Tifo is Hell: Supporters Unite For First Tifo At TQL Stadium
It is well after midnight Thursday night when Chris White and a skeleton crew of members from three different FC Cincinnati Supporters' Groups force the rusty deadbolt to lock the heavy metal door of the half-empty warehouse. He will spend more time here than at home over the next week. He and the others have just finished tracing the first of three large pieces of the tifo for Hell is Real. The match is 8 days away.
Chris, the President of The Pride Supporters' Group will be the first in/last out every day until the newest Hell Is Real tifo is completed. A tifo is a long-standing soccer tradition, a large (or small) painted banner displayed by fans in support of their team, mocking their opponents, or celebrating a player, event, or (occasionally) political movement. This one is special for several reasons. It will be the first tifo in FC Cincinnati's new TQL Stadium, the largest display to date, with moving parts measuring more than 60' X 90', and the first to incorporate the stadium's new rigging.
Hell is Real is the nom de guerre of FC Cincinnati's rivalry match on July 9 versus the Columbus Crew, the first installment in the newly minted stadium where Cincinnati hopes to continue a three-match unbeaten streak and secure the season's first points at home.
This tifo is an enormous, expensive, and time-consuming undertaking driven and paid for by hundreds of members from FCC's nine Supporters' Groups united under the umbrella called the Incline Collective.
The gargantuan effort and financial cost of the tifo are significant. Supporters sew together more than 2,250 square yards of fabric piece by piece. They trace the design onto those pieces over several nights in a darkened warehouse. An image of the design is projected from a laptop projector set up 50 feet away from the blank canvasses which is hung from the rafters. A dozen supporters group members armed with ladders and markers trace 10' X 20' sections line by line while trying to stay out of their own shadow. After tracing is completed more sewing to connect the larger pieces into a whole. The canvass is grommeted then laid out on the floor of the warehouse and marked for color, paint-by-number style.
More than 20 gallons of paint--black, white, red, dark red 1, dark red 2, quite red, a couple yellows that should have been one yellow, and of course orange and blue--will be applied over the course of four and a half days by dozens more members. Painters take off their shoes to avoid tracking dust from the grimy warehouse onto the painted areas of the tifo. They engage in a massive game of Twister to avoid wet paint. The trick is to avoid painting yourself or your friends into the middle of a wide expanse of wet canvass from which there is no good way to escape.
Just days before the match the club will finish installing the rigging on which the tifo will hang, a new feature for TQL stadium that was designed specifically for tifo like this one.
The finished product, which will take upwards of 800 hours of manual labor to complete, including design, planning, sewing, tracing, painting, and rigging, will be displayed for roughly 5 minutes at the beginning of Friday's match.
Following the match, the tifo will be folded up and carried off to a top-secret storage facility with all of the supporters' groups past tifos, a UFO from Area 51, and the Ark of Covenant recovered by Indiana Jones just before the outbreak of WWII.
As for Chris, he will probably get to sleep for a few hours before someone start asking questions about when he'll be able to unlock the warehouse to get started on the next tifo.
