Local soccer fans make the most of the North American World Cup matches.

The knockout game in the Round of 32 made World Cup history on Sunday, June 28, as Canada and South Africa squared off, representing the first of 16 matches in the expanded 48-game field. In the crowd at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles was a Seaside family rooting for neither team in particular, wearing Monterey Bay F.C. and Monterey Bay Sirens jerseys, the day after the local women’s team won the championship.

The tickets to this historic game were a Christmas gift from Andrea Barajas to her husband, Eric Barajas. “Eric is a lifelong football fan and he had never been to a World Cup game,” Andrea says.

They also went to see Paraguay play Australia at Levi’s Stadium on June 25, which ended nil-nil. (Andrea rooted for Australia, where she once studied abroad, and Eric for Paraguay, with a preference for Latin American teams. Their 7-month-old son, Nico, has not yet shared his allegiances.)

Despite no goals, simply walking into the stadium was moving. “I got really emotional just entering my first-ever World Cup match,” Eric says. “It was a really meaningful moment to be a soccer supporter in that very moment.”

Two matches in, they had to wait until stoppage time in the knockout round to see a goal scored, but they were positioned perfectly in a standing-room area to watch Canada sink its 1-0 victory. “At that point, everyone just went crazy,” Eric says.

The lifelong soccer fan, 41, has transitioned from player/supporter to just the latter after a series of injuries. He volunteers for the CSU Monterey Bay soccer program and you can hear his enthusiastic voice through the loudspeakers as the PA announcer for MBFC matches at Cardinale Stadium.

(He now studies announcers, and was irritated by the Anglicized pronunciation of Paraguay. “Now I pay so much more attention to the tone, the annunciation, how loud the announcers are,” says the bilingual announcer. “I could not stop criticizing him because he kept saying Parag-way.”)

With a Mexico-Ecuador knockout game scheduled for June 30, after the Weekly’s deadline, Eric is unsure who to cheer on – his mother is Ecuadorian, his father Mexican.

Going forward, the Barajases are watching to see if Cape Verde can take down Argentina, or DR Congo can take down England. “I like the underdog story,” Andrea says. “I would like to see someone who’s not necessarily favored win it.”

Either way, they’ve been able to achieve a milestone as fans, and hope to raise their son into a lifelong passion. As Eric says, “football is life.”