Underdog Stories / Football history

What Happened to Antigua Barracuda, the Team With No Home?

What happened to Antigua Barracuda FC? A national-team experiment ended in 26 straight losses, all away, and a club that quit in January 2014.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · September 23, 2026

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In the summer of 2013, the Antigua Barracuda players lived in a modest hotel in Tampa, a long way from the island on their crest. No field to train on? They kicked a ball around the hotel parking lot. For one trip to Virginia, 18 players and four staff squeezed into minivans and drove for ten hours.

What happened to Antigua Barracuda FC is easy to say. The club was founded in 2010 to give Antigua's national-team players full-time professional football. After the Puerto Rican teams withdrew from USL Pro, Barracuda had to play every match in the United States. They lost all 26, and the club withdrew from the league on 6 January 2014, due in part to the lack of a home venue and the money problems that came with it.

Why did Antigua start a professional football club?

A national team normally gets a few international windows a year. Players show up from different clubs, train for a few days, and are expected to play like old friends. Chris Horwedel, who hosts Why We Love This Club, describes the Barracuda idea as a national team camp disguised as a league side. Local internationals would train and play together every week against professional opposition.

The Antigua and Barbuda Football Association backed it. The club was meant to develop and keep local talent, and it was the country's only professional team. The colors were sky blue, white and black. Fans called them the Cudas.

The first official match was a friendly against the Puerto Rico Islanders in April 2010. About 1,000 people came. The plan was to join the USL First Division. That division and the Second Division dissolved in 2010 to make way for a new league, so Barracuda became a founding member of USL Pro and its International Division. USL Pro was the third tier of American soccer.

On a map, that looks like a bridge across the Caribbean. Chris's joke is that on an airline booking screen it looks like a lot of expensive bridges. He's right.

Where did Antigua Barracuda play their home games?

They played at the Stanford Cricket Ground in Osbourn, which everyone called the Sticky Wicket. It had been built for the Stanford 20/20 cricket tournament in 2006, then temporarily converted for football, which is a bit like turning a tennis court into a car park and hoping nobody notices. The episode calls these the "2020" tournaments. The name was 20/20, as in Twenty20.

The ground came with baggage. Allen Stanford, the American financier who paid for it, was convicted of fraud and multiple violations of US securities laws on 6 March 2012. A 2011 Cricinfo visit found a ground in a sorry state. It had been seized after Stanford's arrest in 2009, and bills had gone unpaid. The clock in the stand showed the wrong hour. The restaurant's manager had started calling the place "Second Innings".

A cricket oval is a poor fit for football, as Chris points out. The crowd sits far from the touchline and the temporary markings make the pitch feel borrowed. Still, it worked for a while. Barracuda's first league match was on 17 April 2011. They lost 2-1 at home to the Los Angeles Blues. Tamorley Thomas scored the first competitive goal in club history.

They won nine games that first season. Visiting teams got a trip to a beach island. Association president Gordon Derrick joked that opposing supporters might not want to leave, because Antigua was the last stop before heaven.

Why did the Caribbean division collapse?

It collapsed because nobody could afford the flights. The Puerto Rican sides disappeared. Opponents faced long, costly trips to Antigua, and crowds at the Sticky Wicket shrank. Barracuda won five league games in 2012, four fewer than the year before. Their last home win was a 2-1 victory over Richmond that August.

The league's fix for 2013 sounded practical. Barracuda would move to the United States and play every match away. USL Pro had grown from eleven to thirteen teams, with Phoenix FC and VSI Tampa Bay FC joining as expansion franchises. That added more stadiums for Barracuda to visit and no home games to play. Some of their 26 games were against MLS reserve sides. Barracuda were the only team that played those games only on the road, against FC Dallas and San Jose.

“It was the structure underneath them that failed, not the idea.”
— Chris Horwedel, on Why We Love This Club

What happened to Antigua Barracuda FC in 2013?

They opened with defeats in Charlotte, Wilmington and Charleston. Then they lost 3-1 to VSI in Tampa. The next day they lost 7-2 in Orlando, to a club the episode says was about to join MLS and sign Kaká. Chris calls that match the season in miniature: they scored twice and conceded seven.

Adrian Whitbread, a former English top-flight defender, took over as head coach in June. At his first training session the players didn't know who he was. That turned out to be a small problem. Wages had gone unpaid for months. Players left to support their families. The physiotherapist left too, and replacements took one look at the conditions and said no.

The trip to Richmond was the 10-hour minivan drive, and they lost 4-0. Then they drove overnight to Pennsylvania, waited for hotel rooms, and lost 3-1 in Harrisburg. George Dublin, the captain, later recalled games where they led after 80 minutes and still lost. Whitbread sometimes paid expenses himself.

The squad was finally paid two weeks before the last fixture. The final record was 0-26-0, with 11 goals scored and 91 conceded, the first team in United States soccer league history to lose every match. Both numbers were the worst in the league.

One caution. The episode's cold open says the players walked from their hotel to a match in Los Angeles because they couldn't afford rental cars. Nobody should read that as Tampa to California on foot. I'd treat it as a story about the money, not a map reference.

Did Antigua Barracuda actually help the national team?

Yes, and the timing helps the case. In qualifying for the 2014 World Cup, Antigua and Barbuda reached the Third Round for the first time. They finished bottom of a group with the United States, Jamaica and Guatemala, with one point from a goalless home draw against Jamaica.

A bottom-place finish doesn't sound like a breakthrough. But getting into that group at all was new for a country of fewer than 100,000 people. The episode adds that Antigua entered the world's top 100 and pushed the United States harder than the resources gap suggested. Dublin, Peter Byers, Quinton Griffith and Thomas all got regular professional minutes in one shared system.

The third round was played from 8 June to 16 October 2012. That was a season when Barracuda still had home games and still worked as designed. Nobody has a signed letter proving the club caused the run, and I'd be wary of anyone who says so. But it is hard to call the timing a coincidence.

So what actually failed?

Chris argues it was the structure and not the idea, and I think the evidence backs him. The idea was a small country keeping its best players together at a professional standard. That worked while the club had a home ground and a league nearby. The structure was a Caribbean division that depended on partners who left, a stadium with a troubled past, and a budget that couldn't cover the distances.

His lesson is that geography costs money and a team can't be treated as luggage permanently in transit. Zero points is the most searchable fact about Barracuda, and the least generous one.

The detail I keep coming back to is from Phoenix. The Barracuda lost 1-0, and afterwards the home supporters invited the players for a beer. Small gesture. But these were men with a rough season behind them, and a free drink from strangers who had just beaten them probably went a long way.

You can hear the full story in the Why We Love This Club episode "Antigua Barracuda FC — The Team That Never Came Home."