When St. Louis CITY SC drew a home match with Club América in the group stage of the Leagues Cup tournament, a unique opportunity presented itself to the club’s Spanish-speaking supporters’ group. For STL Santos, last week’s showdown with the Liga MX heavyweights brought a chance to showcase everything the organization brings to the CITY fan base.
And they wanted to go big.
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“We immediately knew that we needed to do a tifo in Spanish,” STL Santos president Carlos Restrepo said. “It immediately became, ‘OK, we need to do this—how do we do this?’”
With their big idea in hand, Restrepo, vice president Isabel Diaz, and the rest of the STL Santos board needed help. They found it inside the CITYPARK supporters’ section, where fellow CITY diehards were eager to assist in the execution. The result was a pre-match tifo—in other words, a fan-made visual display—that was a true community effort.
“The community in the North End had our back,” Restrepo said.
For the monumental undertaking of designing and raising a STL Santos-inspired tifo, the group turned to Chris Zimmerman, a CITY supporter who played a crucial role in efforts to design and unveil tifos on opening night and during appearances by the United States men’s and women’s national teams. For this assignment, Zimmerman was quick to lend his expertise.
“Carlos and Isa came to me with an idea but wanted some help in how to make it work, especially with the tifo rigging at CITYPARK,” Zimmerman said. “I spent hours on the document, just tweaking the design and trying to figure out the best way to make this thing.”
The resulting design represented a melting pot of everything that makes STL Santos the group that it is.
The tifo featured an illustration of the group’s Super Santo character carrying a supporters scarf emblazoned with the phrase “Somos Pasion,” which translates to “We Are Passion.” The scarf, though, was an interesting inclusion in the design.
“The scarf was something new for us,” Restrepo said. “Supporter scarves aren’t really a thing in Colombia or other fútbol cultures. But our members kept asking for a scarf, so we came up with something that could really unite the cultures that make up our members.”
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The scarf ties in Mayan iconography with an homage to “Balam,” the Mayan word for jaguar. The ends of the scarf feature the silhouette of St. Louis downtown skyline. For STL Santos, tying together their heritage with the city they call home was important. “We knew there were fans in our group that support América, but it really speaks to the complex story of immigration that we all share,” Restrepo said.
The inclusion of Super Santo, meanwhile, was a no-brainer.
“Super Santo is kind of like our mascot, our superhero,” Restrepo said. “It’s funny because he just showed up one day in the full costume, and it was instantly like, ‘Yes, this is what we are.’ This is a place where you can have fun and be yourself, and Santo is kind of like the embodiment of that. He has really embraced being that superhero for us.”
Volunteers helped wrap the project in merely five days, working in an old church space to paint the details and bring the design to life. Once the preparation was complete, all that was left to do was make sure it would raise properly ahead of Thursday’s match.
It did.
“I just remember everyone’s excitement as the design came together,” Restrepo said. “It just made the moment so special when we finally saw it unveiled.”
Diaz, among others in the group, was moved by the moment. “I just remember crying, being overcome with all of this emotion,” she said. “Months of our community coming together and now we have something that we can point to and say, ‘This is us.’”
The result on the pitch Thursday night was far from ideal, as América rolled past CITY in a 4-0 victory. And yet, the environment was still something to celebrate. On a night that was dedicated to celebrating the marriage of cultures, STL Santos delivered.
“We want to bring the party,” Restrepo said. “Many of our members support other clubs, we even have members that support América, but we want to be a place where they can come celebrate the culture and find an identity in St. Louis CITY.”
