Diego Buanotte’s car after the accident (photo: Olé)

Buanotte is far from the only young soccer player to be involved in a serious car accident. Young American forward Charlie Davies is currently recovering from injuries he sustained in an October crash in which he was a passenger. Like Buanotte, Davies was lucky, as a friend of his died in the accident. Davies is recovering and hasshown signs of progress recently.

Buanotte and Davies were both seriously injured in crashes, but other players who have been involved in accidents have – often incredibly – escaped unharmed. Such is the case of Real Madrid and France forward Karim Benzema, who was involved in a crash the day after Christmas. Benzema smashed up his yellow Lamborghini in a crash with a Porsche. Incredibly, this was the second accident in which the young Frenchman has been involved in the past two months. He also managed to smash his car into a tree on his way home in November. Incredibly, he walked away from both accidents unscathed.

Benzema’s teammate Cristiano Ronaldo was also incredibly lucky to escape without serious injury after crashing his Ferrari into the wall of a tunnel in Manchester nearly a year ago. Images afterward showed a smashed-up car but Ronaldo was still as pretty as ever.

The results of the Ronaldo crash (photo: BBC/PA)

Former Dutch international Patrick Kluivert is another player to be involved in a serious car accident. In 1995, while a young Ajax star-in-the-making, Kluivert plowed his car into Marten Putman and killed the Amsterdam man. Kluivert was eventually charged with manslaughter, though he never served time in prison. Kluivert said later that the incident shook him deeply. He said, “Something inside me is broken. I can never be fully happy again. Before the accident, I was sometimes reckless, but that is normal for my age. Now, in one moment, it is gone. The child in me has been killed. Only when I am on the field can I be myself [and] feel completely free.”

Kluivert’s words indicate one reason why players are often involved in car accidents. Young, famous, and wealthy, they see themselves as invincible, and often act recklessly. Some, like Benzema and Ronaldo, escape without serious injury; others, like Buanotte, Davies, and Kluivert cause serious injury to themselves and to others.

What is the effect of such accidents on the players themselves? For Kluivert, it may have been one of the main reasons why the player who looked a worldbeater at age 18 never replicated that form later in his career. Kluivert floundered at teams throughout Europe before calling time on his career recently. What will become of Diego Buanotte and Charlie Davies? Both face a long road back to full physical and psychological health. They will need tremendous strength to overcome the trauma of serous car accidents and live out the potential both young players have shown on the field.

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The Tibetan national team (photo: Kaos Pilot)

FIFA likes to promote the fact that it has more members than the UN. The international governing body of soccer got to its current level of 208 members (compared to 192 who belong to the UN) by various means, as Menary explains. Being the birthplace of soccer gives England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland separate teams. Chinese Taipei represents the island of Taiwan, and has since 1954 (the mainland Chinese team, like the country itself, was, for many years, an international pariah, and only joined FIFA in 1979). More recently, there has been a boom in FIFA membership, as some regional confederations with, as Menary dryly puts it, a “far looser idea of what constitutes a ‘nation’ than others” brought new members into the fold in a bid to boost their influence in the world governing body. CONCACAF has used this strategy most often, adding Arbua, the Turks & Caicos Island, and Anguilla among others to their ranks. Oceania boasts such powers as New Caledonia, Tahiti, and American Samoa. These three “countries” are not in fact independent. The first two are French territories, the latter an American possession. But they were let into FIFA in an earlier era. Today, becoming a new member of the club is a far more difficult proposition (only newly-independent countries such as Montenegro have achieved this goal in the past few years). But the fact that FIFA’s many non-independent nations have maintained their membership makes a mockery of the current argument that new members must be members of the international community (how exactly FIFA defined this is unclear, as Menary points out). Some of the teams have been rebuffed because they are technically parts of other countries that do have FIFA membership. In this category are Greenland, the Channel Islands, the Falklands, and Zanzibar, and the Sapmi people of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. For some countries, their entry into FIFA is too politically sensitive for the supposedly apolitical governing body to countenance. The national teams of Tibet, Northern Cyprus and Gibraltar have seen their progress hampered by larger countries with a political interest in the territories. When Greenland scheduled a match with Tibet, the Chinese government threatened to put an embargo on the Danish territory’s exports of shrimp to China. The match was called off. (In reality, FIFA is hardly apolitical. Menary describes their 1994 decision to give membership to Palestine as “a blatantly political act for a non-political organization.”) Then there are teams that Menary covers whose existence is an oddity at best. The Occitànian team is made up of speakers of the language of the same name, most of whom live in France, Spain, and Italy. The players who represent the Northern Marianas Islands, and whom Menary describes as “football missionaries” are mostly American expat “soccer dads.” In a game against neighbor Guam, the Northern Marianas team put out a team with a14 year-old and a teammate who, at 48 years old, could have been his grandfather. It’s easy to laugh off players and teams whose sole ambition is not to win, nor even qualify for the World Cup, but instead just to play in officially sanctioned matches. But all share the same dedication and work ethic as the players who lift the World Cup trophy every four years. Menary’s empathetic writing draws us into the world of Niklas Kreutzmann, Greenland’s captain and a dental student who would not let down his coach by missing a tournament that occurred just before his exams, and spent all his free time in between matches and training in his hotel room studying. Or Zanzibar goalkeeper Salum Ali Salum, who “has to be carried from the pitch crying uncontrollably” after his team loses a match in a penalty shootout. For these two players, as with nearly everyone Menary documents in Outcasts, the struggle to play international soccer is a task to which they have dedicated extraordinary effort.

