The concept for the film became crystallized in November of 2008, during qualification for this summer’s World Cup. Miralles was talking with some Mexican friends of his and suggested that, based on form at the time, it was possible that the US could beat Mexico in the Azteca. Their shocked response, he says, showed him that “there is something really deep and important here.” He wondered to himself how a victory over their fiercest rivals could mean something so different to fans on either side of the Rio Grande. “Why is that different for an American fan, who might say, ‘that would be cool!’ versus a Mexican fan, who would describe the same result as ‘catastrophic’?”

Miralles got in touch with two old UCLA film school classmates of his, Mike Whalen, based in Santa Clara, andRoberto Donati, in Mexico. Together, they have been working for nearly two years to make their vision reality. Gringos at the Gate, as the in-progress trailer shows, explores what soccer means to citizens of the two North American neighbors, especially in light of the US teams dramatic improvement in recent years.

The scope of the project has expanded as the filmmakers have worked on it. At various points, they have wanted to finish filming, but opportunities to interview important people have come up, and they have continued to shoot. “The thing with documentaries is that they keep going and going and going,” says Miralles. He says they have ten interviews left and intend to wrap up shooting in the next couple of months.

Asked what the main message he has taken so far, Miralles answers in two parts. For the United States, he refers me to an interview Bruce McGuire of DuNord did with This is American Soccer. McGuire told Adam Spangler: “I’ve told people for years that soccer in America is like a glacier. It’s moving slow, and most people can’t see it, but there is no stopping it. And it’s going to destroy everything (laughing) in its path eventually. It might take 1000 years, but it’s going to do it.” Miralles says he concurs with McGuire, noting that making this film has “made me very optimistic about the future of soccer in the United States. There are so many diverse people who are so interested in the sport. It goes deeper than I ever imagined.” The growth in of knowledge and sophistication among US fans in recent years has amazed Miralles. As an example, Miralles told me about wearing a retro Johann Cruyff LA Aztecs jersey to last summer’s LA Galaxy vs. Barcelona friendly and having fans come up to him saying, “Oh, that’s so smart because Cruyff played for both teams!”

Johann Cruyff LA Aztecs jersey (photo: Toffs)

Mexico, on the other is a country that Miralles describes as a “classic soccer culture.” Given the predominance of soccer in the Mexican sporting landscape, so much of many Mexicans’ identity comes to be tied up in the performance of the Tricolor. Though soccer may seem to be unrelated to more “serious” matters, Miralles believes it is intimately tied up with national identity and self-esteem. He quotes Mexican commentator, who says that soccer is “the most important of things that have no importance.” This importance is especially acute because Mexico has “the misfortune to be next to the richest, most powerful country in the world,” and much of the film documents how Mexicans have dealt with the fact that their rich, powerful neighbor has started to care about, and often beat them in, the one thing in which they always had an advantage: soccer.

The Mexican collaborator on the film, Roberto Donati is also a psychologist, and Miralles told me that he has said that if the two countries were individual people, he would describe Mexico’s feeling of inferiority toward the US as a “psychosis.” Losing to the US, then, takes on far more importance than a loss to any other opponent. The rivalry, Miralles says, “is much more intense for a Mexican than an American could ever understand.”

Mexico and the US today are tied even more intensely than ever through immigration. With millions of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the US, the question arises of whom these fans choose to support. Miralles notes a game played in the Rose Bowl in 1994 (leading up to that year’s World Cup) in front of 80,000 produced images of mostly Mexican fans that led many in the national media to take note. In an interview, Gustavo Arellano, satirical writer of Ask a Mexican fame, told Miralles that it was on that day that people said, “Holy shit there are a lot of Mexicans in our country!” and it spurred talk of increased border enforcement (legislation was enacted in 1996).

Mexico fans at the 2009 Gold Cup final in New York (photo:  Every Joe / Newscom)

It’s not surprising, Miralles told me, that children of immigrants, many of whom, he notes, grow up in households dominated by Mexican culture, would come to support Mexico. However, the US victory over Mexico in the 2002 World Cup marked a turning point, “the beginning of the cracking of solidarity” among Mexican-American fans. It was then, when the US beat Mexico on the biggest stage of all that many Mexican-Americans really took notice of the Americans as a power, and many started to see them as a team worthy of supporting. This trend has persisted, Miralles believes, and as the US continues to improve, its support from second and later generation Mexican-Americans will grow.

Although he continues to find interesting people to talk with and stories to tell, Miralles says he and his collaborators are hoping to finish what will be a 95-minute movie by the summer. They hope to have a release right after the World Cup in order to take advantage of the excitement the tournament will generate. It is a project that Miralles has poured his heart and soul into despite the fact that it is only a side project on top of his regular work in television and film. He has also opened his wallet to make his dream reality – he has funded much of it himself with the hope that it might get picked up by a distributor after completion. What would his greatest hope be for the film, I ask. “I have a fantasy that it is such a mind-blowing film that we take it to Sundance and it wins audience favorite. And then of course HBO Films picks it up, it does a cable run …” He trails off, smiling, aware that it is, after all just a fantasy for what is still, despite the growth of soccer in the United States, an esoteric topic. No matter what happens, Miralles says he has been happy to be involved in making the film.  “It’s been very enlightening – and fun!”

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The Football Supporters’ Federation protest sign against the 39th game (photo: Football Supporters’ Federation)

The strength of connection between teams and their place of origin may come as a bit of a surprise to American fans. Professional sports in the US became “franchised” so early on that Americans learned quickly that no club was too closely tied to its home to avoid being moved if its owner saw fit. Baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers fans were heartbroken in 1957 when owner Walter O’Malley took the team 3000 miles west to its new home in Los Angeles. The same fate befell the American football Baltimore Colts, whose owner moved the team to Indianapolis in the middle of a snowy 1984 night. While I don’t want to deny the often strong connection between American sports teams and their homes (Red Sox nation, hold your fire), we in the US have seen teams ripped from one place and moved to another often enough to become quite cynical about the connection between clubs and their homes. Professional sports in the US are, and long have been, as much about business as anything else.

This is not the case in much of Europe, where clubs, from their beginnings, came to be strongly associated with the place from which they sprang. The late rise of professionalism in the UK, in particular, meant that clubs’ players often came from the local community and lived in it the same as any other member. Clubs’ identities came to be closely tied to those of the local community, and separating the club from its community was largely seen as a non-starter (that said, Arsenal’s move from South to North London in 1913 is a huge exception). Indeed, clubs more often served to incorporate arriving immigrants into their new communities. Many Irish men in Glasgow found a home at Celtic, for instance, just as many migrants from southern Spain found a home at Barcelona FC. One recent migrant, Eseteban, told the website The Travel Rag: “When I came here from Andalusia one of the ways I was able to feel part of the city and part of Catalonia was to support Barça. It was hard being a migrant but the club gives you an identity. Now I feel Catalan and I’m proud to live in Barcelona.”

