This story is part of FanSided’s Fandoms of the Year, a series spotlighting the teams, athletes and cultures that defined sports fandom in 2025.
The green and gray smoke is pouring out of the front row as players and fans merge, meeting at the barrier separating the sidelines from the bleachers. As the bodies pack together — dancing, chanting, singing, hugging and waving flags — it's harder and harder to tell where the team ends and their supporters begin. But that's kind of the point.
Today, it's all one — Vermont Green FC, the newly crowned USL2 champions and the community that backs them. It's all just soccer in Vermont.
Building a legacy from scratch
"As builders of this club," said Patrick Infurna, one of the Vermont Green FC co-founders, "we knew that if we were going to make this work in Burlington, Vermont, in this state, it had to mean something more than just fielding players to play sports and hope to win. Like that's not enough for this community. I think a lot of this community holds itself to a really high standard. And they want the things that they engage with, and the things that they do, to have a deeper meaning and a purpose."
Vermont Green were featured on the FanSided's Fandoms of the Year back in 2022, honored as the Most Socially Conscious Fandom of the Year. At that point, the club had exactly one season under its belt and was mostly drawing attention for its foundational mission and action plan around environmental and social justice. You could be forgiven for generalizing them as a progressive activist organization with a serious soccer fetish.
Four years later, and it's clear the soccer hasn't been taking a back seat — both pillars are equally important and the way they complement and augment each other is the secret sauce.
Vermont Green went undefeated in the 2025 USL2 season (11 wins and 3 draws), finishing with a plus-30 goal differential across 14 regular season games. They then made their way to a league championship with one miracle after another in the playoffs. In the second round, they trailed 2-0 against FC Motown and scored three goals from the 65th minute on to steal the win. They followed that with a 3-1 overtime win over Lionsbridge FC, scoring in the 104th and 116th minutes.
In the national semifinals, they needed a 4-2 edge in penalties to break a 0-0 tie and escape from the Dothan United Dragons. And in the national final, they scored the winning goal in the 90th minute, securing a 2-1 win, their first championship and setting off that joyous celebration with fans at the edges of the field.
"It's really hard to describe, to be honest," said head coach Chris Taylor in the short documentary, Today You're With Us, before the final game. "Because every single game, every single night, it was like, 'Oh, my god, this was the best night we've ever had.' But then the next one comes, and you're like, 's**t, here we go again.'"
"And then I think, to be honest, the fans and the community felt they were having an impact on the game, and it became, like, addictive to everyone."
A fanbase about soccer and something more
USL2 is a U-23 semipro league that plays in the summer, and most of the rosters are filled with high-level college players looking for elite competition opportunities in the offseason. The team plays at the University of Vermont stadium, Virtue Field, which officially seats 2,500 fans. As the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference, they hosted every playoff game through the Final, and attendance just climbed, ultimately to well above that max capacity.
The field is ringed with a chain link fence, and over the years, fans who can't get tickets to sellout games have begun congregating on a grassy hill at one end of the field to watch from outside. For the final, the team actually removed advertising and branding signage from parts of the fence, so the game was visible from more places outside the stadium. They even had a construction company working on a site next to the stadium move equipment and barriers, so fans could watch from there.
When tickets for the final went on sale, there were reportedly 7,000 people online at 10 a.m. trying to buy in. The team estimates that roughly 5,000 people were there to watch the team win the final, both in the stands and watching from all around the outside of the stadium. Remember, we're talking about Vermont — one of the smallest states in the U.S. and a metro-area (Burlington) of about 230,000 people. That's 2 percent of the population showing up for this game, an equivalent crowd in say, the Dallas metro-area to watch the Cowboys, would be 185,000 people, more than twice the actual capacity of AT&T Stadium.
The final, which was only available on YouTube or the local CBS affiliate in Burlington and Plattsburgh, N.Y., was shown in a theater in Rutland, Vt., two hours from Burlington. I live 45 minutes south of the stadium, in a tiny town of 4,000 people, and I was at a watch party with about 40 people for the final. This is a four-year-old club in a fourth-tier league in a tiny, rural state with no legacy of professional or elite college sports to speak of. And they have become a universal fandom for Vermonters.
And soccer is just a part of the puzzle.
"I think if you polled Vermont Green supporters and fans like I'm guessing — more so than any other club, certainly in the soccer world, and probably in sports in general — there are a very large percentage of people who would not classify themselves as sports fans," said Tyler Litwin, founder of the Green Mountain Bhoys, the club's official supporter's group. The environmental and social justice missions were important entry points for many people who otherwise weren't that interested in soccer. But whether you found your way to the team because of sports or social justice, the community is what has kept people coming back.
"We just tried to build this big tent," said Infurna. "The idea was a club that was hoping to attract soccer fans, was hoping to attract people who just wanted to hang out on a summer night. It was hoping to attract people that just wanted to have a place to express some civic and state pride, and then, you know, be a part of something that they saw as doing some good."
"We found the thing that people care about, the thing that people are willing to really pour their energy into, because of the way it represents the way they live outside of the 90 minutes of a soccer game."
Can the Green get bigger?
In a relatively short time, Vermont Green FC have built a large and deeply committed fan base. But continuing to build off the success of this season has challenges. They sold out every game last season, and there is no real way to increase the capacity of the stadium. Fans ringing the stadium and enjoying the action through a fence is a growing phenomenon, but probably not a sustainable solution.
Infurna said the team has begun some very exploratory planning, trying to figure out what financial thresholds they'd have to hit to actually build their own facility, and what that would even look like for a team that only plays three months of the year. One new initiative that will make more tickets available — the club is launching a women's team, which will begin play this summer. Growing attendance is obviously not the primary reason the club is taking this step, but it does mean an opportunity to reach more people.
"It's going to be a Venn diagram," said Infurna. "It's going to be a lot of the same people, but it's also a new community. It's people who love women's sports, and we want to engage with women's sports in that way. And we're so excited to build that and serve that community, But also just continue, like, pushing this idea that we're a soccer mecca of the United States."
Former USWNT player Sam Mewis has already been hired as head coach. The women's team is expected to play a similar schedule to the men's team, which means 1,300 more season tickets available for Vermonters, and a dozen more games with room for 2,500+ people to come and be a part of what the club is building.
"We hope to just continue reflecting this community in a way that allows people to see themselves in it," said Infurna of the future of the club.
Whether you're coming for championship-level soccer, to cheer for women athletes, to put your money where your mouth is on the idea that sports can be a world-changing force for good, or just to have a good time with your friends and neighbors — if you show up to Virtue Field, inside or outside the fence this summer, then you're with us.