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Tifo creation is a true labor of love for any supporter. But in Charlotte, members of the Royal Family Tifo Committee are putting the emphasis on the labor part, mastering the tricks of the trade and pumping out some of the best tifos in MLS at an incredible rate.
The tifo committee was formed in 2022, before Charlotte FC’s inaugural season. It was created on the back of the supporter’s council, a collective that includes representatives from the club’s supporters groups, including Mint City Collective, Queen’s Firm, Southbound and Crown, South Charlotte, Norcas CLT, Carolina Hooliganz, QC Royals, Forty Thieves, Charlotte FC Black Supporters Union and Blue Furia.
Brandon Lewis joined as the head of the tifo committee in 2022.
“It was just kind of a volunteer thing, no interview process,” he said. “We were just a bunch of supporters that were getting together, and we were like, ‘Hey, who wants to lead?’ I was like, ‘Okay, that sounds fun, let’s do it.’”
The committee itself has around 20-30 consistent members from different supporters groups who participate in all aspects of tifo creation, from logistics to sewing, drawing, and painting, in order to keep the group’s processes consistent for future seasons.
Each season, several supporters groups collaborate on the home opener tifo, as well as the Pride celebration tifo, but divvy up the rest of the home matches, with members pitching or suggesting ideas and designs which are then green lit by Lewis and the rest of the committee. The abundance of talented artists and graphic designers in Charlotte ensures that the quality of each piece is high.
“Each supporter group will poll their members individually for what game they prefer,” Lewis said. “Typically we try to do combined efforts on the home opener and Pride and then the rest are up for grabs. We have one group that really loves doing Hispanic heritage tifos, one group that likes doing Black excellence tifos, right now one group really has a thing for Star Wars.”
One factor that has helped the committee’s prolific output is the easy rapport between groups.
“We’re still able to cooperate in a good fashion. We’ll see how groups feel about each other in 10 years,” said Lewis. “But right now, I’ll have messages from other supporters groups weekly, depending on what game is coming up, and they’ll hit me up, and we’ll talk about tifo ideas and what the outlook will be. That’s not often common, where you have such an easy connection between supporter groups.”
That easy working relationship, and a lot of hard work, allowed the committee to produce a tifo for every home match during the club’s inaugural 2022 season, including their Queen Charlotte tifo for the home opener, a massive hornet’s nest tifo, and several chronicling the adventures of mascot Sir Minty. They followed that up in the 2023 season with two emotional tributes to Anton Walkes, who passed away before the start of the season, and several other impressive displays.
“Anton’s passing happened, and it was a quick turnaround, and we had already done the first tifo by that point [another take on Queen Charlotte],” said Lewis. “So we tried to transform that one. We got a hold of some LED Rope, and we were able to zip tie that to the queen in the shape of the number five for Anton. As it went up, the lights in the stadium went off, and they plugged it in. It was kind of a fingers crossed moment, I was hoping it didn’t mess up any connections as we were zip tying it and that the number five would look ok.”
As beautiful as tifo reveals can be, there is an remarkable amount of unseen energy and infrastructure that leads up to it, from acquiring the right type of fire retardant cloth, hauling materials around the city, adhering to stadium and building codes and working with the club’s operations team to ensure everything is run smoothly and by the book.
“In our first year, we just wanted to hit the ground running, get the experience, get everything under our belt and know what to do going forward,” said Lewis. “What we quickly learned was that it would be great if we could schedule our own stuff on our own time, but a lot of stadium operations type stuff and fire department stuff requires a lot of advance notice for permits. Especially around here, we learned very quickly that we had to really give them a heads up ahead of time.”
Lewis is an engineer as his day job, so the logistics come easy to him, but he’s been on more calls with the Charlotte Fire Department than he’d like to recall.
“It’s just a time commitment trying to weed out all of the things to where everybody's trusting of us, and we know what materials we can and can’t use, we know what sizes work, we know our rigging,” said Lewis.
But despite how hectic it can be to put out metaphorical fires and prevent real ones, the overall experience makes it worth it for Lewis.
“I really do like the process,” he said. “I think the best part is the feeling at the hoist test, when it’s just a few of you and some club staff in an empty stadium, looking up at the tifo. You’ve gone through all of the sewing, drawing and painting. You see all the little mistakes, like you’re sewing and your thread breaks, or your needle breaks, and you hope it doesn’t rip in mid-air. Then it goes up and you’re like, ‘Huh, it worked.’ That feeling of relief is the best part.”