timbers fans “have a flair for the dramatic … sometimes unnecessarily,” Paulson wrote, the organization supported fans “having a right to exercise their voice on matters of human rights at games. This has long been a fabric of our sport and an important part of differentiation from other sports.” Some Timbers players—like Zarek Valentin, who wore an Iron Front T-shirt the day of the Seattle game—showed their support for the cause. This was not, however, a confrontation between the Army and its team; it was a confrontation between MLS and its most iconic fan base.

In a fundamental way, says USC professor Ben Carrington, MLS encouraged its fan groups to model themselves after European clubs. The relationship between European teams and their supporters is often far more intimate, and more grounded in the culture of the city itself—less of a “top-down-driven ownership model,” says Carrington, who’s studied the political, cultural, and racial aspects of sports. “I think MLS was clever enough to realize they can’t compete at [the European level financially]. What they could do was initiate much more locally grounded enthusiasm and fandom.”

But that comes with a cost, Carrington says, which is that those independent fan groups are not going to follow a corporatized model when it comes to how they structure themselves. Carrington is sympathetic to the Army’s argument that these are issues more about culture than politics. But, in a way, he says, “these things are always political.”

Eventually, the relentlessness of the Army’s argument wore MLS down. Less than a month after the demonstration during the Seattle game, MLS executives met with representatives of independent supporter groups, including Rawson, who recalls sitting in a nondescript conference center in Las Vegas and patiently explaining why this ban wasn’t something the Army could back down on. “It was very cordial,” Rawson says. “We knew what we wanted. … But a lot of it was helping MLS understand what the issues and the history are. I don’t think they had those pieces. I don’t think they knew where we were coming from or why it mattered.” (An MLS spokesman sent me MLS president Mark Abbott’s initial statement on the ban, along with several others, but did not make Abbott or any other officials available for comment.)

“In terms of this rising from the grassroots, and then having the Timbers Army stick with it as all these things were happening?” Boykoff says. “As far as I know, it’s unprecedented in [American sports].”

This kind of organized response often happens in European soccer, Carrington says, as when Liverpool fans denounced the notion of the club copyrighting the term “Liverpool” to combat counterfeiting, or when, as Boykoff notes, Borussia Dortmund fans in Germany directly confronted anti-Semitism within their ranks. That’s because many supporters of European soccer clubs view their relationship with their teams in similar ways as the Timbers Army—it’s a direct extension of their relationship with their town or city and its underlying identity. But that connection is rare in American sports, particularly in the big three of the NFL, NBA, and MLB, where larger corporate interests tend to dominate, and vast numbers of fans tend to view sports mostly as entertainment. And the fallout from the Iron Front ban raises all sorts of questions, particularly as MLS seeks to grow and expand its own footprint—and as sports and real-world causes become increasingly intertwined.

“There is an ingrained tension in MLS between the more sanitized, corporate version of the sport, and the rougher-edged fan groups,” Boykoff says. “And that’s going to be there moving forward. The Timbers Army are not known to be people that get in line for corporate power and ownership.”

That uneasy power balance may have allowed the Timbers Army to challenge the MLS front office directly. But it’s far-fetched to imagine it translating to other major sports in America, which rely more on television revenue than stadium attendance and fan experience: The MLS makes roughly $90 million per year in TV money, compared to the NBA, which makes roughly $2.7 billion per year.

The NBA recently found itself embroiled in its own conflict between its image and its bottom line after Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s tweet about Hong Kong stirred up tensions with China: Earlier this month, the Philadelphia 76ers ejected a pair of fans from a preseason game for holding up “Free Hong Kong” signs in the wake of that controversy. Yet what’s the likelihood of thousands of 76ers fans responding with a mass act of civil disobedience inside the arena? For major sports in America, Carrington says, the only way to implement change in the past has been for the players themselves to demand it, as LeBron James and other NBA players did in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death, or as Colin Kaepernick tried to do in the NFL.

Eleven days before I meet Sheba Rawson, I attended my first Timbers game—the first one since the ban on the Iron Front symbol was lifted. Outside of the north stands where the Timbers Army gathers, no one really seemed to notice or care. There are thousands of people in Portland who attend Timbers games who seemed entirely unaware that the controversy even existed in the first place. But in those Timbers Army sections, there was a palpable tension: When I tried to speak to a fan in a Hawaiian shirt waving a gold and black Iron Front flag, he shrugged his shoulders and refused to say anything. And after one security guard tried to tell me that media members weren’t allowed in the stands, another apologized and admitted, “We’re on high alert tonight.”

All of this is happening at a moment when MLS finds itself at an inflection point: Expansion is happening over the next several years, and the league has moved into large markets like Atlanta and Miami while seeking bigger TV deals—even as some of its more established teams have struggled. As soccer’s footprint continues to expand in the United States, the league is seeking to raise its profile and to expand its revenue base.

So what happens, a longtime fan like Duane Schulz wonders, when the league leans into growth? Will a small market like Portland eventually get left behind unless it succumbs to the forces of gentrification and corporatization? Will the Timbers Army still be able to exert the same leverage they did during the Iron Front fight? Shulz questions whether MLS understands how important independent supporters’ groups have been to the success of the league, and he worries MLS will start to resemble other American professional leagues. “Is this thing getting too big, too fast? Is it going to turn into the NFL?”

That’s the irony: The Timbers Army is so admired for its structure and organization, Rawson says, that she and other leaders have advised NFL and NBA owners on how to replicate their methods. But the very reason the Army has gathered such power is because it doesn’t fit the prescribed model of American sports. Their power is in their independence, and if they cede that, then where does that leave them? And what does it leave a city like Portland to cling to as it confronts its own palpable angst about getting too big, too fast? For Schulz, who’s bounced back and forth between the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland throughout his tech career, Portland’s inherent quirkiness is a large part of why he kept returning. And his fealty to soccer has become an inextricable extension of his loyalty to the city itself.

“For us,” he says, “the community and club are the same thing.”

Michael Weinreb is a freelance writer and the author of four books.