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Jersey Number: 10
Hometown: Asunción, Paraguay
Position: Forward
Age: 26
Former club: Club Guarani
Background
(Cecilio Dominguez/Twitter)
On Aug. 24, 2020, forward Cecilio Dominguez became Austin FC's first-ever Designated Player.
The Paraguayan footballer came to the club after being loaned to Club Guarani, a team in Paraguay's Primera Division that also held Austin FC players Rodney Redes and Jhohan Romana on their roster, in 2020. With Guarani, Dominguez helped the team to the finals of the Copa Libertadores, South America's highest level of futbol competition, where he scored the deciding goal in the tournament opener.
Before Guarani, Dominguez was teammate Tomas Pochettino's rival at Club Atletico Independiente in Argentina. He was the club's record signing and proved his worth in his two seasons with the club, scoring eight goals in 29 league and 13 cup appearances.
Dominguez now has experience in four professional leagues, including Liga MX. Dominguez transferred to Club America in the league in 2017, where he racked up 21 goals in 74 appearances to be crowned 2018's Liga MX Apertura Champion.
Before Liga MX, Dominguez tallied up more titles in his home country's Primera Division with Cerro Porteño. Just as in 2020, Dominguez brought his team to the finals in the 2014 Copa Libertadores and was the joint-top scorer in both the 2016 Copa Sudamericana and the Torneo Clausura 2016.
Dominguez has also represented Paraguay 17 times internationally and has played for his home country's Under-17 and Under-20 club.
Dominguez has scored 73 goals in his career and has appeared in 288 matches. He's likely to only rack up more minutes as Designated Player for Austin's first professional team.
With Austin FC
The Legend Grows. Introducing our first Designated Player signing, Cecilio Domínguez.#LISTOS | @10_dominguez94 pic.twitter.com/iparZVGdpj
— Austin FC (@AustinFC) August 24, 2020
Austin FC's second--ever signee was also one of its most distinguished to date. Dominguez joined the team in the summer of 2020 as the club's first Designated Player, and he's set to be the team's playmaker.
A talented attacking midfielder and left winger, Dominguez's decorated career has continued with the club. Dominguez scored twice in the team's La Copita preseason scrimmage against FC Dallas, and he's clearly an important piece to the team's attacking game.
The spotlight's certainly on Dominguez heading into the season, and Dominguez is pretty much locked in as the team's No. 10. Austin FC Head Coach Josh Wolff said that Cecilio is full of surprises and always ready for more.
"We're learning more about Cecilio every day," Wolff said. "What's great about Cecilio is he's taken in our information and tried to apply it in the ways that we've talked about, but he's also given his own interpretation and character."
Designated Players are one of three members of each roster that can be signed above the league's salary cap. While it's a lot of pressure to be one of the highest-paid members of the club, Dominguez said he considers himself just another player on the roster.
While he doesn't regard himself as any different than his teammates, he does recognize the pressure put on him as the team's offensive leader.
"It's a huge responsibility," Dominguez said. "I want to be the best version of myself and hopefully take this club to where it can be above and beyond."
Off the pitch
(Cecilio Dominguez/Twitter)
It's clear in countless photos and clips that Dominguez plays with passion, and his charisma has translated to this new team, Wolff said.
"He brings real character and quality to the group," Wolff said. "He's got a lively personality and he's super charismatic, but when he plays, he competes."
It's also obvious that Dominguez loves his son, Thiago, who can be seen spending time with his father on Dominguez's social media accounts.
Back at Club Guarani, Dominguez played alongside current teammates Jhohan Romana and Rodney Redes. In the journey from Paraguay to Austin, Dominguez told Marca.com he's bonded with his fellow forward.
"We are good friends. We understand each other a lot, we talk a lot," Dominguez said. "I think the whole Austin thing has made us closer, we talk both on and off the field."
For eight months, Dominguez and many others didn't play due to the pandemic. Dominguez said it was hard to be without his "passion" but that he is now even more excited to hit the pitch once again with Austin FC.
"Playing soccer, it's our passion, and to not have played it for a while, it's somewhat complicated," Dominguez said. "It's a privilege to be honest to play for Austin, and it'll be a historic day to finally play."
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Popular
A Web3 meetup was held this week at Cosmic Coffee + Beer Garden. (Andrea Guzman/Austonia)
It’s hard to know what Web3 is without first understanding the original versions. The first web is the 90s Internet where people had their own random websites that didn’t link together, making it decentralized. In Web2, we saw the rise of Google, Facebook and other major players who configured standard ways for people to share and receive information.
Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood and other blockchain developers say a decentralized version of the Internet, Web3, is on the way. Web3 can be thought of as synonymous with cryptocurrency, meaning it is based on the blockchain. Platforms and apps built on Web3 won’t be owned by a central gatekeeper, but rather by users. Those in the Austin crypto community believe to see a growing presence of Web3 in Austin.
Pujaa Rajan, an engineer at financial software company Stripe and adviser for startups, describes herself as a “digital nomad.” She has traveled all over from Hawaii to New York and San Francisco, looking for the crypto community in each place.
Having been in Austin for the past month, Rajan organized a Web3 meetup this week at Cosmic Coffee + Beer Garden in South Austin open to folks working in crypto or the crypto-curious. About 30 people showed up. "Compared to a lot of other cities that I went to, it is a lot more open and community-oriented here, which is what Web3 is all about,” she said.