If club teams are closely tied to their homes, one might imagine national teams would be even more so. It can be argued that especially in these times of increased globalization, sports are one of the few arenas in which people can continue to feel a strong connection to their countries. But in the 21^st century, the connection between nations and their national teams is changing dramatically. The bond between national teams and the nations from which they come is, in many cases, no longer as strong as it once was.

At the conclusion of World Cup qualifying last month, Tim Vickery noted that many South American fans must now wait a long time before they will see their teams play at home. Vickery points out that a “gentleman’s agreement” means that European clubs release their players for friendlies as long as these matches are played in Europe. Having the chance to gather their best players is one reason that many national teams play matches outside of their home countries, but it is far from the only one. Often just as important is the chance to make money. When Brazil played England in recent friendly, the game did not take place in London or Rio de Janeiro. It was played instead in Doha, Qatar. Brazil has outsourced the scheduling of its friendly matches to Swiss company Kentaro, leading the seleçao jetting off in recent years to destinations such as Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Dortmund, Montpellier, Dublin and London. Brazil has clearly capitalized on its global appeal, though it is an interesting question to wonder how Brazil’s image may change it the team never plays in Brazil.

Brazil vs. England in Qatar (photo: Who Ate All the Pies)

Other countries have played abroad in the hopes of improving their national teams. This is the approach that New Zealand has employed in recent years, as Colin Peacock outlined on a recent Football Weekly podcast after that country qualified for the World Cup: “They decided: look, no one ever comes to New Zealand to play so we will assemble our team of journeymen from the second tiers of various leagues across the world and Ryan Nelsen if he can make it and play a few games across Europe. They absolutely targeted this opportunity and now they’ve done it.”

While the examples given so far all involve distancing national teams from their fans, there is also an interesting trend of teams going to places where migrants have settled. Mexico is perhaps the best example of this. The Mexican national team often takes advantage of the millions of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the United States and plays friendlies north of the border. A look at recent results shows Mexico lining up against Peru, Colombia, and Argentina on American soil, not to mention regular friendlies against the United States itself, all of which sell out huge stadiums. The appeal of playing its games abroad for the Mexican federation is two-fold: it gives Mexican fans abroad the chance to see their team play while giving the federation the opportunity to rake in huge sums of money. Indeed, this combination leads many countries with immigrant populations in the United States to stage matches here (see, for example, a recent friendly between Honduras and Peru played in Florida).

Sports are about creating community, as Simon Kuper has pointed out recently. He quotes Michael Oriard, who writes in his new book about college (American) football, that “a college football game at Michigan or Alabama, with its bands and cheerleaders, its pre-game tailgating, and its postgame partying, is something like a folk festival providing a sense of community, meaningful ritual, and sheer pleasure for millions of Americans each weekend in the fall.” Yet what happens when those games occur far from the place from which the team springs? Increased ease of communication and travel, key features of the contemporary wave of globalization, are changing the connection between soccer teams and the places from which they come. While the strong connection that many European clubs have to their place of origin has made moves such as that of MK Dons the exception to the rule, national teams throughout the world are increasingly playing matches wherever they can top-quality opponents, émigré fans or oodles of cash. Ironically, the national teams, whose existence is in part predicated on their connection to specific places, are coming to be less and less tied to their homeland than are club teams.

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Major League Soccer officials have just one hope for England’s friendly against France on Wednesday: that David Beckham does not get hurt. They are less concerned with Beckham earning his 100th cap than they are with ensuring that he return for Saturday’s LA Galaxy season opener injury-free.

The bubble of hype that Beckham’s arrival in LA inflated was popped by the injuries that kept him out of most of last season. Some fans who had purchased tickets to see Beckham complained – many teams forced them to buy multi-game packages to see the Galaxy come to town – and MLS officials were forced to explain that his injuries were genuine and there was nothing they could do. The off-season has given Beckham time to recover fully, leading to his England recall and a nervous few days for MLS officials.

David Beckham, the face of MLS? (photo: The Offside)

But to say that Beckham is all MLS has going for it is to ignore a maturing and increasingly competitive league. The league began in 1996, hoping to build on the legacy of the 1994 World Cup. In the 12 years since then, the league’s long-term survival has occasionally been in doubt, but the past few seasons have undoubtedly been the best, both on and off the field.

MLS is run on a “single-entity” structure in which all teams and players are owned by the league. This structure is intended to avoid the irrational exuberance that led the NASL, America’s previous professional league, to go under in 1984. Slow and steady growth has been the goal this time, although for several years it was more slow than steady. In 2001, the league was forced to eliminate two of its teams and in 2004 there were reports that it had lost $350 million.

From this low point, MLS has begun to move toward profitability. The league signed a 10-year, $150 million dollar sponsorship deal with Adidas in 2004 and in 2006 inked its first television rights deal (it had previously been paying to put games on TV). Last season was the first in which MLS teams sold shirt sponsorships, proving that Americans are behind Europe in at least one aspect of capitalist excess.

Much of the success in recent years can be attributed to teams building their own “soccer-specific stadiums.” After years of being forced to rent American football stadiums, teams with their own stadiums now reap higher matchday revenues. They have also sold the naming rights to these stadiums, which explains why the LA Galaxy play home matches at the Home Depot Center (named after an American home improvement store), and will open the MLS season at the home of the Colorado Rapids, Dick’s Sporting Goods Park (nickname: The Big Dick).

The Big Dick (photo: dickssportinggoodspark.com)

This surer financial footing has given MLS the confidence to begin expanding. This season sees the resurrection of the San Jose Earthquakes, a team that was unceremoniously moved to Houston and renamed the Dynamo in 2005. A Seattle team will join the league in 2009 and Philadelphia will bring the league to 16 teams in 2010.

The Philadelphia team has received a fair amount of publicity for its preemptively-formed fan club, the Sons of Ben. This group is part of a trend of increasingly numerous and boisterous MLS supporters groups, including DC United’s Barra Brava and Chicago’s Section 8. These groups are truly grassroots, and have sprung up in a league that was, until recently, more focused on attracting soccer moms and their families than reaching out to knowledgeable fans. MLS increasingly recognizes the importance of soccer-savvy fans and has eliminated many Americanizing gimmicks, such as keeping the official time on the stadium clock and having it count down, using hockey-style shootouts to avoid draws, and naming the Kansas City team the Wiz (though their current nickname, the Wizards, is only a slight improvement).

