Just after I started my NFL team fan club in 2010, I secured a spot for our group at a local bar and arrived early on the day of the season opener. As a native New Englander who’d relocated to Cincinnati, I was rocking my Patriots jersey when I opened the door to the massive sports bar.
It’s possible my mind may have since over-dramatized the memory of that moment, but I’m pretty sure a record scratched, the bar went dead silent, and every head turned to stare at me. I was a silver-and-blue dot in a sea of hundreds festooned in orange and black. Further, the Cincinnati Bengals’ opener that year was us, the New England Patriots.
However, many travelers have been in a similar situation. As a fan traveling to a new city, you may have stepped into a bar, stadium, or parking lot full of local tailgaters, blood pressure elevated, and forehead perspiring just a little. Plenty of fans know the experience of turning their head from side to side to keep an eye on the crowd while in an enemy team’s territory. It can be uncomfortable to show up to root for a visiting team when you’re surrounded by throngs of the hometown team’s fans.
Being a fan at an away game can be unsettling at best. And at worst, it could even be dangerous, depending on where you are, what teams are playing, and how ardent their fans are.
But, to paraphrase the favorite song of The Liverpool Football Club, you don’t need to walk alone. If there’s an expat club in the city you’re visiting, it can instantly connect you to pre- and post-game events and be a safe space to express your passions. And these days, expat clubs are pretty easy to find.
How to find an expat sports fan club
Photo: Patriots Nation Nati
“In the past, fans had to connect through magazines’ letter-writing pages or via mail,” says Holly Swinyard, the author of 2024’s A History of Fans and Fandom. But that’s changed, she says. “The internet has made it significantly easier for fans to connect through emails, online newsletters, and social media like TikTok and Discord.”
When Brazilian native Adriano Batista Branco moved to New York City for a job in finance, he couldn’t find a club for his favorite Brazilian team, Palmeiras. So he took to social media to build one.
“I realized I had to organize something. So I searched on Instagram, grabbed the name “PalmeirasNY” and then just manually followed every Palmeiras supporter I could. I followed some 30,000 people and, in doing so, built our own following to about seven or eight thousand.”
From there, Branco found a bar in Manhattan for fans to watch Palmeiras matches together, eventually growing the team’s New York Instagram following to nearly 22,000 people.
Fans of São Paulo’s Palmeiras celebrating on a bridge in NYC. Photo: Palmeiras NY
“Social media is certainly one of the best places to go to find a club,” says Dan Lobring, Senior Vice President at the sports marketing firm Stretch PR. “There’s probably a Facebook or Reddit fan group where you can reach out and find out if there’s a watch party, player appearances, tailgate, etc.”
And the bigger your team, the more clubs it will likely have. The website for FC Bayern München out of Munich, Germany, boasts an astounding 4,409 fan clubs with more than 325,000 members. Of those clubs, 538 of them are international, located in 106 countries. Many teams have pages on their websites (often under “Fans” or “Fan Zone”) where you can find their clubs, usually in a searchable format.
Expat clubs can make travel for sporting events much easier
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Many clubs aren’t focused only on the cities where they’re located – they travel. For example, it’s relatively rare that my New England Patriots come to Cincinnati to play. So our club often buys group tickets to games in cities we can drive to from Cincinnati, like Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, or Nashville.
Zack Luttrell, a Charlotte, North Carolina native and fan of the Carolina Panthers, takes travel to away games one step further. He started his Roaring Riot Panthers fan club in 2008 when he bought a 55-passenger bus, loaded it with Panthers fans, and bused them to an Atlanta Falcons game in Georgia.
The club grew from there, and in 2015, he not only brought 550 Panthers fans to a Jacksonville Jaguars game in Florida, but also bought out all the cabana tickets around the two pools at the Jaguars’ EverBank Stadium. (He fondly remembers that whenever they showed the pools on the live TV broadcast, all they found were Panthers fans). He later came close to buying out huge sections of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers stadium in Tampa for 850 Panthers fans, and eventually, took a coalition of Roaring Riot members to an NFL game in Europe.
