Futebol is the Excuse

Inside Secret Futebol Club's fifteen-year practice

The club does not have a choice. It never did. It's been yanked by its hand down the block. Pulled by its sleeve to the park. It's been tagged and buffed. Bootlegged and bent. It has crests, but they've been borrowed. A field that’s rarely available. Players that wane, wax, bring someone new, materialize but swear they were there all along.

The people are the problem and the solution. They're the reason it keeps shapeshifting, and the reason it still has any shape at all. A club with no jersey, no fixed crest, no permanent pitch, fifteen years deep in a city that disappears most things in three. The physics shouldn't work, but they do because of them.

Futebol in America, and especially in New York, is entering its age of legibility: programmed, monetized, and made useful to institutions that had no use for it until now. The World Cup brings the familiar American impulse to boil the thing down and package it back up. Everyone wants it. The tech bros, banks, fashion brands, prediction markets. A lot of it will be bad. Some of it we'll be part of. Much of it we already feel in ticket prices, permit fees, tariffed gear, and what an hour on the pitch away from work now costs us.

Secret Futebol Club was “started” in 2011. But it was starting long before that and we just started again and we’ll be starting again very soon.

It began accidentally, in a group chat, with five people who had something in common and couldn’t find anywhere to play. Today, it’s grown to a community of 200 with multiple games a day, organized encryptedly on Signal by whoever wants to play, under the shared understanding that no one is coming to do this for us.

Over time the game began growing limbs. The creatives who came to play started documenting and making things around it, shifting the frequency of the club. Futebol became the reason to gather, and the gathering became the reason to make.

It's a noisy time to be building a futebol project in NYC. We're surrounded by new clubs and brands all clawing at the same rope. But we're used to making noise. Our model has always been about the making, after all. And we’ve survived, not through preservation, but through shared practice.

We just keep doing it. We do it, then we forget how we did it, then we do it again with new references, new understanding, new hands. The version of this club from three years ago wouldn't recognize the one we're running now. That’s how we know it’s working.

We’re a ring of practitioners. Practicing our sport. Practicing joy and love. Practicing expression and resistance. We're not linked by possession or sex or money or employer. We don't belong to each other in any conventional way. We just keep at it, and over time the keeping at it accumulates into something (including, ironically, a sense of belonging).

The practice is, at heart, a study. The earliest evidence is in the bootlegs. We have remixed every national and club team crest by now, not as a collection but as a way of understanding. To bootleg a crest is to look at it long enough to realize why it worked and how you’re connected to it, then misuse it with affection. The same study runs through our own logo, redrawn by hand every time the frequency of the club shifts.

The practice shows up between members. In the mini-series shot on 16mm with our players as the cast. In the objects we use and furniture we sit on made by our own. In the comedians who MC our tournaments and the cooks that feed us.

Lately, the practice has found new surfaces. Secret Radio: a station where members host shows and put out mixes. The soundtrack to our game, made by the people playing it. Secret Film Supply: a program that puts cameras in the hands of the image-makers documenting the game from inside it.

None of this was planned in 2011. None of it is finished. We're less interested in building a fixed product than in building the conditions necessary for things to emerge on their own time. The practice works because the club is porous by design. Thoughts, aesthetics, sounds, fits, languages, jobs, grudges…all of it passes through. Every so often, something catches on a splintered edge and stays.

As Secret has gotten louder, the legibility machine has started circling. Big brands come to us because there's something here they can't manufacture, can't brief. They want to learn how to loosen their grip and let people in. The risk is obvious: the closer you get, the more legible you become. Say yes too often, or say yes to the wrong thing, and the practice becomes a product. So when we say yes, the question is always the same: can we bend the work back toward the practice?

In spring 2025, Wrexham hired Secret to launch their 25/26 home and away kits after a historic promotion into the Championship. It was the club’s biggest kit release yet, and the first available worldwide. The campaign moved through 160 years of club history, the rise up the leagues, and the town that carried it there, with the home kit editorial premiering in Manhattan as part of Quest for Glory, a multi-sensory installation built with Meta.

It’s work we’re proud of because it looked like a campaign, but moved like the club: flags sewn in a Brooklyn studio by Secret’s own Jackson T. Owens and Sam Hart, shot by Raphaël Gaultier. A kit editorial by Adam Powell, creative directed and produced by our founders. A release party DJ’d by Folarin Ajibade, with jerseys hand-customized from designs by Secret OG Abby Costeira.

None of this would have happened if Secret were only a logo, a roster, or a scene. It happened because the club had become a working system: people playing together, making together, and building enough shared language that the campaign could move through it without flattening it.

Moments like these are when Secret is most legible. And then, of course, the light changes. That’s what’s hardest to explain to anyone trying to grasp it. Secret isn’t something you catch up to. It’s already in motion, pulling you by the sleeve.

The biggest change came this year. After years of borrowed fields and stolen hours, SFC moved into a physical space in a warehouse in North Brooklyn, between techno clubs and pickle factories. The instinct, when a fifteen-year-old club gets a building, is to read it as the end of the practice. A fixed good. An impermeable door.

That's not what it is. This is simply another experiment designed to fuel the practice. A corner unit with windows porous enough to catch the light as it changes. A place to dance, play, and grow our collective memory. To capture and amplify our communal soundscape. To learn from one another below the community art that lives on the walls. Another fleeting pin in the map of where we are now, decided by the people that caught the splintered edge.

The version of this place six months from now won't recognize the one we just opened, and that's how we'll know it's working.

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N0TNO @ East Side Radio Lisboa