Pujaa Rajan, an engineer at financial software company Stripe, organized a Web3 meetup in Austin during a visit. (Andrea Guzman/Austonia)
ATX DAO member Roberto Talamas, who stopped by the event, talked about the crypto group’s expansion. Web3, in Talamas’ view, expands on the previous versions which allowed people to read, then read and write. Now, he says, people can read, write and own. To Talamas, blockchain technology has powered that ownership aspect, and it can be utilized through groups like a DAO, a group that pools together capital and goes on to make investments or take on blockchain-based projects.
“The ecosystem of work with (Web3) companies here in Austin is still relatively small,” Talamas said. “And that’s one of those things that we’re trying to deal with at ATX DAO is to do all the advocacy work needed to make Austin the best Web3 city.”
Part of that community, however, has gotten a bad rep for being “crypto bros.” Rajan acknowledged that Web3 involves both finance and technology, which are fields women have historically been excluded from. But, she says the decentralization aspect creates a clean slate and a new means to form groups. “I feel like we can kind of take back the power or create a world for ourselves,” Rajan said.
The meetup at Cosmic brought together crypto users to talk about the prospects of Web3. (Andrea Guzmán/Austonia)
Meetup attendee Jonathan Hillis also talked about the idea that Web3 creates an opportunity to start over and how this could be something that grows in Austin. Born and raised in the capital city, Hills has left his Bay Area Web2 Instacart job behind to live in a cabin outside Dripping Springs last year. He and his wife, along with a group of internet friends formed a DAO called Cabin, and he's now writing on the Web3 version of Medium, known as Mirror.
When it comes to the state of Web3, four cities stand out. “The dam broke in Covid,” Hillis said. “Everybody no longer had to live in the Bay Area for tech.”
San Francisco is still rooted in Web2 traits with Big Tech and software as a service venture. New York is financial technology. Miami is another major player. But with Austin, Hillis sees a lot of potential.
“Austin is great at being a place for independent online creators of many types—musicians, but also artists,” Hillis said. “What excites me about Web3 is the opportunities for putting creators at more of the center of the value capture.”
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(Philip Taylor/Flickr)
For Carson Stanch, who moved to Austin from Brooklyn, New York, to be near family, Austin's lower cost of living was just an added bonus. According to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, a $100 bill is worth $98.20 in Austin when compared to the national average in 2020, while it's worth just $84.53 in New York.
Houston native Carson Stanch moved from Brooklyn, New York to Austin just before the pandemic. (Carson Stanch)
Stanch soon realized she was a trendsetter—or perhaps a fortune teller—as the pandemic hit a few months after her move. No longer willing to spend extra money on their more expensive apartments, Stanch said many of her friends and other New Yorkers left the city amid COVID lockdowns.
"It's so expensive to live there (and) all of the reasons why you live in New York, you couldn't really do anymore," Stanch said.
Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst with the Tax Foundation who wrote a 2018 report on the value of $100 in U.S. metros, told Austonia the report factors in the costs of goods and services with residents' incomes and compares them to the national average. The result is price parity, a number that varies drastically across the country—for instance, a $100 bill won't get you near as far in Austin as it would in more rural parts of the Hill Country.
While a Ben Franklin note was worth $4 more in New York in 2020 when compared to 2018, a $100 bill decreased by $1.60 in value in Austin. Austin's cost of living also saw the 12th-highest increase among U.S. metros from the 2010 to 2020 census.
And as the pandemic's nationwide housing boom gained extra momentum in Austin, peaking at a median home price of $575,000 in June 2021, Watson said the value of $100 could have dropped even further.
"There's just been a chronic hunger for building houses on the coasts and in certain cities in the heartland," Watson said. "Especially this year, we're seeing more and more discussion about that in Austin, and so that is a big, big factor."
Price parity bleeds into other factors as well—in San Francisco, where the value of $100 sits at $82.63, residents are nearly 18% poorer than their higher incomes suggest. But with higher incomes than the U.S. average, they may find themselves more flush with cash when moving to a cheaper city like Austin.
Many out-of-towners have used that extra change to make housing offers much higher than the asking price, Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather told Fox7 Austin.
"All those migrants are bringing with them high-paying jobs who are used to much more expensive housing and they’re willing to pull out all the stops to win these homes and move to Austin," Fairweather said.
But Austin is catching up to those traditional hotspots: the area was predicted to be the most expensive metro outside of the Golden State by the end of 2021.
In just two years, Stanch said she's seen some signs.
"I feel like I look around certain areas of Austin (and) they do feel more similar to downtown Brooklyn," Stanch said. "Some businesses I see might tend to cater to folks who have a little more income."
So why not move to, say, Florence, Alabama, where money is almost 20% more valuable?
Watson said the difference comes down to the value of amenities—something the study can't track.
"Part of the value in New York City is all the amenities that you're near, the value of Broadway, the value of being able to get food delivered to your door," Watson said. "So that may be reflected in people's willingness to pay higher prices... there's a lot of really great reasons why people may want to be in Austin from an identity perspective that you can't get in other parts of Texas."
In Austin, tech salaries rose 5% from 2020-2021 as big-name corporations like Oracle and Tesla—alongside Tesla's billionaire owner Elon Musk—flocked to the nation's new "boomtown." With an ever-increasing job market, eclectic culture and reputation as one of the world's best cities for move-ins, Austin's appeal might still offset its price.
But for Stanch and many others, there may still come a time when price wins over location.
"If I was to the point where homebuying was more important than being near friends and family, then I would move to get the home," Stanch said. "I think that's kind of part of my plan."
