Last year, we gave away our sixth Club of the Year Award to Tulsa Athletic. We’ve celebrated six different clubs from across the lower league American soccer scene. Teams from the UPSL, WPSL, NISA, USL W League, and USL League One have all hoisted our silver platter, engraved with Club of the Year. We’re a small organization, but we live in this space. We’ve invested time, energy, and so many dollars into trying to cover these leagues with respect and professionalism. And we always involve our readers and listeners in naming the winner of each year’s award.

This year we have five more clubs for you to consider, two are repeat nominations from earlier years. All have done important work in the lower leagues this year. Winning championships is, of course, an obvious sign of success, and there’s several trophies on this year’s list, but there’s also clubs who made the list because of their impact off the field. That sort of work deserves to be recognized as well. So without further conversation, here’s one of this year’s nominations. Be sure to return to vote beginning 12/23! - DV

The Flying Burrito Brothers are a thing. One of American songwriter Gram Parsons’ more tasteful side projects, TFBB were formed on the West Coast at the peak of soccer’s counter-culture era explosion in the United States, therein only reinforcing how the Burrito Bros. are all we can think about when we think about El Farolito SC.

Named famously for the sponsoring chain of Mexican taquerias making mouth-watering handcrafted burritos until 2 a.m. PT every night, and generally regarded as the best men’s amateur team in San Francisco, El Farolito SC is a club with an origin story that includes winning a Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup as ‘San Francisco C.D. Mexico’ in 1993.

This year, the club added to that story with its best tournament run since '93, advancing tenaciously into the Third Round of the Open Cup with delicious wins over pro clubs Portland Timbers 2 (MLS Next Pro) and Central Valley Fuego FC (USL-Championship).

Following 11 championships in the San Francisco Soccer Football League (SFSFL) from 1991-2017, the club joined the National Premier Soccer League (NPSL) in 2018 and has risen like a well-made tortilla to the top of that USASA-sanctioned summer league, too, winning the Golden Gate Conference each of the last two seasons and three times overall.

Led this year by a cast of attacking talent which included Honduran international Dembor Benson and Bay Area native Erik Arias, El Farolito SC were 9-3-0 (w-d-l) in regular-season league play before beating the beans out of their opponents in the NPSL playoffs and topping it off with a 2-1 win over FC Motown in the NPSL Championship Game in Madison, N.J., on Aug. 3 to claim a second national title.

Parsons' Burrito Brothers have a song in their catalog called ‘Six Day On The Road’, and its chorus ends with the line, ‘Six days on the road and I’m gonna make it home tonight!’, which seems entirely appropriate in describing an amateur club that has etched itself into the history of the Open Cup while plunging even further into the overflowing arteries of our burrito- and soccer-loving hearts.

- Dennis Pope