“After that trip to London, I just fell in love with the international games,” he says. “So I started a side business, Sports Fans Travel, that specializes in international travel for clubs.” Since then, he says, he’s helped all kinds of fans see their teams abroad, from taking Pittsburgh Steelers fans to Dublin to ferrying Washington Commanders fans to Madrid, Spain.
Sports travel helps home teams stay profitable
Canada fans celebrate after their team defeated the United States during the CONCACAF Nations League Third Place Match at Sofi Stadium in Inglewood, CA. Photo: Ringo Chiu/Shutterstock
Generally, locals don’t like seeing the fans of their foes pulling into town. I’ve experienced this myself, when I overheard a diminutive but feisty Browns fan say “I’d like to punch every single one of these Patriots fans in the face” after we filled an entire bar in Cleveland, Ohio.
But locals should like what these opposing fans do for their local economy. Unlike most home fans, traveling fans will not only spend money on game tickets and stadium concessions, but also on hotel room nights, flights, restaurants throughout their stay, ride-hailing services, and tickets to other local attractions.
Teams that might be struggling to fill seats in the stadium can even get proactive in their outreach to opposing clubs. At the height of the Patriots’ dynastic years under Tom Brady, the group salespeople from other nearby teams would regularly call me with compelling offers selling group ticket packages.
These clubs also do more than connect fans: they help create networks of connected groups. As the founder of Cincinnati’s Patriots fan club, I’ve met founders from other Patriots clubs in Arizona, South Carolina, Tennessee, and even Switzerland and Germany. There’s a closed Facebook group just for leaders of Patriots clubs and we’ll often work together to create sports and social events when our team comes to play in one of their towns.
Expat clubs can create supportive communities
Clubs can evolve from game-day-only meetups into real, tight-knit communities. Photo: Patriots Nation Nati
Expat clubs often start out focused solely on games, but tend to eventually evolve beyond just watch parties. Luttrell’s Roaring Riot regularly supports events for Jaguars players’ charitable foundations. My own club has gotten together for movies (specifically ‘80 for Brady,’ as you might expect), birthday parties, and other events. Branco’s club in New York City now gets together to play their own soccer matches and even offers samba lessons.
“Our club was started for Palmeiras followers but it’s way more than that,” says Branco. “Now it’s about inclusion. Many of our members were Brazilians who were alone in New York City.” For many of those people, he says, the club is more like a family. This idea that the clubs can grow into real communities and real connections was consistently echoed by those I spoke to for this story.
Swinyard explains why that may be. “Fan clubs facilitate human connection through shared stories, whether about a sports team or a fictional universe,” she says. “And these connections fulfill a fundamental human need for belonging and appreciation.”
For Luttrell, seeing those connections is one of the best parts of developing and growing an expat club. “It’s just so cool to see everyone come together,” he says. “In the end, the Carolina Panthers are just a medium to connect people. I’ve seen people at our tailgates who are at opposite ends of the socio-economic or political spectrums sitting down and talking and laughing because they have that shared connection. No matter what happened during the week, we’re all on the same team on Sundays.”
Expect expat sports clubs to thrive during the 2026 World Cup
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Leaders and members of fan clubs focused on association football (soccer, to most Americans), already have their eyes on 2026, when the World Cup comes to Canada, the US, and Mexico. It’s a new opportunity for Branco, who says he plans to switch gears and pivot from being a Palmeiras club to a Brazilian one. He’s exceedingly hopeful that Brazil will play in at least one match in New York City, which will also host the finals on July 19, 2026. He’s already planning how to mark such an occasion.
“We will do some similar events as we did when Palmeiras was here for the Club World Cup, like a takeover of Times Square,” he says. “But of course, it won’t be about Palmeiras. It will be about all of Brazil.”
If you’re a fan of the US national team, there’s only one club you need to know about: the American Outlaws club, with more than 200 chapters in the US and abroad. “The American Outlaws are kind of a gold standard for how they organize trips internationally,” says Lobring. “If you’re a traveling US fan, they’re the ones to seek out.”
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what your preferred team is, where it’s based, and whether it plays football, American football, or anything else. If you find your team’s club in an away city, you can always count on one thing: that group can help make sure you’ll never walk (or cheer) alone.
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