Fantastic article on Club Tijuana and the American connection

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Times have changed. Every week, Americans make the journey to Tijuana for an irreproachable reason: they cross into Mexico to watch their beloved soccer team, Club Tijuana. It may be located in another country, but the Mexican league side has become the de facto hometown team for San Diego.

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It has been estimated that twenty percent of the fans going to Xolos games at the Estadio Caliente are Americans. Joel Tena brought his son across the border for their first Xolos game last year, an experience they wouldn’t soon forget. “[There was a] festival atmosphere in the parking lot,” he says, “folks tailgating and bumping musica. It was awesome to observe the homegrown passions I’ve only seen on TV come alive in the bleachers behind goal.”

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“The team’s [red] colors remind me of an anarchist rally, which only adds to the Xolos’ mystique,” Trena says. He didn’t mind the “perpetually-under-construction stadium” and felt it was a safer atmosphere for his five-year-old than Dodgers and Raiders games he had been to, “but not so sanitized as to be [boring].”

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