Meet Clube Desportivo Faialense, the amateur Mass. soccer team that made it to the U.S. Open Cup

The best team in the Bay State Soccer League doesn’t hold tryouts.

Clube Desportivo Faialense, the back-to-back victor of the league’s Division I championships, builds out its bench by word of mouth, a vetting process that players say safeguards the team’s chemistry.

Nearly every member can trace his joining CD Faialense to another player. Players are added when someone in the club says he “knows a guy” — a friend or former teammate or opponent — and says, “Come hang out on Saturday, pass the ball around.”

“If someone is really good, but they’re gonna disrupt the basis of what we do, it’s better to just not have them,” said Lucas Rezende, the team’s starting goalkeeper. “Because if you come to a game and you hang around after, you’re gonna realize. You’re gonna be like, 'I can’t believe these guys play soccer.'”

This year, the tight-knit amateur club will makes its debut in the 110th U.S. Open Cup, the nation’s oldest soccer tournament.

In its first round, the Cup pits 32 amateur teams against 32 pros, the only U.S. team sports competition that gives amateurs the opportunity to play against professionals. CD Faialense will take on Maine’s new Division III professional outfit, the Portland Hearts of Pine, in a single-elimination tournament Thursday.

For the men of CD Faialense, having fun with friends is at least as important as winning. After every match, coach Paul Correia gives a bottle of champagne and a black cowboy hat to the best performer. Then, for hours after the final whistle, the parking lot buzzes as the guys joke, crack beers and discuss life.

By no means do the chill vibes take away from the guys’ competitive edge. They play to win.

“We want to win. We’re there to win,” said Rezende, who works in property insurance. “I tell the guys all the time before the games, I’m like, 'we got up at 7 a.m. — might as well win this.' Like we’re not gonna get up that early to lose.”

The roster includes 40 men representing a dozen countries.

“I feel like that’s an advantage of having that many people from all around the world,” said Josue Ruiz, a civil engineer who’s been with the club for seven years. “The soccer IQ is very high within the team.”

Most are former Division I college athletes — from Holy Cross, Duke, Harvard, University of New Hampshire, UMass and Merrimack College — where many were honored as All-Americans, or exceptional athletes.

Now, many are married with kids, and all have full-time jobs. For the Cup this week, only 18 club players can make the roster.

Ruiz was invited to join the team just as he was finishing his senior year at Merrimack.

“Ever since then, every Saturday I just showed up to have fun, have a couple beers after the games with my teammates, and as the time kept going, the team got better,” Ruiz said. “And then fast forward to now. We just win on and off the field.”

Coach Correia attributes the team’s no-stress environment to a lack of egos — something rare when players are this good.

“All these players could play the whole game for any team they want to in the division,” Correia said, “but they choose to play on this team even though they’re sharing minutes.”

CD Faialense’s roots go back more than 50 years.

Correia’s grandfather immigrated in 1976 from Terceira Island in the Azores. He joined a community of people from Faial, another island in the Azores, who settled in East Cambridge and eventually formed a soccer team in 1972.

In 1984, the men bought the building at 1121 Cambridge St. in Inman Square and turned it into Clube Desportivo Faialense — a social club, event hall, bar and restaurant that serves as the team's home base.

The team faded away sometime in the 1990s. In recent years, Francisco Correia, the club’s president and Paul Correia’s father, decided he wanted to bring soccer back to the club. Paul, a Merrimack College alum, told his father he knew some guys who would be interested — a club team he had recently joined with many of his fellow alumni.

One of those players was Felipe Guimaraes, who has been with the team the longest at 12 years. He joined when it was called the Portuguese American Club of Lawrence and playing in Division III. He saw it become Merrimack Valley United FC and finally CD Faialense, when the Correias sponsored the team in 2023. He said qualifying for the Cup was “the cherry on top” of more than a decade of work.

The team won its first division title in fall 2023 against Boston Street Futbol Club, a semi-professional team that plays a league above CD Faialense. Rezende said the only people who believed the team could beat Boston Street FC at the time were the players themselves.

“They were training four or five days a week, and then they’re playing us amateurs who get together on Saturday mornings and drink beers after 90 minutes,” Rezende joked. “And I think the thought was that they were just going to run over us.”

CD Faialense took the semi-professional team into overtime and won in penalty kicks.

“I texted my mom after the game, and I was like, 'Mom, I know I’m 27, But that was the most fun game I’ve ever played in,'” said Eoin Houlihan, who joined the team in 2019. “Because it was like you got the joy back when you were a little kid.”

Gold trophies, old photos and a framed 2023 jersey from the team’s first league title now sit in the window of the club on Cambridge Street.

CD Faialense qualified for the U.S. Open Cup on its second try, in November, after winning its second consecutive league Division I championship. Paul “Polo” Mayer, a top scorer, flew in from his home in France to help his team qualify.

Coach Correia knows Thursday’s match will require the team to play better than ever. He said the guys are excited.

“We have a really cool opportunity in front of us with this Open Cup game to do something pretty special.”

This story is part of a partnership between WBUR and the Boston University Department of Journalism.