The standard of play in MLS has risen dramatically since the league’s inception. Early on, skilled foreign players often complained about the excess physicality and lack of skill in the league and hotfooted it back to where they had come from. Foreign players arriving today are just as likely to say that the level of play in MLS is above what they expected.

But high-profile foreign players like Beckham are the exception rather than the rule in MLS. Or, perhaps more accurately, they are the result of the so-called “designated player” rule, which allows teams to sign players at salaries that exceed the league-mandated salary cap (around $2 million per team per year). Former Aston Villa striker Juan Pablo Angel and USA captain Claudio Reyna went to New York and Mexican legend Cuaumtémoc signed with Chicago on this rule last season. This year’s designated player signings are Argentines Marcelo Gallardo and Claudio Lopez, who will play for DC United and Kansas City respectively.

But perhaps the biggest on-field shift in MLS in recent years has been the emergence of young American players. The most promising talent at the moment is New York’s Jozy Altidore. Born to Haitian parents, the 18 year-old striker has the rare combination of size, skill, and poise in front of goal that has led Real Madrid to take an interest in him (and to top it all off, he also writes a weekly column on the New York Times website). When Altidore does leave, he will join a growing list of former MLS players in Europe, including Brad Friedel, Brian McBride, and DaMarcus Beasley. Less well known, though just as promising, is 20 year-old Michael Bradley (son of national team manager Bob), whose 16 goals from defensive midfield at Heerenveen in Holland have attracted interests from teams across Europe.

A more worrying exodus is the increasing number of players headed for leagues whose level of play is in no way superior to MLS, but whose salaries are. Beckham’s millions aside, salaries in MLS are relatively low. As a result, many players have taken more lucrative offers to play in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Austria in recent years. The loss of these players is bound to lower the quality play in MLS and worry league officials, especially as new teams thin the talent pool.

This season begins on Saturday with teams looking to knock back-to-back champions Houston Dynamo off their perch. Steve Nicol’s New England have come close to doing so, but have lost in the playoff final both years (like other American sports, MLS determines its champion in the playoffs, not in the league). DC United turn out consistently strong teams, though their hopes this year rest on how well playmaker Marcelo Gallardo adapts to the league. Chicago hope to build on the success that Mexican Cuauhtémoc Blanco inspired at the end of last season.

Cuauhtémoc Blanco (photo: Last Kick)

Unfortunately for MLS, teams in the two biggest American markets have experienced little success. Red Bull New York (the team was purchased by the energy drink company in 2006) boast the dangerous strike tandem of Juan Pablo Angel of Jozy Altidore, but the club have always struggled. Chivas USA, the American offshoot of the eponymous Mexican club, were the better of the two LA teams last year, beating the Galaxy 3-0 twice. The Galaxy failed to make the playoffs last season and real questions remain about the team going into this season. New coach Ruud Gullit has promised to bring sexy football to LA, but his team have few quality players outside of Beckham, US international Landon Donovan, and Guatemalan striker Carlos Ruiz.

At the outset of its 13th season, there are two ways of looking at MLS. Pessimists will claim that it has failed to break into the American mainstream and can’t match the quality of top European leagues. But optimists will point out that MLS has achieved a degree of financial stability and raised the level of play on the field to a point many doubted it would ever reach. David Beckham may be the icing on the cake, but at least there is cake to be iced.

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After the 2006 World Cup, Sanchez got his wish and was named national team boss. He stuck with his promise not to select naturalized players until earlier this year when he called up one of Lavolpe’s favorites, Antonio Naelson. Sanchez retreated from his previous statements and relied on the same constitutional rationale that Chivas officials recently employed to justify Jesus Padilla’s spot on their team. “The doors are open for all Mexicans, and the constitution says that they are Mexican,” said Sanchez.

Hugo Sanchez has not been as revolutionary as he promised to be (Photo: FMSite.net)

Hugo Sanchez has a completely different set of problems today. As boss of the Olympic team, he recently failed to get out of a qualifying group that also included world heavyweights such as Canada, Guatemala, and Haiti. The cases of Chivas and the Mexican national team indicate that Mexico is a country currently working to define what it means to be Mexican.

Halfway across the globe, Qatar’s oil wealth has, for years, allowed its clubs to bring in talented foreign players (admittedly, slightly past the peaks of their careers). Gabriel Batistuta, Frank Leboeuf, Jay-Jay Okocha, and Romario have all spent at least some time in the Q-League. Despite these big names playing in the domestic league, the Qatari national team has achieved very little.

Recently, Qatar has begun to naturalize foreign players so that they can represent the country’s national team. This might seem to be controversial, but unlike in Mexico, there has been very little criticism of Uruguayan-born boss Jorge Fossati. Why is this the case? Just as in Mexico, political economy largely explains this phenomenon. Critiques of using foreign-born players (of Mexican descent or otherwise) in Mexico are rooted in a conception of Mexican identity originally promoted by Jose Vasconcelos, and shifts in this conception are now occurring largely because of the economic situation that has led to large numbers of Mexicans living outside of the country. In Qatar, foreign workers are an integral part of the country’s development. In a country accustomed to this reality, non-Qatari born soccer players representing the national team may not be such an, um, foreign idea.

Jorge Fossati is named Qatari national team boss in 2007 (Photo: FIFA/AFP/Karim Jaafar)

Like many countries in the Middle East, Qatar has, in recent years, brought in thousands of foreign workers. The US State Department reports that foreign workers are 52% of Qatar’s population and 89% of its labor force. In addition to native Qataris, Indians make up 20%, Filipinos and Nepalis 10% each, Pakistanis 7%, and Sri Lankans 5% of the 900,000 population of the gulf state. Foreign workers are employed in many industries and are the labor engine that is firing Qatar’s economy.

With half of the population made up of foreigners, Jorge Fossati has a limited pool from which to name his squad. He told FIFA last month, “You mustn’t forget that this is a country with a population of only 250,000, which makes it very hard to select a national team using only players born and bred here.” Just as bosses of Qatari industry have done, Fossati has looked for labor abroad. Michael Cockerill wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald last month of this plan:

After a string of frustrating failures at both World Cup and Asian Cup level, it dawned on the Qatari authorities that they were always going to struggle to make a splash in international football unless something radical was done. There are roughly 850,000 people in Qatar. Only one quarter of them are actually Qatari citizens, and only half again are male. To create a competitive national team out of such a limited talent pool was clearly a pipe dream. So Qatar began “buying” players from Africa, South America and other parts of Asia who hadn’t yet played for their own national teams. By accepting the lure of tax-free petro-dollars in the Q-League, they had to also declare their allegiance to the Qatar national team. For most, it was a no-brainer.

