JUST OFF THE corner of 24th and Mission streets in San Francisco sits a distinctive piece of domestic American soccer’s past and present.
The past perches inconspicuously over El Farolito’s bar, where the 1993 U.S. Open Cup trophy sits tucked among an array of championship hardware.
The present lies on the sign announcing the taqueria’s name to prospective customers walking down Mission Street — which also serves as a billboard for the San Francisco-based amateur soccer team that shares El Farolito’s name and history.
Not content to rest on the laurels of its former championship, these days El Farolito battles through the Open Cup’s initial rounds as one of a number of amateur outfits that make up the bulk of the Cup’s first games every year. And this spring, for the second straight season, it became the last amateur club standing in the competition where it once triumphed.
To properly tell the tale of El Farolito, we need to go back over four decades.
In 1983, Salvador “Don Chava” Lopez founded El Farolito, the restaurant, at its staple Mission Street location. Two years later, Lopez founded a soccer team under the same name as the restaurant, competing in the local San Francisco Soccer Football League.
The club was quick to rise through the divisions of San Francisco’s historic league (which dates to 1902), reaching the top flight in a matter of years. It also competed in the U.S. Open Cup, where in 1993 it ascended to the top of American soccer, playing under the name Club Deportivo Mexico.
Santiago Lopez, Don Chava’s son and current general manager/head coach of El Farolito (as well as a GM for the chain of taquerias, now up to 11 locations), was 8 years old when CD Mexico hoisted the Cup. He remembers laughing with the players at team dinners and seeing some of those players cry tears of joy after the final match.
It’s fitting that Lopez has memories of his family’s club achieving Open Cup glory, because under his leadership El Farolito has built a surprising recent pedigree of making noise in US Soccer’s oldest cup competition.
The Burrito Boys book stunning 3rd Round berth (1-2)#USOC2025 | @elfarolito_npsl | CUPSET 🌯 https://t.co/zhgcKKfDeV pic.twitter.com/azjLDILSg2
— U.S. Open Cup (@opencup) April 2, 2025
IN 2010, LOPEZ became the club’s head coach, a role he had no experience in. He was 24 years old, and it was initially supposed to be an interim role, piloting the club to the end of the season. But when the campaign ended, Lopez’s interim tag became permanent.
Stability followed, but Lopez saw a path for further steps forward. He recalled being embarrassed by a defeat in the qualifying rounds of the Open Cup, and set out to enhance El Farolito’s competitiveness.
He started attending more coaching courses. He ramped up his searches for new players to improve the squad. Tryouts for players recommended by squad members and other area coaches became a particularly effective way of adding talent, but the process of making the team is by no means easy.
“I test them,” Lopez told ESPN of the assorted trials El Farolito has hosted over the years. “How disciplined and consistent they can be. Because for me, it’s very important to train. Training gives us everything.”
Gabriel Arias, a midfielder and project engineer by trade, is among the ranks of players who signed with the team via a tryout. He said the exclusivity of the opportunity to try out for El Farolito adds to the significance of playing for the club.
“Being able to suit up with this uniform means a lot,” Arias said. “A lot of players out there have very good talent [and] want to be in this team. Not everybody gets the opportunity.”
THESE DAYS, THE odds of a team such as El Farolito ever winning the Open Cup are next to none. Teams from Major League Soccer, which was still three years from its inaugural season when CD Mexico lifted the trophy, have won every edition of the competition in the 21st century. Just two teams from the USL Championship, American soccer’s second tier, have even made the cup final since 2000.
Even with fewer MLS teams in the competition, an NPSL (to which El Farolito moved from SFSFL in 2018) side would have to beat as many as eight consecutive professional squads to take home the title. When considering the reality of the assorted differences between resources at the amateur and professional level, the math is hard to square.
Players on El Farolito’s roster compete for the club out of passion for the game and community, not for a living. The team’s roster includes painters, Uber drivers, contractors and more. They train hard and often, but don’t have a traditional facility to serve as home base. It’s not unusual for their training sessions to come into conflict with youth teams or other clubs.
Compared with professional outfits, the deck is stacked against an El Farolito run. But that doesn’t mean the team can’t cause havoc.
