Reflections from Two Stop Cop City Players Two Years In
Stop Cop City United (SCCU) was founded by numerous comrades to express solidarity with the movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest and to Stop Cop Cities everywhere. Through this club and in collaboration with other teams and individuals, in Spring 2024 we set up a soccer league called the Autonomous Football League (AFL) which hosted six teams over eleven-week periods in the spring and summer. On October 14, 2024 we hosted a ten-team invitational tournament called Stop Cop City Cup (reflections on this coming soon!). Before that, we grew our community by hosting informal pickup matches once a week for a number of years. Those pickup matches offered opportunities to collaborate with groups that are helping asylum-seekers adjust to life in NYC, food vendors, artists, and many other individuals and initiatives. Our pickup matches continue and are open to all skill levels, all abilities, and do not require any fee or signup in advance. We hope that this model can be picked up by collectives and individuals all over since it is a very feasible method for growing capacity, trust, and affinity groups. Helen and Andreas are two of SCCU’s players who met up to discuss some reflections after two years of organizing. The conversation has been edited for clarity.
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Helen:
Two years ago I didn’t even play soccer. I started showing up to scrimmages for the social environment — some friends, mostly people from the neighborhood — and eventually found confidence and love for the game. Now I spend more time on soccer than anything else outside of work. I do my best to support weekly pickup games; I play in the Autonomous Football League and work to connect AFL and SCCU with ongoing efforts to defend against Cop City in Atlanta and, now, here in Queens. In my opinion, our strength as a grassroots football club starts from our ability to hold space together. As we expanded our activities into political actions and generating material support for our asylum-seeker friends, I realized the vitality that emerges from a devoted group of people regularly gathering, coordinating, playing, and problem solving, in shared public spaces. Someone gets hurt? We will give first aid and half a dozen people will check on them in the days to come. The Stockton guys [our asylum-seeker teammates and friends who were living at the Stockton “respite center” before it was abruptly closed] are displaced and urgently need clothing and backpacks? We will be there next week, so let’s host a supply drive. It’s a big weekend for Stop Cop City actions? How about we host a celebration of life for forest defender Tortuguita, the young person murdered (while seated in their tent) by the Georgia Police.
Andreas:
Totally. Remember that soccer has radical roots. It emerged as a proletarian game many centuries ago, depending on which theory you subscribe to. Some trace it back 800 years! While most of the sport’s deeply embedded working-class and anti-authoritarian principles have been “tamed” by corporations and national football associations, as phrased by Gabriel Kuhn, or co-opted by right-wing hate groups as we see with some historic clubs in Europe, at the grassroots level, community and fun are still certainly prioritized by the ethos of the sport. The principal reason we play together is because we love the game. But because of the community-building that the sport helps foster, both in how it is played and in how we organize the games themselves, it has been a no-brainer to use our matches as vehicles for helping folks who need it. In other words, the games are an infrastructure for building solidarity and networks of care. After playing together for many years, it was relatively easy to help organize food distribution, clothes drives, a free store, to participate in charity matches, and to provide material and emotional support for asylum-seekers arriving to an environment made very hostile because of draconian laws and destructive actions of the Eric Adams administration. Our explicit goal — in addition to having fun — is to continue in football’s community-oriented legacy and experiment with the possibilities for self-organization that the sport encourages through its limited barriers to entry. Unlike other sports, to play soccer all you need is a ball!
Helen:
I think this is really evident in how quickly our weekly pickup games took shape and grew in number, and how it allowed us to respond to pressing concerns in our communities and beyond. Last year a friend from Bushwick City Farm connected our pickup crew with a network of asylum seekers, many of whom used to stay at the Stockton shelter (which was suddenly and cruelly shut down the first week of August). We’ve been playing together with the Stockon crew and other connected asylum seekers, ever since. And it’s amazing to collaborate with Newcomers FC which manifested this past spring.
Andreas:
What I really love about the AFL is that it is a completely autonomous project that succeeded in organizing a competitive semi-official league — complete with designated referees, translators, kits, and so on — that not only aligns with, but actively practices, our politics — or better yet that allows a platform for us to build and develop our politics through practice. For example, we view the city’s permit-policies with a healthy dose of criticality. While we do complete permit applications to make sure we can use the field, we have community guidelines in place to make sure we can collectively work with people in the park. If kids who live in the community are playing on the field, for example, we talk with them to make sure we can all use the space simultaneously.
Helen:
Totally. I think the clearest demonstration of how informal pickup matches can provide that form of community-building is that our collaboration with Newcomers FC grew out of our weekly pickup matches. There is only so much time between scrimmages and AFL, so the guys coordinated to find more times and spots to play together. Our friend Avi came up with the name Newcomers FC, which now has a beautiful life of its own. Each week seems to boast higher attendance than the last, and it has even won the affection of a group of high schoolers who join them every week. Forming friendships through soccer is one of the great pleasures of my life here in NYC. So much of that is because of the guys from Newcomers FC. All that corny stuff about soccer transcending language and borders is true, but, for us, it’s more than that. We don’t just let soccer transcend differences among us, we use soccer as a way to actively work in solidarity with one another: to build capacity, share resources, and struggle against state repression, together. Everyone was at a loss this summer when the Stockton shelter suddenly shut down, and many of the guys we play with were directed to far-off, overcrowded shelters with only a printout of Google Maps in English. One friend didn’t know where he was going to sleep that night. There is no amount of food served or socks collected that can compensate for everything the city is grossly failing to provide for our friends.
Andreas:
I really appreciate the way you’re describing the relationship between the pickup matches and the groups/organizations that have emerged from those first encounters on the pitch. New York City has always been a city of (im)migrants. However, the city’s immigration, asylum, housing, and economic policies have also always acted as technologies for policing arrivals and making their lives incredibly difficult. From tenaments operated by slumlords in the early twentieth-century to today’s predatory landlords shoving people into expensive, overcrowded, and unsafe basement apartments; from historical migration quotas to today’s brutal, underfunded shelter system, (im)migrants and community-members have always worked together to help each other. Today, in so-called “respite centers,” asylum-seekers are separated from each other by sex and age, making it very hard to meet people and build community. They are also barred from working. Many folks do not yet speak English, and even fluent English-speaking interpreters have a hard time making sense of the baroque asylum policy. Even worse, every thirty days, they can be sent from one shelter to another with little or no warning, flung from the Bronx to the Rockaways and back. It is hard to assimilate when one’s life has no continuity or consistency. Our league, where we play together at least twice a week, share food, and build friendships has at least offered some consistency and a space for meeting people from different backgrounds and experiences. And as far as mutual aid goes, I’m really proud that our groups have focused on the mutual rather than descending into the traps of charity, which is unidirectional. Everyone is pitching in, setting up the goals, storing materials, taking and giving — collective appropriation. As our comrades in the Art Workers’ Inquiry describe: “Unlike charity, mutual aid does not function according to a logic of morality… Mutual aid is a relation that builds working-class power, solidarity, and capacity, enabling the working class to experiment with self-determined structures of care that begin to offer alternative forms to capitalism.”