Qatar’s earlier attempts to lure relatively high-profile players such as Ailton and Dede to represent their national with promises of cash were shot down by FIFA. Instead of giving up on the idea of naturalizing foreign players to make them eligible for their national team, the Qataris simply looked for lower profile players. In a thread snarkily titled International Gathering of Failed Foreign Players in Qatar aka Qatari National Team, on the aliraqi.org message boards, user Al-Kazwami has detailed the foreigner players (and their country of origin) who have represented the gulf nation recently. They include Lawrence (Ghana), Wissam Rizk (Palestine), Talal Al-Belushi (Kuwait), Mujeeb Hameed (Sudan), Qassim Burhan (Sudan), Ali Mejbel Fartous (Iraq), Majdi Sidiq (Sudan), Ali Nassir (Yemen), Hussein Yasser (Egypt), Majeed Mohammad (Sudan), Sebastian Soria (Uruguay), Abdulah Koni (Senegal), Mohammad Saqr (Senegal), Fabio César Montazine (Brazil), and Marconi Amaral (Uruguay).

Qatar’s Uruguayan-born forward Sebastian Soria, in white (Photo: FIFA/AFP)

That this gaggle of foreign players representing Qatar has not caused more of an uproar in the gulf nation is not unconnected from the number of foreign workers in the country. Qataris accustomed to foreigners working in industries seem content to let them move into the sporting arena. The contrast with Mexico – a country with little history of immigration– is clear, and it is no surprise that bringing in foreign players for El Tricolor is more controversial. The controversy in Mexico is coming as a result of the high levels of emigration and the increasing number of talented foreign-born Mexicans like Jesus Padilla has forced Chivas to change its “Mexicans born in Mexico only” policy. Indeed, Hugo Sanchez and future Mexican national team bosses may begin to field more and more American-born Mexicans (New Mexico-born Edgar Castillo was part of the unsuccessful U-23 team). The team selections of Chivas, El Tricolor, and the Qatari national team are being drastically affected by global political economics.

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Since 1994, Vickery has been discovering more and more about South American soccer and writing about it for the BBC, The World Game, Sports Illustrated, and World Soccer magazine. He was kind enough to take the time to speak with me recently about soccer in Brazil, the country where he is based.

Tim Vickery (photo: Tim Vickery)

One of the first games Tim Vickery went to when he came to Brazil was between two of the coutry’s biggest teams, Flamengo and Corinthians. At the time, Savio (who would later play for Real Madrid and earn 44 caps for Brazil) was playing for Flamengo. Vickery was amazed at Savio’s talent, and the fact that he had not heard of this player, who was clearly destined for great things. It was at that point, says Vickery, that he realized how strong the Brazilian “factory of players” was. Going to games, he says, was like “going to a movie and seeing the trailers. These are the forthcoming attractions of world soccer and you’re privileged to see them.”

At the same game in which Savio wowed Vickery with his skills, there was another player who also caught his eye, but for a very different reason. Corinthians defensive midfielder Ze Elías was, as Vickery describes him, “an awful, awful player, a bad, bad player.” Ze Elías subscribed to the “if it moves, kick it; if it doesn’t move, kick it until it does” school of soccer more often associated with Vickery’s homeland than Brazil. “It was a surprise to me that someone of this limited technical ability could be considered of great prominence,” says Vickery. Yet Ze Elías’s constant effort and his effectiveness had endeared him to many in Brazil.

Ze Elías was just as popular with Corinthians fans as Savio was with Flamengo supporters. Though he says it was a “huge surprise that a player such as [Ze Elías] could be lionized by the Brazilian public,” this taught Vickery an important lesson: Brazilian soccer has been “mythologized out of all proportion” and the reality is often far different from the stereotypes that most people have about it. Yes, there is jogo bonito, but that is not all to be said about Brazilian soccer.

Anyone who’s watched games from Brazil knows that violence is quite common in the Brazilian league. Vickery notes that games in South America’s largest country “can be played in a very violent atmosphere. It doesn’t take much for the fists to start flying.” A former coach told him simply: “football is survival.”

Brazilian coaches in general today don’t fit the vision many have of Brazilian coaches, encouraging creativity, flair, etc. Advocates of jogo bonito are few in number, having been overtaken by what Vickery describes as the “technocrats” that make up much of the ranks of Brazilian coaches. These men often have advanced degrees in physical education and work with a large team of highly specialized assistants. Like technocrats in any profession, Brazilian soccer coaches “live in a world of statistics. What they can’t measure, they can’t manage. They absolutely love breaking the game down into statistics.” Vickery recalls meetings of coaches he has been to as being incredibly boring, focusing on ideas such as whether moves that string together over seven consecutive passes are more likely to lead to goals.

Current national team boss Dunga is a good example of a new breed of Brazilian coaches. Dunga subscribes to the belief that “winning is everything,” and he is far from the only one in Brazil to believe this. Vickery says he “absolutely hates” the Brazil teams of 1982 and 1986, who played a more free-flowing game, and calls them “specialists in losing.” Dunga’s teams value winning over everything, even if that means leaving out players such as Ronaldinho and Kaká in favor of Josué or Mineiro, both players in the mold of Ze Elías (or, more generously, Dunga himself).

Tim Vickery’s most recent column focused on the touchy subject of race in Brazilian soccer. In that article, Vickery goes back to the 1950 World Cup to explain ways in which race remains important in Brazilian soccer today.

The 1950 team had several prominent black players. There was a widely promoted idea that Brazilians were a new “race,” distinct from the indigenous population, former slaves, and European immigrants who were their ancestors. The 1950 loss led many to question this idea and brought out what Vickery describes as Brazilians’ “racial phobias” about themselves. “The idea of being an inferior, mongrel race, which was very, very popular at the time, that really came to the fore. The players who were singled out for special scorn after that were the black players.”