Greenland (in red) and Zanzibar face off in the FIFI Wild Cup (photo: FIFI/Corbis)

The book is not without its faults. Many of the chapters were written as stand-alone pieces, and the book has a slightly pasted-together feel. And Menary’s decision to write about so many teams means that some of the more compelling stories are given short shrift. But overall, Outcasts is a wonderful addition to the increasingly homogenized diet of soccer writing being produced today. In an era in which so much soccer journalism simply repeats the latest result, transfer rumor, or Joey Barton arrest, the unique stories that Steve Menary writes about in Outcasts are a rare treat. Outcasts: The Lands That FIFA Forgot is published by Know the Score Books and is available from their website or Amazon.

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Students involved with Grassroot Soccer (photo: Grassroot Soccer)

Leah Bellow-Handelman grew up in New York City. It was a bit of a shock for her, then, when she went to college in rural Ohio at Oberlin College. That shock, though, was nowhere near what she experienced when she graduated and headed off to South Africa to begin working at Grassroot Soccer. Grassroot Soccer (GRS) was founded in 2002 by Tommy Clark, son of Bobby Clark, current Notre Dame men’s coach and former Scotland international. Tommy had played professionally in Zimbabwe before returning to the US to get his medical degree. But Africa one of Africa’s most vexing problems – HIV/AIDS – drew him back, determined to use the sport he loved to fight the disease. He gave GRS its motto: “using the power of soccer in the fight against AIDS.” Since its founding, Grassroot Soccer has grown enormously in stature. On a recent visit to Africa, Bill Clinton visited a GRS program in Zambia.

Slick Willie in Zambia (photo: WinMcNamee / Getty Images / Grassroot Soccer)

Leah Bellow-Handelman first heard about GRS from a friend of a friend who had worked for the organization. A player at Oberlin who majored in Politics and African-American Studies, she had become interested in public health in Africa. What better way, Bellow-Handelman thought, to combine her interests than to work for GRS?

Since arriving in South Africa in September, she has been participating in various aspects of GRS’ work. The primary goal of GRS is to provide education and awareness about HIV/AIDS and how to prevent the disease. It is a massive task. Bellow-Handelman says that, when asked on a quiz if they can avoid getting HIV/AIDS, many children in South Africa believe they cannot. Her job, then, is to show them how they can avoid the deadly diseases. And her entrée into their lives is something they love: soccer. “Anytime [kids] see a soccer ball,” she says, “they want to play, they want to talk to you.”

Bellow-Handelman works on various projects at Grassroot Soccer. She spends a lot of time in schools, playing games that incorporate soccer and HIV/AIDS awareness. One game called “Risk Field” has students dribble a ball around cones, each of which represent a risk of exposure to HIV/AIDS. Another game is called “Find the Ball” and it involves students standing in a line and hiding tennis balls behind their backs while a classmate has to guess which players are holding balls. The balls are intended to represent HIV/AIDS and the premise behind the game, Bellow-Handelman says, is “you can’t tell who has HIV/AIDS by looking” at them.

