Ambar Ramirez
Words by Ambar Ramirez
It’s a Thursday night, and after a long work day, you head over to your Dart Bar & Games to unwind. You walk in, expecting a quiet crowd, since the weekend hasn’t yet arrived. If anything, there might be a small crowd celebrating a birthday or men in suits catching up over IPAs. What you didn’t expect was a large group of people in matching sports jerseys engaging in spirited games of foosball. At least that’s not what I expected when I met up with Tony Cinca and Perry Palacio, founders of Foosball Academy.
Before the rise of our favorite arcade games, such as Pac-Man and Street Fighter, there was foosball. According to “Smithsonian Magazine,” the game gained popularity in parts of Europe during the 1880s and 1890s. However, foosball didn’t arrive in America until 1962 when Lawrence Patterson, stationed in West Germany during the ’60s, observed the game’s popularity and introduced it to the United States. It quickly gained widespread popularity.
By the 1970s, the U.S. had its own homegrown foosball tables, and tournaments were featured in “Sports Illustrated” and “60 Minutes.” In 1976, the European Table Soccer Union was established, transforming foosball from a popular pastime into organized events and clubs. Rookies and professionals traveled across the country to participate in these tournaments, competing for significant prizes. Yup, that’s right, back in the ’70s, if you won a professional game of foosball, you potentially could have won a Porsche or Corvette.
“I started playing [foosball] when I went to [Florida State College] back in ’73 when it was just a junior college,” Cinca recalled. “I played foosball instead of going to classes.”
For some perspective, at the time, Jacksonville had about only a handful of bars with foosball tables including The Keg, Brinkman’s, Beer Stew and Applejacks. In 1975, Cinca heard through the grapevine found out that a group of foosball players were headed to one of these bars to play some matches. What Cinca didn’t know at the time was that this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill group. This was Tournament Soccer, a Seattle-based company that would pack players into a van with a foosball table and send them around the country to play at bars to promote professional foosball.
“They were nice guys, but they wore these matching uniforms — collared, striped shirts. They looked professional,” Cinca explained. “And they destroyed us, and we all thought we were pretty good. It was different. It was an organized game. If it wasn’t for their professionalism, I might not have been as turned on, let’s say, to it.”
Looking back, Cinca gives a lot of credit to that moment for his passion for the sport and for the formation of Foosball Academy. But around 1982 Cinca decided to go back to school and get serious about his future, even though every now and then he would go to his nearest foosball table to play a couple of matches, which is around the time he met Palacio.
“There was a group of us skipping class and going to this place up the street that had tables and that’s where we ran into Tony. He started teaching us really how to play at a high level, you know, and it was kind of a good period of time there in the ’90s where we just played a lot,” Palacio said. “Everybody wanted to level up each other. And we found that we would seek wherever there was a table and then a lot of us would kind of collect and play. Then we just started to have professional lives which would kind of create a long break for foosball for me.”
As time goes by, life catches up. Before they knew it, Cinca and Palacio had families, full-time jobs and no time for foosball … until 2018, when Palacio — in search of somewhere to play foosball — reached out to Cinca on Facebook.
“I was working so much. I had my day job, I had a night job, and I needed to do something more fun,” Palacio recalled. “So I connected with Tony and then started playing a little bit again with some of the locals.”
Having reconnected with the game that had once brought him joy and community, Cinca thought others might be looking for the same thing. And in 2019, Foosball Academy was born.
The easy part was done. They had a name and a place where they could consistently play. The hard part was getting more people to join. The tabletop game that was so popular back in the day had become something placed sporadically at dive bars, a game played only when the pool tables were occupied or the conversations were boring.
“I would say for sure, like when I tell people I play foosball, they think of it like it’s just like some casual bar game, that there’s no levels to it,” Foosball Academy member Joseph Neely said. “Just like any other sport there’s technique, strategy, practice drills, all that stuff goes into it.”
As mentioned before, the rise of arcade games killed foosball. Bar owners were taking into account how much money these smaller sized games were bringing in versus how much one large foosball table brought in. It was about quantity, not quality. But what arcade games don’t have is socializing and community. Whether you’re playing a singles or doubles game, some sort of conversation has to happen.
“It’s ultimately a social thing. We have a foosball community,” Cinca expressed. “And there are probably a lot of people out there that don’t realize that we still have foosball.”
Since its inception, Foosball Academy has experienced significant growth. It has not only established a welcoming space for individuals of all backgrounds to enjoy the classic game but has also fostered symbiotic relationships with various bars. Eventually, Cinca would like to get foosball tables set up in schools in Jacksonville to further nurture and grow this community.
Regardless of your foosball experience, every Thursday night at Dart Bar & Games from 7 – 11 p.m., Foosball Academy sets up tables for free play. Their only rules? Have fun and no spinning.
For more information, check out foos.academy.
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