Support — Buy season tickets now for just $60
Some mile markers force reflection, even if FC Buffalo’s latest signpost doesn’t quite fit into a neat historical anniversary package.
It’s difficult to have a nice round celebration of 15 seasons or years or competition summers thanks to the pandemic, the two small tournaments we were able to play in 2020, and the fact that we founded the club in August 2009 and started putting a team together than year — coincidentally, we announced our first ever tryout on Dec. 7, 2009 — but didn’t kick off until 2010.
So pick however you want to brand our 2025 men’s and women’s seasons from the below list, and then let’s get on with chasing some silverware.
- Fifteen summers of soccer in the books, with No. 16 ahead of us.
- Celebrating a 15th league season for our club, with the men debuting in the 2010 NPSL season.
- Celebrating a fifth year of women’s soccer in blue and gold.
Either way, it’s a cause for celebration of our supporters because you/they have driven us here. You can’t just force people to care about something; We, enabled by supporters and Buffalo’s love for the game, have quite organically grown this from seed to soil to surface. And the passion of those around us has driven FC Buffalo through every storm. One of our academy mottos has been to “be a buffalo,” as our city’s animal is a rare species that will run through a storm.
That resilience — or stubbornness — runs through the veins of our club. We’ve registered more than 400 players for our men’s and women’s first teams, have had dozens more on staff, and seen thousands through our doors for home games.
Where have FC Buffalo’s USL/UWS/NPSL players and staff come from?
A passionate supporter asked us earlier this year for data on our alumni. It’s quite something.
There’s no perfect math here due to the melting pot that is the soccer world. Take a couple of well-known names in Buffalo soccer: Kelsey Araujo hails from Canada, played at Niagara University and lives here now, but represented Portugal in World Cup qualifying. Abdi Salim was born in Kenya, grew up in Buffalo, and represents the Somalia national team.
Yet we’ve done our best to know and subsequently follow the 400+ to represent FC Buffalo. Whether it’s tracking their soccer careers or personal journeys into different professional worlds, we can say that the IG feed is vibrant — People from 34 nations and 16 states navigating this universe we share sure do provide entertainment. We’re proud to know them.
It’s no surprise that most of our players are American and from Western New York, and that neighbors Canada are the second-highest “exporters” of soccer talent to FC Buffalo.
And we suppose most would guess that England would be next on the list, and indeed that’s the case.
Four other nations show the happenstances that can play a defining role in any organization’s culture. Our longtime captain Chris Walter‘s charisma at his college, Hartwick, led to several Scottish players putting summers in Buffalo and spreading the word to folks they knew back home. The same happened when UB’s Kiwi head coach brought New Zealand players to the 716. Our 10th anniversary preseason trip to Germany drew interest from that homeland — Hello, Buffalo Dortmund Sister City Committee — while Canisius’ Jamaican player pipeline helped bring talent from the Land of Springs.
We’ve also been fortunate at talented journeys bringing folks to Western New York.
There’s former staffer Mustafa Aahangaran, an Army interpreter from Afghanistan who moved here after service. And Rasha Elghorour, our former director of operations who came to us as a Fulbright scholar from Niagara University with a resume that already included captaining the Libyan women’s national team and working in the front office of their federation.
And the schools with whom we’ve learned so much about our continent! We know we’re missing some names from the below list, but suffice it to say what started with (essentially) begging coaches to consider telling their players about Buffalo as a summer destination has turned into a back-and-forth. We “took a chance” on a junior college striker one Spring and by the end of the summer we’d met coaches from one of the best programs in the country after they planned a trip to Buffalo to scout him.
None of this takes includes the journeys players from Buffalo take to get to their schools or just to us. The large Yemeni community here has produced so many talented people as well as their own club. Myriad elite, premier, travel, and house youth programs in Western New York have instilled love for the game and launched their players by putting them on big stages.
The sport here is part of an ecosystem, one for people both with means and requiring help, one for those with the talent to amaze us on the field as well as the talent to bring us together in the stands. And while often we speak (or write) from the position of a strong, stationary buffalo proud in its footing, we all come with the scars and memories that come from charging into snow storms, living each day as a club in the hope of inspiring 10 more.
Thank you for being a part of it. Let’s keep it going.
