Sounders FC will host Tijuana Xolos in a friendly in the Emerald City on March 24.

Many Sounders fans have knowledge of Mexican sides due to repeated involvement in the CONCACAF Cup with Santos Laguna and Monterrey providing past opponents. Many fans will also be aware of the country’s big names including Chivas, Club American, Pumas and Tigres.

However their opponents next week are certainly unique in being perhaps the the most American of Mexican clubs.

Xoloitzcuintles de Caliente or (luckily) Xolos for short embody the duel nature of this club, situated in the border town of Tijuana with its nose pressed up on the US border.

If you visited a Xolos home  game, you would not be alone. Anecdotal estimates calculate that as many as 30% of those attending a home game have crossed the border from the US.

“Any American would feel quite at home coming to a Tijuana game. The vendors will understand your English and happily accept your dollars. There’s a good chance any fan you turn to will understand your question,” says Jonny Rico, Prost Amerika Mexico correspondent who now assists with the club’s English language coverage.

The atmosphere going into the stadium is atypical of an American’s stereotypical view of attending a Mexican League game. You’ll immediately smell, before you even see, an NFL style tail gate. The paraphernalia on sale would not look out of place at a baseball game.

The female Xoloitzcuintles team will even be part of the WPSL in the United States and will play their home games in San Diego County. The club’s fans are a little different to other Liga Mx’s in club culture.

“Whereas many fans in Mexico recycle and customize Argentinian football chants, Xolos fans tend to be more creative and invent their own,” notes Rico.

Xolos are different in one other way to Mexico’s establishment. They are refreshingly new. Although there have been a few attempts to launch pro or semi-pro soccer franchises in Tijuana, the Xolos launched in 2007 are already the most successful.

The Mexican league, like most of Latin America, have two football seasons in every calendar year; Apertura (opening) and Clausura (closing). To make things more complicated, it is the Clausura that starts in January. The Apertura coincides with the start of the European football season.

Having won the Apertura in 2012 just five years after kicking its first ball, the club went into tonight’s match with Veracruz top of the table, with the visitors from the Yucatan peninsula surprisingly second.

There is a strong American contingent at the club.

Greg Garza is a Texas native who left home to ply his trade in Brazil before plying his trace in various youth systems in Europe. He has represented the US at every level and has featured in full internationals at left back since the World Cup.

Although he has a Mexican passport too, the 24-year-old speaks better Portuguese than Spanish.

VIDEO: Greg Garza – Tijuana Xolos and Sounders FC have much in common

But for Xolos, their proximity to the US and the English speaking market of San Diego is not merely a happy bonus. It is a massive opportunity. The club is determined to make a big English language outreach and become San Diego’s team.

Recently the players headed north and presented the Mayor of San Diego with a jersey. Attempts have been made to infiltrate local San Diego anglophone media.

Spearheading that campaign is Ivan Orozco, the club’s English language communications officer. Orozco did not land that job by being the best English speaker on the communications staff. He was hired specifically to reach out to English speaking fans and slightly shamefaced admits that, despite his heritage, his English is better than his Spanish:

“I might be a little embarrassed to say this but Spanish was my first language but I grew up in California, went to school in California, was born in California, so English became my main language and I (now) speak more English than Spanish.”

His appointment is not tokenism and the club has recently enlarged his department with some anglophone interns going onto the payroll. Orozco explained the principle on which his rapidly increasing operation is based:

“I think I can relate to our fans on both sides of the border because the Tijuana, San Diego, southern California region is a unique region to the world where our fans not only speak Spanish but speak English too. If you come outside and you see them buying tickets, you see them order them in English. It’s not new that you’ll see fans that speak only English.

“That’s why we started trying to reach out to the public through our social media pages in English, through our website in English and through English language media for people who grew up in the area, maybe not reading in Spanish. Maybe they’re not watching television in Spanish. They want their soccer news in English.

“Myself, I grew up in San Diego and I wanted to watch television in English, read my newspaper in English but I never left my Mexican roots because my family is from Tijuana, Guadalajara. That I still wanted to be a part of. The club relates to those people.”

Needless to say, his department most of all inside their Estadio Cliente home is looking forward to the trip to Seattle. The clubs have much in common. They both had a history of soccer in their town but burst onto the national scene recently and then exploded exponentially from there. Camera and national media started to arrive.

“People started to know who this team was this team all the way up in the Upper Left of this country,” notes Orozco and when he does, he could be equally talking about either club.

Both clubs are ambitious in respect of enlarging their audience; Orozco to English speakers and Sounders – finally- taking seriously their global rather than local potential.

This is not your average Sounders friendly of the years 2009-2011, with a view to either coining in revenue or pandering to supporters of other clubs.

This friendly is partly to assist with preparation for the CONCACAF Champions League. However, there is another side to the occasion. Both Sounders and Xolos are now eyeing bigger markets than before and both sides will be earnestly seeing what they could learn from each other to that end.

Stay tuned to Prost Amerika for more build up to the Sounders v Xolos friendly