These racial phobias were not put to rest until 1958, when Didi, Garrincha and a 17 year-old named Pelé won the World Cup for Brazil. They remained in place for goalkeepers until recently (some might say they still exist) and Vickery says the low number of black coaches is evidence they haven’t disappeared completely.The Brazil team of 1958 and many teams after them played a free-flowing soccer that gave rise to the typical “Brazilian” style (exactly which Dunga and the like have been fighting against in recent years). This style originally came about as soccer was brought to the country from England, explains Vickery. The sport there had been “forged by the values of the English industrial revolution … where the virtues of muscle power and reliability” were important. But most important of all in English soccer was the collectivity, everyone working together for a common goal. Factory workers were valued for their muscle power, reliability, and ability to work together during the worker; footballers were prized for the same talents on the weekend.

But in Brazil the game was reinvented. Vickery says that “[soccer] was reinterpreted by the South American masses from a game of straight running, muscular Christianity to a much more balletic thing full of twists and turns.” Playing this new style, Brazil was very successful and this “led to international triumphs and international recognition for a nation that [was] starved of both.”

In this reinterpretation, Brazilians came to value individual play over that of the collective. Despite the pragmatic shifts of recent years, this emphasis on individuality remains an important part of Brazilian soccer. Vickery attributes this in part to the social stratification, which has long been a part of Brazilian society.

“In Brazil, the football culture is much more individual. … Brazil remains semi-feudal and people are born serfs almost. Football is the moment where the serf can become a king. Say I’ve got the ball and you come and tackle me and I do a little shimmy and you fall on your backside. Even if that move serves no objective purpose and you’re on your feet instantly, I’ve made you look ridiculous, for that one little instant I have humiliated you. And that is the moment that will most get the Brazilian public up.”

Robinho (in white) becomes a king during his days with Santos (photo: Sydney Morning Herald)

I ask Vickery whether soccer is played more avidly among any class of Brazilians. Absolutely not, he tells me. Soccer is universal in Brazil and “all the other sports live on scraps.”

But Vickery does acknowledge that the make-up of professional players might be changing. Whereas before well-off Brazilians would have given up their passion for soccer in order to pursue a more stable career, today more are tempted to pursue a career in the sport. Especially with more and more players going abroad, the potential payoffs are just so great today, Vickery says. A player like Kaká, who comes from a quite well-to -do family, would never have tried his hand at professional soccer twenty or thirty years ago. Even Pelé, who came from anything but a wealthy family, was discouraged from going pro by his father, who was afraid an injury might ruin his son’s career, as it had ruined his.

Brazilian soccer was recently in the news when FIFA announced that the country will host the 2014 World Cup. Vickery has written recently about some of the potential problems the nation will have to overcome in order to stage a successful tournament. Given this, I was surprised when he told me that he has no doubt that the 2014 World Cup will be a success. “Football has a fantastic ability to assert itself in the most unfortunate circumstances,” Vickery says.

But that, he says, is not the real question. It is more appropriate to ask what the legacy of the World Cup will be for Brazil the country. “It’s a fantastic opportunity in terms of stadium and infrastructure improvement. I worry that the opportunity is not going to be taken to the fullest extent and the traditional pattern of Brazilian society will reassert itself once more. A small minority will do fantastically well and the great majority won’t get a great deal out of it.”

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Perhaps it’s the Marx I’ve been reading, but I’ve been thinking about the class identity of soccer recently. Is soccer a sport of the working class, the middle class, or the wealthy? Of course, the answer is yes. It is everyone’s sport. But I believe that throughout time, and especially in England, the sport has shifted in terms of the class of people it is primarily identified with.

Many stories exist about soccer’s origins (does it come from the Chinese game of cuju? Native American ball games? Ancient Italian calcio?), but it was clearly codified into the modern-day sport in England around the the middle of the 19th century. Students at several of England’s elite public schools (the equivalent of private schools to us Americans, see this explanation) and universities wrote down the rules to ball games common at the time, and these rules established the sport known today as soccer.

Soccer grew popular in elite schools such as Eton College as well as Cambridge and Oxford Universities. It is no surprise, then, that the sport was initially seen as the game of the upper class. David Goldblatt writes in his book The Ball is Round that “[i]n the early 1870s football remained a minor recreational pastime for a very narrow stratum of Victorian society” (32).

The 1874 FA Cup winners, Oxford University AFC (photo: Answers.com)

Goldblatt writes that the church was responsible for soccer moving its way down the English social ladder. Especially in the north of England, soccer was seen as a creative form of outreach: “In response to the decline of organized religion among the poor, evangelical sportsmen had spread the gospel of football through various forms of missionary and social work in the new industrial cities” (40). Many clubs formed during this period by churches as a creative way to increase their congregation have remained to this day, including Birmingham City, Everton, and Bolton (for more information on the role of churches in early English soccer, see Peter Lupson’s Thank God for Football).

Soccer also expanded from the elite schools that had given it rise and came to be played at institutions with students of widely varying backgrounds. Goldblatt writes that “by the 1880s the spread of football down the social scale was sufficiently entrenched that old boys of the most lowly state school could create sustainable football clubs” (39).

Soccer was initially a game played exclusively for fun. But when it became a business, those in charge of teams had every incentive to increase their fan bases. Attending soccer matches was marketed to the masses as a form of entertainment and the fans came out in force. FA Cup Finals had attendances of over 100,000 on several occasions in the first quarter of the 20th century (it is estimated that over 200,000 packed in to Wembley for the 1923 match, since known as the White Horse Final, for the mounted policeman who cleared the crowd, many of whom had overflowed onto the pitch). Crowds of these sizes indicated that football had become the sport of the masses.

The proletariat are escorted from the pitch (photo: Virgin Media)

English players throughout the 20th century came from similar backgrounds as many of the fans (the maximum wage, abolished only in 1961, ensured that they remained in the same class). The 1966 World Cup-winning team was led by a former bricklayer in net (Gordon Banks) and a former coal miner in front of him (Jack Charlton). Players of better-off backgrounds, such as Liverpool’s Steve Heighway, were noticeable by their limited numbers.

The late 20th century saw a rise in violent incidents perpetrated by football hooligans. One consequence of this development was that all of English football became associated with what many assumed were the largely working-class males who were most likely to become hooligans (in fact, people of all social classes became hooligans). Especially after the Heysel and Hillsborough stadium disasters, soccer became increasingly unrespectable, especially for those in middle and upper classes, and attendances dipped.

The inception of the Premier League in 1992 can be seen as a turning point in the class identity of English soccer. A major reason that the Premier League has become the most profitable in the world is due to its attracting fans from all social strata. Middle-class and wealthy people who kept their distance from the game have returned in large numbers. One only need look at the shirt sponsors of Premier League clubs to realize the demographic that is watching. Manchester United is sponsored by insurance firm AIG, Birmingham City by investment company F&C, and Arsenal by Emirates Airline, whose first class cabin looks both incredibly comfortable and incredibly expensive.

