Messi is playing for a soccer trophy once won by an SF taqueria

On Wednesday night, Lionel Messi and Inter Miami descend upon Cincinnati for a semifinal against FC Cincinnati. After tearing through the Leagues Cup with a whopping 10 goals in seven games, Messi has his eyes on another American soccer trophy: the U.S. Open Cup. It’s the oldest soccer tournament in the United States, and it’s been professionalized in recent decades. But that wasn’t always the case. Thirty years ago, an amateur team from Taqueria El Farolito on Mission Street won the whole thing.

The late Salvador Lopez founded the El Farolito restaurant empire, and for many years, he managed El Farolito SC, racking up trophies in the San Francisco Tavern Pool League. Today, those trophies, along with the one from the 1993 U.S. Open, sit on the shelves of El Farolito Bar at 2777 Mission St. 

Salvador left Mexico City in the 1970s with his wife and two daughters to live in a single room in a friend’s house in Half Moon Bay before eventually settling in San Francisco. “The Mission reminded him of Mexico City,” according to Santiago Lopez, Salvador’s son. “He saw this amazing multicultural neighborhood that not only had a thriving Spanish-speaking community from across Latin America but a mix of immigrants from Asia as well. He knew that it was a place where he could make it.” 

Salvador took everything he learned working in the kitchens of Mexico City and opened his own taqueria, the very first Taqueria El Farolito, at 2779 Mission St. in San Francisco on Dec. 11, 1983. Less than two years later, the soccer team was formed and entered into the San Francisco Soccer Football League. With roots dating back to 1902, the SFSFL claims to be the oldest soccer league in the country, and it has historically been composed of teams with ties to local European immigrant social clubs, such as North Beach’s San Francisco Italian Athletic Club, which became the first U.S. Open Cup champion from the city in 1976, and Greek-American AC, which won the cup in 1985.

Accompanying Salvador and the players to the championship game in Indianapolis in 1993 was his 7-year-old son Santiago, who has since taken over as the club’s manager. He beams when reminiscing about the experience: “I remember that trip so well. I was so young. I remember going into downtown Indianapolis and seeing all the tall buildings and getting to stay in a big hotel. For a kid from the Mission, it was amazing.” He laughs as he recalls how he “got to play troublemaker” with the players while the team hung out in the hotel lobby playing cards. “It was such a great atmosphere inside the group. And they all played together for each other.”

All of the players were immigrants from Latin America, mostly Mexico. According to midfielder Samuel Cid Del Prado, who now lives in Antioch, the family atmosphere nurtured by Salvador Lopez himself was critical to the team’s success. Del Prado immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in 1987 and began playing for El Farolito in 1989. His younger brother Jose also played for the team and scored two goals in the championship match. It wasn’t the only family affair at the club, with another two goals in that match scored by Elias Fonseca, whose brother Guadalupe was also on the team. Fonseca’s daughter, Stephanie Ramirez, recalls that Lopez was a “caring and thoughtful person” who employed him at a taqueria for a year while he was getting on his feet and playing soccer.

Record books will show the name of the 1993 U.S. Open Cup champion not as El Farolito SC but rather as Club Deportivo Mexico. That rebrand, according to Del Prado, was because “Salvador wanted the team to have a name that represented his people — the Mexican community.” The club’s traditional blue-and-yellow kits were scrapped in favor of the familiar color scheme of Mexico’s national football team, El Tri: green, white and red. But despite the team’s reaching the highest of heights as CD Mexico, the community demanded that it revert to the original name. “At the time, El Farolito had become synonymous with San Francisco soccer, and he decided to go back to it,” Del Prado said.

CD Mexico’s 1993 cup run included a penalty-kick shootout win over Exiles SC of Southern California in the quarterfinals, followed by a 3-1 victory over the Milwaukee Bavarians in the semis. The team’s opponents in the final would be nothing short of American amateur soccer royalty, United German Hungarians of Greater Philadelphia and Vicinity, a club with roots dating back to 1922. 

UGH proved no match for Lopez’s men in the final, falling 5-0 at Kuntz Memorial Soccer Stadium in Indianapolis, a venue the young Santiago Lopez recalls as being “like a high school stadium, only smaller.” Samuel’s younger brother Jose scored the third and fifth goals. And even with UGH’s esteemed pedigree, it had not underestimated CD Mexico heading into the match. Former player Bob Wilkinson, who now serves as the head men’s soccer coach at Moravian University, recalls, “We heard they were good. It turns out they were really good.”

The 1993 trophy is on display at El Farolito Bar, perched atop a television at the end of the bar. It’s smaller than the ones from the Tavern Pool League, but it’s more prestigious by far. 

The 1993 cup would end up being one of the final times an amateur team won the trophy. When MLS kicked off its first season in 1996, the league’s teams began participating in an effort to promote the sport. Since then, the only non-MLS team to win the trophy has been the Rochester Rhinos in 1999. With players like Messi in MLS now, it’s unlikely such a thing will ever happen again.

El Farolito SC has since moved from the mostly recreational SFSFL to the semi-pro National Professional Soccer League, the fourth tier in the U.S. soccer pyramid. According to Santiago, the move to the NPSL was made “to create an environment to keep players in high performance. If you’re a young player, you can develop yourself. And if you’re a veteran player, you can get a second chance at maybe getting noticed by a professional team.”

As winners of the 2023 NPSL West Region’s Golden Gate Conference, which concluded play in June, Santiago and El Farolito SC have also won a place to compete in the 2024 U.S. Open Cup. It’s not only an opportunity to win back that trophy and once again honor Santiago’s father’s legacy both on and off the field but also a chance to maybe face Messi along the way.

The club retains its Latin flavor, with over half its current roster originally hailing from Colombia, but Santiago insists that Farolito is a club for all fútbol lovers, regardless of nationality. “It doesn’t matter if they’re Asian or Samoan or Italian, as long as they can play.”