AFC Mobile has released its schedule for the 2020 season, the club’s first as a member of the National Premier Soccer League, setting up a slate of matches that includes a home-and-home series with the New Orleans Jesters, back-to-back meetings with longtime rival Port City FC, and the second annual MoonPie Match against Chattanooga FC.
The NPSL is the largest and, by many measures, the top summer soccer league in the country, sanctioned by the US Adult Soccer Association and made up of 91 clubs nationwide. Membership in the league gives the Azaleas direct qualification into the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup, the single-elimination national tournament that pits clubs from every level of American soccer, from top Major League Soccer franchises down to amateur sides, against one another for a shot at a national title.
Open Cup qualification is the prize that separates the NPSL from the regional leagues Mobile has played in before. It is the oldest continuous national soccer competition in the United States, and its format — where a semi-professional side can, in theory, be drawn against a professional franchise — is what gives a club from Mobile a path, however steep, to a one-night upset on a national stage.
“We are certainly excited about the upcoming campaign. We will see some familiar faces and create new rivalries, which will be fantastic for our supporters and special for the players,” AFC Mobile head coach Steve Wieczorek said. “The schedule will be tough but I know that we are up for it and ready to give everything for the club and our loyal supporters.”
The move up the ladder is the latest step for a club that has grown with the city’s soccer culture, playing its way from regional competition into a national league without ever leaving its home grounds in west Mobile. For supporters, the change shows up most concretely in a schedule like this one: named opponents from across the Southeast, dates that stretch deep into the summer, and a trophy match with history attached.
The road ahead
AFC Mobile opens the 2020 campaign on the road May 7 against the Jacksonville Armada U23s before traveling to Louisiana on May 16 to face the New Orleans Jesters for the first time since a 2018 preseason friendly the Jesters won 2-1 in Mobile.
The Azaleas will host their home opener on May 23 against the Jacksonville Armada U23s at the Archbishop Lipscomb Athletic Complex, known locally as “The Lip.” From there, Mobile hits the road for consecutive matches against Tallahassee SC and Pensacola FC, two clubs joining the Azaleas in the move from the Gulf Coast Premier League to the NPSL’s Gulf Coast Conference.
That migration of clubs gives the conference an unusual familiarity: the opponents Mobile spent recent seasons building local interest against — the Florida panhandle and capital city sides within driving distance — come along to the new league, preserving the short trips and the visiting crowds that make regional soccer work. A mobile supporter’s road trips remain what they were: Tallahassee, Pensacola, New Orleans, Gulfport.
The Jesters, who sat out the 2019 season after reaching the NPSL Southeastern Conference finals in 2018, return to Mobile on June 6. The New Orleans rivalry is the oldest thread in the schedule — two Gulf Coast cities, two hours apart, whose clubs have traded results and supporters’ taunts across the lake and the marsh for years.
The Forgotten Coast Cup rivalry with Port City FC picks back up June 13 in Mobile, with the Azaleas traveling to Gulfport the following week for the return leg. Mobile hosts Tallahassee SC again on June 27 before the season’s marquee non-conference date: a July 1 trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee, for the second annual Match for the MoonPie against Chattanooga FC of the National Independent Soccer Association, one level up from the NPSL in the American soccer pyramid.
“Renewing our match against CFC is another important part of the journey forward as an organization. We get to measure ourselves against an established successful club and play in an outstanding environment,” Wieczorek said.
Chattanooga FC is led by former University of Mobile coaching standout Peter Fuller, adding a personal thread to a rivalry that already comes with its own hardware: the winner of the Match for the MoonPie takes home a professional wrestling-style championship belt adorned with a MoonPie logo.
“It’s exciting for us to see some familiar faces come back to Finley Stadium this summer,” Chattanooga FC managing director Jeremey Alumbaugh said. “Having AFC Mobile return for the Moon Pie Match will give our fans and supporters a great treat and we are anxious for the 2020 season to begin.”
The trophy’s whimsy conceals the fixture’s substance. Chattanooga FC is among the most successful clubs in NPSL history, a program that has drawn crowds in the thousands to Finley Stadium and made multiple national final appearances, and the MoonPie Match was conceived as a measuring stick — a chance for a rising Gulf Coast club to test itself in front of a big, loud, experienced soccer crowd.