This shift has led some to complain that football is losing its identity, which for most of recent memory, has been markedly working-class. Roy Keane’s famous diatribe against Manchester United’s “prawn sandwich eating fans” was emblematic of this concern. Many have complained recently about rising ticket prices in the Premier League. An article in the Sun last year quoted Malcolm Clarke, chairman of the Football Supporters’ Federation, as saying that “Premier clubs are pricing large sections of society out of football.”

Middlesborough’s Riverside Stadium had entire sections empty at a 2005 Carling Cup game. Is the low attendance due to high ticket prices? (photo: BBC)

My own impression is that English football today is followed by perhaps a wider range of people than ever before. It may be true that Premier League ticket prices are pricing many working- and even middle-class supporters out, but the increasing number of games available on television means that everyone can feel connected in some way.Soccer in England has gone through many changes in its class identity in its century and a half of existence, from its invention in elite schools to its popularization among the working classes to its current following among what seems like nearly every group in English society. The character of the English game in the future will likely continue to be shaped by the backgrounds of the fans who follow it.

The local MLS team, the Columbus Crew, has taken note of the growing Hispanic population in the area. This year, they appointed Eddie Carvacho, the team’s former goalkeeper coach, as their Director of Hispanic Development. Upon his appointment, Carvacho said, “My objective is very simple. I am the connector within our organization between the growing Hispanic community…” While his objective may be simple, achieving it is anything but. Carvacho spoke with me recently about the challenges of attracting Hispanic fans to the Crew.

Eddie Carvacho (photo: Columbus Crew)

Unlike other demographics that MLS teams are trying to attract, Hispanics are already soccer fans. Eddie Carvacho himself loved soccer from the time he was a child. Growing up in Chile, he says, he would often go to the stadium, make sure no police were around, hop the fence, and watch his team play for free. Now, his job is to get people like him to buy tickets to games.

Doing so is no simple task, says Carvacho. Hispanics, he says, “don’t communicate by email so I can’t send a mass email.” Instead, he has to “entrench himself in the community.” He does this by meeting with local community leaders, putting up promotional material at stores frequented by the Hispanic population, going to local Hispanic soccer leagues, doing publicity with local Spanish-language media, and talking with people he meets on a daily basis. The local Hispanic community is quite mobile, and this requires a multitude of strategies to reach these potential fans.

More than anything, Carvacho insists that his job is about building bonds with the local Hispanic community. “It’s not just calling up someone and saying, ‘Do you want to buy some tickets?’ It’s relationship-building.”

The Crew has used Hispanics’ soccer fanaticism to their advantage by organizing a tournament called Copa Victoria that attracts Hispanic teams. Carvacho says he uses the tournament as an opportunity to talk to the players and their families about the Crew and he hopes that some of them will buy tickets to a game.

The 2006 winners of the Copa Victoria at Crew Stadium (photo: Columbus Crew)

The main strategy that MLS as a whole has used to attract Hispanic fans is to bring in high-profile players from Latin America. The Chicago Fire’s signing of Cuauhtemoc Blanco is the latest example of this practice, which has been fairly successful (Blanco’s first match in Columbus drew a healthy crowd of over 20,000 fans). Eddie Carvacho approves of this approach, saying that whatever brings Hispanic fans to the stadium is fine with him. “If it’s Blanco, great. … If it’s Ivan Guerrero, great for the Hondurans. If it’s Wanchope, it’s Wanchope. If it’s Guillermo Barros Schelotto because of the things he’s doing, fantastic. Whatever it is that’s going to bring [Hispanic fans].”

Hispanic fans may recognize some of the players on MLS fields, but the stadium atmosphere often differs dramatically from what they saw at home. Some Hispanics, says Carvacho, are surprised to find that the stadium is largely family-friendly, in contrast to the often dangerous arenas that dot Latin America. It may be different, but Carvacho says that, “Once they come and they have a good experience in the stadium, they like the environment. They like the fact that they can get a cerveza and they can stand and drink it while they watch the game.”

The Crew is also working give its stadium a more Latin feel. This year saw the development of Turbina Amarilla, a fan club made up of mostly Hispanics, complete with drumming and singing in Spanish. It has added a new element to the stadium that Carvacho and others at the Crew hope will attract more non-Hispanic fans as well.

The Turbina Amarilla fan club (photo: posted by crewfighter on Big Soccer)

Carvacho says that the Crew’s outreach to Hispanics has been successful overall (he estimates that the team has brought in about $80,000 worth of revenue from this population). But quantifying ticket sales to Hispanic fans, he says, is a challenge. In many of their home countries, the idea of buying season tickets or even buying single-game tickets in advance of a match is relatively rare. “The biggest challenge is trying to educate them about and affect their buying behavior. The Hispanic community is very reactive and spur of the moment. They don’t understand being a season ticket holder.”

The main way Eddie Carvacho judges his success is by looking at the same-day ticket sales. He says the team’s walk-up ticket sales have been higher this year than in the past and he believes many of these are due to the increased number of Hispanic fans.

Carvacho is proud of the work he has done. “I would love for people from the league not to look at Columbus as a Midwest, small market. I want them to look at us as a progressive club that is doing things differently.” He credits Crew general manager Mark McCullers with having the foresight to reach out to the Hispanic community in Columbus, which he estimates at around 60,000 to 70,000. This Hispanic community may be small compared to that of LA, Chicago, New York, or Washington DC, but its potential impact on the Columbus Crew far outweighs its size.

Eddie Carvacho uses nearly every strategy he can think of to attract Hispanic fans to Crew games. But ultimately, he says, he has a simple message for Hispanics in the area. “We know you’re from another country and your first love lies with another team, but now you live in Columbus. There’s room for a second love.”

This agreement is the latest example of labor policies having a particularly marked effect in the world of soccer. Soccer often seems disconnected from the real world; the effect of labor policies on the sport is one of the ways in which we are reminded that soccer is very much a part of the world we have created.

The effect of this little-noticed decision could be dramatic. The high number of African players in France is due, in no small part, to their being from former French colonies and thus able to qualify easily for work permits (this stands in marked contrast to the England, where there is a fairly strict work permit process by which non-EU players have to prove their exceptional talent). If African players are no longer counted in the non-EU quota, they will likely flock to Spain.

