So who are you and how did you get involved with the club?
What’s up! My name is Patrick Infurna and I’m a co-founder of Vermont Green FC. I grew up in a town called Castleton, Vermont where I coincidentally also went to college. I used to make some videos with COPA90, and now I work full-time on the international communications team for Eintracht Frankfurt. I got involved with the club after a spontaneous phone call where an old colleague of mine named Burke Cherrie introduced me to a fellow by the name of Matthew Wolff, maybe some folks have heard of him! From there I was introduced to the concept Matt had just started to bring to life with a few of his college friends, and immediately set down the path of starting Vermont Green FC! The idea of building a soccer club in my home state that unapologetically used its sporting platform to address environmental justice was a dream I had played around with in my head, but these guys came to me with the intent to really do it. I never looked back in joining the effort.

Gotta start with the name. How did that come about?
Vermont Green FC was the name Matt came to me with from his earliest phase of ideation, it was always perfect. The Green Mountain State, a “Green" club, a community that was culturally very attached to the color and the idea, it was a no brainer to not just have it be the color of the shirt but the name and the identity of the club from the jump.

Kits made a big splash, can you talk about the design and what goals you had for them?
I REALLY ought to pass this question to Mr. Wolff, but I’ll do my best version here: we are so happy with how these kits came out. The design of the shirts followed the same mission that the greater club ethos does: represent Vermont & Vermonters to the best of our ability. We were able to put out a pretty awesome collection of outfield shirts and some fun goalkeeper kits that do a great job of representing a wide array of Vermont culture pieces while providing a little something for everyone stylistically. The home shirt is a groovy green tie-dye because, we had to, the away shirt offers a clean look pairing a maple creemee body with some green sleeves and trim with a collar, a third kit in black with eastern pines. We also have the foliage away kit to represent Vermont autumn, the pink swirl tie-die that is in the color of the state flower, and finally the Vermont Republic goalkeeper shirt that carries the banner of the original independent Vermont that existed from 1777-1791 (Our starting goalkeeper wears number 77, and we also have a goalkeeper who wears number 91.) To answer your question on the goal, I hope Vermonters and Vermonters-at-heart can find something that makes them feel at home in at least one of these kits, and we hope those from far and wide observing the project as friends/fans/supporters can get a little taste of our great state through these shirts.

What was the ramp like, leading into your first season?
It’s been wild. Starting a club is the most fun thing I’ve ever done, it’s also the hardest. We joke often about how we all had this vision fo starting a club and by matchday 1, being able to sit in the stands and enjoy what we’ve started, but we’ve hilariously realized that starting a club at this level is constant labor, and we love it. The lead-up has really just been a tremendous amount of groundwork, building relationships, building partnerships, getting people in the community to understand the mission and commit to the growth of this club. It’s been amazing, and we’re really just getting started.

Club has had good attendance so far, was that a product of effort or are people just wild about soccer
We were able to get 1,001 fans to our home opener, which I think is a fantastic number, but we really think we can grow on this. I hate using the term “market” — I think its a weird way to refer to a place where people live and work and build community and live their lives, but I’ll use it here because I know its commonplace — Burlington is an underrated market. Chittenden County and the Burlington metropolitan area is full of soccer-loving, community-building, environmental justice-prioritizing folks and I think continuing to build a medium for people to gather, enjoy themselves, support local athletes, and continue their every day fight for a better world will be an exciting challenge. So to answer your question, we put in a lot of effort, our founders and staff and volunteers, coaches and players, but we believe as well that Vermont as a whole is hungry for both high level soccer and community outlets that represent them and we hope VGFC can strengthen that role here with every game.

Matchday poster designed by Blake Ink. The club sells them here.

How does the club plan to continue to grow the fanbase?
We’ve got a ton of initiatives here in Vermont that I think will help us grow the fanbase, our Spread The Love season ticket has allowed fans from out of the area to buy tickets that benefit local youth from our partners at the King Street Center and others, we’ve partnered with the local Somali Bantu community football club Juba Star FC to expand access to soccer in the community, and just today we launched a partnership with the Vermont Labor Council, AFL-CIO to have a Labor Night on July 13th, connecting our club with the labor movement in Vermont and bringing more folks from the community together. This is an endless job, in a good way, we just need to keep reaching out to folks, having conversations, and saying “hey, want to watch some soccer?"

What players have been the bright spots so far?
We’ve been incredibly thrilled with the group that Adam Pfeifer has brought in so far. It’s a great mix of players from big D1 programs across the country, if I started to highlight players I’d end up going through the whole list, I can’t say enough good things about these guys as players and as members of the community here. I will say that USL League 2 has a top 50 prospects list they put out this week, and our striker Eythor Bjorgolfsson made that list, that’s pretty awesome for him!

Did you expect the club to come out and play so well early on? How do you explain it?
We had nothing but faith in Adam Pfeifer and his staff, we know its difficult for expansion clubs to get their footing out of the gate and there’s always going to be a degree of that, but to come out with a 4-0 win, and then have 6 points and a +6 GD is not bad! There’s a lot more work to do this season, but we’re excited to keep watching the team grow.

If we know anything about you, you're a dreamer. What's your pie-in-sky dream for this club?
Man, I wish we were on audio for this one, I have so many dreams for this club that start right here on the streets of Burlington and in the hills of the Green Mountains, but also big ones that expand into the realms of how professional sports build themselves and become more sustainable entities, and even on how I think we need to reform soccer in this country (we’ll have to talk more about this later, you know where I’m at!)

The short version is, I want to see the state of Vermont & the city of Burlington become a soccer hotbed that punches above its weight in regard to quality of play, player development, fan culture, infrastructure, all of that. It’ll take a while, but that’s alright. We’re not the biggest place in the world, but that doesn’t matter, and I think Vermont is prepared to support soccer so long as the soccer supports Vermont. I want to see this sport and this club become completely inseparable from the environmental justice mission and the community building side of our operations. We want players to come here and fall in love with the state and carry their experiences here into the professional leagues as a source of pride. We just want to have good vibes, play some soccer, and take care of our neighbors and the planet. That’s our mission in a nutshell.

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