The Legend of the Queso Fountain

Tuesday, January 15th was a big day in Austin soccer fandom. As part of the announcement welcoming Austin FC to MLS, U.S. Soccer Legend Alexi Lalas said something that may have seemed odd to those outside of Austin Soccer cicles in his opening remarks.

“May you all bathe in a fountain of queso.”

— Alexi Lalas

He was even asked about it by the press afterward.

Later in the ceremony was another mention of the gooey cheese by none other than Anthony Precourt himself. The crowd responded with an impromptu chant of “Queso! Fountain!”

We’d gone international, but some people didn’t know the history.

So, this is the tale of how flowing cheese out of a monument became an objective of Austin Anthem.

The term was first recorded on 3/30/2018 in a tweet by Dallas Teston. He’s the current Treasurer of the SG, but at the time, was a member just following along. Now that I think about it, it’s probably what endeared him to us, so we gave him the gig.

Anyway. We had posted on our Twitter account asking about features members wanted to see incorporated into the stadium. Austin Anthem has been very engaged with the Front Office about amenities and features for the facility. Dallas replied with two inspirational words: Queso Fountain.

The legend was born.

Going further back, this really all started with a quote in March of 2018 by Austin FC CEO Anthony Precourt: “I have a total weakness for queso.” He cited this as one of the reasons why he was so sold on Austin. A valid reason of course. The Save the Crew posse immediately added this to the long list of talking points they used to fuel their personal attacks against him. So we turned it around and turned a love of queso into the positive that it is — mostly as a running gag. It kind of evolved from there.

So the fountain became somewhat of an inadvertant battle cry for the stadium deal moving forward and making it uniquely Austin. We would note when it was missing from updates to the stadium site plans and worked to recruit sponsorship from our favorite local taco chains. It made reoccuring postings in our social feed in the months that followed. The Slackbot on our group chat still responds with “🧀⛲️” when the queso fountain is mentioned.

Now that the queso fountain’s gone mainstream, you now know the story behind it.

So what next? Well, now we’re kind of committed to the idea. The club and local chain Torchy’s Tacos seem to now be in on our quest for a wellspring of queso as well.

We’ll continue our lobbying campaign to bring a physical queso fountain into existance. We’ve got until 2021. If you haven’t already, join our mission to make it happen.

“I will die on the Queso Fountain hill.”

— Jeremiah Bentley, VP of Marketing for Austin Anthem

Praise be to Nachos!

Los Zanates!

Austin Anthem is the independent supporters group for Austin FC, the Major League Soccer club of Austin, Texas.

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