The MoonPie itself ties the two cities together. The snack, born at Chattanooga’s bakery, has long been a fixture of Gulf Coast grocery shelves and of Mobile’s own New Year’s Eve celebration, which lowers a giant electric MoonPie over the city at midnight. A match named for it gave both clubs a mascot-sized piece of common culture to build a tradition on, complete with a belt that lives with the winner until the rematch.
A new league, the same home
AFC Mobile closes out its regular season back home on the Fourth of July, hosting Pensacola FC at The Lip.
All home matches are scheduled to kick off at 7 p.m., a slot that keeps the Azaleas’ games in the summer evening’s cooler hours and leaves the night open afterward for the supporters’ rituals that have become part of the club’s identity. Season tickets for the club’s debut NPSL campaign are on sale now through the team’s website.
The Archbishop Lipscomb Athletic Complex has been the club’s home throughout its rise, and its qualities fit the level of soccer that is coming to it: a proper field, workable parking, and enough intimacy that the noise of a few hundred committed supporters fills the ground. Summer soccer at this level succeeds or fails on exactly that atmosphere — the drums, the chants and the sense that a city’s club is playing in a neighborhood, not a stadium district.
The calendar itself tells the story of the club’s ambition. It opens with a May road trip, builds through June’s regional rivalries, peaks with the July 1 pilgrimage to Chattanooga and closes on the Fourth of July at home — a holiday date that gives the season’s last home match the feel of a city event rather than a league fixture. Between the opener and the finale lie seven weeks of matches against opponents old and new, for a trophy shelf that now includes a cup with its own name and a belt with a snack cake on it.
For the Azaleas’ supporters, the 2020 slate is the most consequential schedule the club has published: the first that comes with a national tournament berth attached, the first that reads like a tour of the Southeast’s emerging soccer cities, and the first that requires a map with Chattanooga on it. Wieczorek’s promised “tough” season begins in Jacksonville in early May — and Mobile will find out, over the summer that follows, exactly where its soccer stands.
The Gulf Coast Conference schedule that fills the middle of the season rewards the kind of supporters culture the Azaleas have built. Every opponent is within a half-day’s drive, and most are within two hours, which means home matches draw traveling fans as well as home ones and away matches feel like invasions rather than road games. Regional leagues survive on that energy; the NPSL’s Gulf Coast Conference structure has preserved it even as the level of play has climbed.
The move also changes what is at stake in each fixture. In a regional league, the season’s reward was a playoff and a trophy among peers; in the NPSL, the regular season carries a club toward the national tournament structure and, for the conference’s best, deep-summer knockout rounds against the winners of other regions. A club’s season can now end in Mobile in July or extend to a national stage in August, and the difference is decided week to week from the opener forward.
For the players themselves, the leap matters in career terms as much as competitive ones. The NPSL’s summer window overlaps the college offseason, drawing university players home to their hometown clubs and giving coaches a proving ground of athletes with ambitions above the amateur level. A Mobile player who spends his college years elsewhere can come home for the summer and play at a national league standard; a high school standout can measure himself against that level before signing anywhere.
Wieczorek’s remarks about “familiar faces and new rivalries” cut in both directions as well. Familiar faces mean the Jesters and Port City and the panhandle clubs the club has already fought; new rivalries mean the Armada’s U23 side, the Tallahassee newcomers and, at the top of the novelty list, a Chattanooga program with a national reputation. The schedule offers a first look at all of them within five weeks.
The club’s administrative growth has kept pace with its ambitions on the field. A schedule like this one — nineteen dates, two states and a Tennessee trip, coordinated around stadium availability and opponents’ grounds — reflects the kind of front-office work that summer clubs often lack, and the ticketing operation now selling season passes through the website is part of the same professionalization.
What has not changed is the bargain the club makes with its city: local grounds, local players, local rivalries, played in the open summer evenings when the Gulf Coast’s sports calendar is otherwise empty. The 2020 schedule, the first at the national level, simply raises the stakes on that bargain. The Azaleas will be measured, match by match from May 7 to July 1, against the best summer competition the country’s largest league can assemble — with an Open Cup berth as the reward for surviving it, and the MoonPie belt, still, as the trophy nobody forgets.