A similar situation to that seen in Spain today arose in Italy in 2000. Then, Andriy Shevchenko was playing and scoring (yes, it was a long time ago) for AC Milan. But, the striker complained that he was still counted as a foreign player despite the fact that Ukraine and Italy had previously signed a labor agreement. After Shevchenko’s repeated complaints that he was being treated as a “second-class citizen” and appeals by AC Milan, he was finally granted EU status.

Andriy Shevchenko (photo: BBC)

These two examples affect only a limited number of players in two countries, but other labor decisions have affected the whole of European football. The EU decision in 1993 to allow free movement of workers throughout its member countries has dramatically affected European leagues. Leagues that previously had quotas of non-Spanish, non-Italian, etc. players were forced to reshape their limits so they only applied to non-EU players. The result has been a dramatic increase in the number of players moving across borders. The heated debates on the number of foreign players in the Premier League, for example, have come about because of the EU decision to allow free movement of its workers.The changes above have been forced by larger labor policies that end up affecting soccer dramatically. There has also been one major decision recently which came directly from the world of soccer. In 1990, Belgian player Jean Bosman sued because he was not permitted to leave his club RFC Liege when his contract had ended. Difficult as it is to believe now, players at the time were still considered property of the team they played for, even when their contract was up. Bosman won his suit and from 1995 on, players were permitted to leave their clubs at the end of their contract.

Jean Bosman surrounded by judges (photo: La Galaxia de Estrellas)

The so-called Bosman ruling had a dramatic effect on European soccer. Clubs such as Ajax, which developed young players received no compensation when their protégés were poached by bigger teams. Players and their agents began to negotiate for contract extensions far before their deals were up, using the threat of leaving for free to pressure the club. Opinions about the effects of the Bosman ruling are mixed, but it is fairly incredible that it was not until 1995 that soccer players gained the right to leave at the end of their contracts. I cannot imagine that other workers would have persisted under this system nearly so long.

A large part of the reason soccer players didn’t complain was because, even before the Bosman ruling, they were, for the most part, making good money. Even if things were exactly as they would have liked, they weren’t that bad.

Since 1995, salaries have increased dramatically. Several players in England make over 100,000 pounds per week. As a result, it’s difficult for many fans to consider them in the same class as themselves. Were a soccer player to complain about labor conditions, he would become the object of scorn among the fans who spend an increasingly high percentage of their earnings following their teams (witness the treatment Rio Ferdinand receiving when renegotiating his most recent contract).

In 2001, the Professional Footballers Association in England threatened to strike over revenue-sharing before striking a deal with the Premier League at the last minute. Given the lack of patience fans in England have shown with big earners complaining about their salaries, I doubt a strike would have earned the players much sympathy. (Union power may be on the decline in the US compared with Europe, but ironically American athletes are much more apt to strike than their European counterparts; see baseball in 1994, American football in 1987, and even the US national team’s threatened strike in 2005.)

Strikes in soccer-playing countries where players are not getting as rich as the Premier League are more common. Latin American leagues are notorious for not paying their players on time, or at all. It was over unpaid salaries and paltry pay that players in Argentina struck in 2001, followed by their Chilean counterparts in 2002 (a union leader there said at the time, “At the moment here in Chile there are players who earn only a hundred dollars a month, and that’s not enough to live decently on”).

In the eyes of some, sports have overtaken religion to become the opiate of the masses. As providers of this opiate, it is often difficult to remember that professional athletes are workers as well. They may be fabulously wealthy, but labor policies designed for all workers affect them just the same.

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In 1977, when Peter Vermes was 11 years old, his father took him to see a World Cup qualifier in his homeland between the Hungarian national team and the USSR. The young boy was in awe of the stadium and the players out on the field. He told his father, “One day I’m going to play in this stadium. I’m going to play for the United States and we’re going to play against Hungary.”

Vermes’s desire to play for the US against Hungary reflected his family’s background. He was born in Delran, New Jersey in 1966 to Hungarian parents. His father, Michael, had been a professional player, a member of the great Budapest Honved FC team in the 1950s. Things were on course for the elder Vermes to play in the 1958 World Cup, but the Soviet invasion of 1956 forced him to flee his homeland. He eventually settled in the United States, although he would later return most summers to Hungary with Peter, seeking to instill a connection to his homeland in his young son.

The elder Vermes also taught his son the game of soccer at which he had been so skilled. Peter was a star college player at Rutgers in the late 1980s and began playing with the Olympic team as it prepared for the 1988 Seoul games. While at a pre-Olympic tournament in Lille, France, Vermes was approached after a game by a man speaking Hungarian. “[He] asked if I spoke Hungarian and I said yes … He asked me if I had any aspirations of coming to Europe and I said yes.”

Peter Vermes (photo: sporting-heroes.net)

The man, it turned out, was an agent and said that he could set up trials with European teams for Vermes. The agent said he would set up a trial with Belgium’s Standard Liege (the club where American defender Oguchi Onyewu plays today), but first Vermes should go to Hungary to train for a couple of weeks and get up to speed on the European game. The agent had contacts with a team called Raba ETO (known today as Gyori ETO FC) and so Vermes began training with them.

Instant impact doesn’t even begin to explain what Peter Vermes did in his first day of training with Raba ETO. He was placed on the reserve team in a scrimmage against the first team.

Five minutes in, the first team scored against us. Five minutes later, I scored to tie the game up. The coach, after the goal was scored, put me on the first team. Within ten minutes of that, I scored a goal for the first team and we won 2-1 … They stopped the game, we all went inside, and they offered me a contract right then and there.

Vermes talked it over with his father and they decided that it made sense for him to sign with the Hungarian team. He could play there for a year or two to gain experience and then move to a bigger league in Europe. Vermes signed with Raba ETO in 1989 and became the first American to play first division soccer over a whole season.

In signing a contract with a Hungarian team, Vermes was also going behind the Iron Curtain. He had chosen to play with a Hungarian team, at a time when Hungary was still under communist rule. What did it feel like, I asked, to be an American in Hungary at that time?

“Someone who had never been there before would have looked at it with different eyes,” Vermes told me. Having been there nearly every summer as a kid, he knew what he was getting into.

The manifestations of the country’s economic system were relatively limited, Vermes has said. He is quoted in David Wangerin’s book Soccer in a Football World as saying, “I know there is communism there, but it’s not something I notice in my everyday activities. What I notice more is how much more culture and tradition there is … everywhere you go to eat, there are violins playing.”

That is not to say that communism was completely invisible to Vermes while he was playing in Hungary. While contact between capitalist and communist nations was often minimal, the American Vermes got up close and personal with many Russians.