In 2024, the club topped Portland Timbers 2, the MLS club’s reserve squad that competes in MLS Next Pro. Then it upset third-division side Central Valley Fuego FC before falling in the competition’s third round. It made for a nice moment, an amateur outfit named for a local restaurant chain mounting a run in a tournament it captured many years ago. At some point, the club picked up the nickname “Burrito Boys” on social media, a moniker the soccer-watching internet has enjoyed using ever since. It was a fun throwback to a different era of the cup’s long history, but one that was likely forgotten by most fans as the competition progressed to its later rounds.
Then this year, El Farolito repeated the feat.
On March 19, El Farolito once again traveled to face an MLS reserve side in its opening-round game. El Farolito topped the Real Monarchs 3-1 in Utah. A week and a half later, the club headed south down Route 101 to face USL-C’s Monterey Bay FC in Round 2. A 2-1 victory put the amateurs in the third round once more, where they fell 1-0 after taking another second-division side in Sacramento Republic to the final whistle.
THE MAGIC (AND MADNESS) OF THE CUP 🤯#USOC2025 | @elfarolito_npsl 🌯 pic.twitter.com/VHS0UFwLmu
— U.S. Open Cup (@opencup) April 2, 2025
A TYPICAL WEEKDAY for Kevin Gonzalez — a case manager at the Unity Council in Oakland and El Farolito’s deputy goalkeeper — involves driving to work, a seven-hour shift, a 20-minute drive back to his home in Dublin, California, for lunch, and another drive back through Oakland to San Francisco for training. He gets home around 11:30 p.m.
A Bay Area native, Gonzalez joined El Farolito as a teenager — the youngest player on the roster by a wide margin. He watched as Lopez stepped into the head coaching role, seeking to get the club out of a rut of lackluster seasons. Gonzalez moved on after a few years, spending time traversing the American soccer domestic pyramid at CD Aguiluchos USA, Stumptown AC and Chattanooga FC, among other clubs.
Gonzalez eventually found his way back home, though, training with El Farolito last year as he recovered from an ACL injury and signing ahead of the 2025 campaign. When reflecting on what has gone into the squad’s upsets this campaign, Gonzalez noted a veteran mentality among the team.
“Experience. It’s something that you can’t be taught,” Gonzalez said. “It’s like the seasoning on your mom’s favorite food, you know? She probably just puts that sense of pinch in it. You can’t put it in a cup. You can’t measure it.”
Arias echoed the sentiment that the club’s continued success against professional sides continually builds in the squad a feeling that future upset wins are attainable.
“I wouldn’t say we’re overconfident, but we know it’s possible to beat these professional teams,” Arias said. “We’ve done it before, year after year. Second year in a row we’re in the third round — we know it’s possible.”
NO MATTER THE origin story of their addition, El Farolito’s players share a critical common trait — a willingness to go all-out for one another no matter the odds. Gonzalez credited Lopez’s mentality in building El Farolito’s roster when assessing the club’s ability to knock off squads in higher divisions.
“It doesn’t matter if your guy played collegiate soccer or not. It doesn’t matter if he played in an academy or not,” Gonzalez said. “If you know how to play, and you’re passionate, and you love the game, and you’re willing to fight for the guy next to your left and right, and you’re ready to wear that badge, that Farolito badge on you? He’s like, ‘Oh, that’s all that matters.'”
It’s only fitting that a family club — Lopez’s sister Irene also helps run El Farolito, serving as president of both the club and the taquerias — boasts a family atmosphere on and off the pitch. Watch the scene from after the team’s second-round upset and you’ll see kids aplenty celebrating with the players, just as Lopez did as a child so many years ago in 1993.
Lopez said the family element isn’t something the club actively tries to foster, rather it’s a merely authentic byproduct of a tight-knit group.
“Those are things that just happen naturally. We honestly don’t think about, ‘We want that.’ It just happens,” Lopez said. “There’s people that have never met each other before, now they’re best friends. Their families get together.”
Backed by family and history alike, El Farolito stares down near-impossible odds in its continual quest to add another Open Cup to the bar at 24th and Mission. But regardless of what hardware it might bring home, one thing is certain: El Farolito will never back down from a challenge.