We would play on Saturdays and we would get Sundays off. Saturday night after the game, I would usually take the train to Budapest because I had a lot of relatives there. When I would get on the train, a lot of the Russian soldiers would travel [into Budapest] when they would get a day or weekend [off]. I would end up being on a train with a bunch of Russian soldiers.

Vermes said he almost always felt perfectly safe in Russian-occupied Hungary. But one night, driving home from dinner, he got quite a fright:

I was driving home and all of the sudden … out of nowhere fifty yards ahead of me, a Russian tank came out into the street and it was heading straight toward me. And I’m like, “Holy s***, what am I going to do here?” All of the sudden, [the tank] turned down another street.

The tank’s trip through the city tore up the streets and it was one incident among many that led Hungarians to take a dim view of their Russian occupiers. Even though he was in a communist country, Vermes told me, he noticed Hungarians’ unhappiness about their occupiers and rebelliousness which would lead the country to freedom shortly after he left (he moved on to FC Volendam in Holland after one season with Raba ETO)

Like many of the American “pioneers” of his era (he mentioned Tab Ramos, John Harkes, and John Doyle), Vermes had to go abroad to earn a living, and doing so was a transformative experience for him. He told me that it “hardened [him] as a player” and taught him how to be a professional.

Right before the 1990 World Cup, Peter Vermes achieved a long held goal. With his father in attendance, he represented the United States in a game against Hungary played at the same stadium he had been to as a child.

Peter Vermes (in blue) playing for the US national team (photo: BBC)

That summer, Vermes achieved a goal his father had long ago dreamed for himself: playing in the World Cup itself. Even though the US lost all three of its matches in Italy that summer, Vermes was simply proud to have played in the tournament. And his father was just as proud of his son. Vermes told me of his father:

I think for him it was full circle. He was a professional player, he played in Hungary. He had to leave because communism was coming in, he had to escape the country and cut his career short. And then here I was, his son, who eventually become a professional player, and was playing in Hungary, his old country that he wanted to play for some day and probably would have if he had stayed. And then finally, his son was going to a World Cup. … [M]aybe he couldn’t finish off his career but he saw it happening for me and I think he was extremely proud of that fact.

Many, of course, have done so simply as an investment. Not surprisingly, this group consists of Americans. The Glazer family at Manchester United, George Gillet and Tom Hicks at Liverpool, and Randy Lerner at Aston Villa seem to have bought their clubs because they see potential profit in them. These uber-wealthy gringos have put little effort into feigning interest in soccer, but needn’t do so, as they are clearly most interested in the economic potential, rather than sporting success, of owning a team. The lucrative television deal that goes into effect this year and the huge worldwide appeal of the Premier League are two of the reasons that their investment will likely yield them the profits they desire.

Bryan Glazer (L), Avram Glazer (C) and Joel Glazer (R) (photo: Daily Mail)

Then there are the foreign owners who seem to have bought British clubs for love of the game. Roman Abramovich is the prime example. The billionaire Russian has spent oodles of his rubles on Chelsea. Though peeps occasionally come out of West London about making the club profitable, Abramovich’s time has seen incredible economic losses. Not that Abramovich cares: his team is winning like never before. Despite their on-field success, the Russian owner is not entirely happy and has often urged manager Jose Mourinho to play a more attractive style of play. Abramovich clearly cares not at all about losing money, but does have a love of the game.

Didier Drogba and Roman Abramovich with the FA Cup (photo: Daily Mail)

Another Russian, by the name of Alexandre Gaydamak, far less famous than Abramovich, bought Portsmouth in 2006. Since then he has taken a similar approach to the bearded Chelsea supremo, investing money to bring his team success. Gaydamak’s money enabled the club to bring in quality players such as Sol Campbell and Kanu and though the results haven’t been as dramatic as those seen in West London, Portsmouth had a strong season last year, finishing ninth and qualifying for Europe, a year after they were nearly relegated.

The most notable foreign takeover by a foreigner during this summer was Thaksin Shinawatra’s buy-out of Manchester City. Thaksin’s checkered past includes allegations of human rights abuses while in power in Thailand (the Guardian’s tea-time email The Fiver is now referring to Man City as Human Rights FC). Since his takeover, Thaksin has taken an interesting tack in his control of Man City. Last week, it was announced that the new owner had arranged trials for three Thai players at the club. Other clubs have been accused of bringing in Asian players to sell replica shirts in their homelands, but this is one of the only cases I am aware of in which a chairman has brought in players simply because they share his nationality. Thaksin seems to see his position as Man City owner in part as enabling him to give his country’s players a shot a the big time (the Soccernet article linked to above suggests that he is also doing it to boost his own imagine back home, where there is a warrant out for his arrest).

Human Rights FC owner “Rockin” Thaksin Shinawatra (photo: CBS News)

Though new Manchester City manager Sven Goran Erikson didn’t appear bothered by his Thai trialists, other managers have raised a ruckus when their chairmen have made similar moves. Hong Kong businessman Carson Yeung bought a 30% stake in Birmingham City earlier this year. Since gaining this control, he has told the press that he wants to see Chinese players at the Midlands club. His “hope to have one or two Chinese players at the club” did not go over well with manager Steve Bruce. The man with the ugliest nose ever responded angrily, saying, “I won’t be railroaded into anything.” Time will tell how this debate will be resolved.

At Hearts, there was a similar debate last year over who ultimately got to pick the team. The Scottish club was thrown into turmoil when internal conflicts spilled out onto the front pages. In 2004, the club had fallen on hard times and was rescued by Lithuanian mogul Vladimir Romanov. While many fans initially celebrated his arrival, some began to worry when he began to bring in Lithuanian players, coaches, and backroom staff. Some players complained of the chairman’s interference. Three of the club’s top players – Steven Pressley, Paul Hartley, and Craig Gordon – organized a dramatic October 2006 press conference in which they decried the involvement of Romanov in the every day affairs of the team (Pressley and Hartley have since left, though Gordon remains at the club). Romanov is the most extreme example of a foreign owner buying a British club and then filling its roster with players from his homeland.

Vladimir Romanov, owner of Hearts (photo: BBC)

The economic draw is an important draw for all foreign owners investing in British teams. But while it is the main attraction for the Americans, the Russians seem to be focusing on building a team to express their love of the game. Then you have Thaksin, Yeung, and Romanov, owners attempting to provide a sort of ethnic patronage for players from their homelands.

If you’re a young player hoping to make it as a professional in Britain, you can work hard and be discovered by a scout from a Premier League team. Or just sit back and hope that a wealthy businessman from your country buys himself a team.