South African students participate in a Grassroot Soccer game (photo: Grassroot Soccer)

Recently, she has begun organizing a “Street Football League.” Bellow-Handelman says that this project takes advantage of South African’s children natural proclivity to play soccer everywhere possible (“driving through the townships,” she says, there are “kids playing on every street corner”). Right now, it happens once a week and begins with 45 minutes of Grassroot Soccer HIV/AIDS awareness games and then a street soccer game with whoever has shown up. The project has been quite successful, Bellow-Handelman says. “It’s really incredible to see. We show up and there are ten kids. Within ten minutes, they see cones and a soccer ball and there are swarms of sixty, seventy, eighty kids.”

Soccer, Bellow-Handelman has found out, is her way to connect with South African children. When they get over their initial shock of seeing a white woman playing soccer (something she says is “fairly shocking” to South African kids), many come to talk with her. “There are constantly kids coming to the office to borrow a soccer ball. They don’t really speak English and we just juggle with them for hours. There’s a way to communicate with them through soccer and through sport.”

Children play street soccer (photo: Grassroot Soccer)

Of course, the soccer is the tool that GRS uses to promote its message of HIV/AIDS prevention. That work can be difficult in many ways. Bellow-Handelman is well aware of the statistics on the rates of infection in South Africa and knows that many of the students she works with already have HIV/AIDS. And she worries at times that GRS’ message of empowering students to prevent themselves from getting the disease is impractical for some. “It’s hard for me because I know we have these messages about the positive aspects of prevention: ‘you can make a choice’ and ‘you can avoid getting HIV.’ But the reality is a lot of these kids, unfortunately, can’t.” Belllow-Handelman notes that many children got HIV/AIDS at birth or through sexual abuse.

Another difficulty is being around children when they find out that they have HIV/AIDS. Attending a recent GRS event in Lesotho that had on-site testing, Bellow-Handelman says, “It’s not easy to tell a group of kids to get tested when it’s likely that they might test positive, but part of my job is getting them to understand that it’s better to know your status, regardless of what it may be.”

Even though she knows it is better for kids to know their status, the process of testing is emotionally taxing. To encourage kids to get tested, Bellow-Handelman decided to get tested herself.

As I watched so many kids go for testing, and told so many how important it was to know their status, it felt strangely hypocritical not to do so myself. I felt compelled to share the unpredictable emotions, fears, and potentially life-changing experience that so many kids had just gone through, so toward the end of the day, I walked into one of the tents to be tested myself. Even though I knew my status, there is something about walking into a testing and counseling tent, in the middle of rural Africa, that makes your heart beat just a little bit faster.

Leah Bellow-Handelman left the event knowing that she did not have HIV/AIDS. Not everyone was so fortunate: of the nearly 500 children tested at the event, 23 tested positive.

Children at the Lesotho at the “Test Your Team” tournament wait to get tested for HIV/AIDS (photo: Leah Bellow-Handelman)

Over a decade after the end of apartheid, Bellow-Handelman says that some people she’s met maintain views reminiscent of past eras. Some white people, she says, “laugh at us and tell us that our work is in vain and that ‘these people won’t change’.”

This is, fortunately, a minority view. Most people Bellow-Handelman has met support GRS’ work. “When people find out what we do, there are so many people who want to be trained in our program,” she says. Training locals to implement the GRS curriculum is an important goal of the organization. They don’t want to be seen as just the latest group of foreigners coming in telling Africans how to live their lives. And in the long term, GRS wants to make its program self-sustaining. “Our main goal is to come here, deliver this program, and train enough people so that when we leave, it won’t disappear,” Bellow-Handelman tells me.

GRS has been quite successful in getting locals trained in their program out to work in the community. This makes Bellow-Handelman quite proud. “It’s really easy to see … that our trainers, even if they started out as just people in the community, become community role models. Kids know them as Grassroot Soccer coaches and know that they’re a resource they can go to.”

Nearly all talk of soccer in South Africa these days is focused on the 2010 World Cup. Grassroot Soccer hopes to be involved with the tournament, using the high profile event to get out its message of HIV/AIDS prevention. Leah Bellow-Handelman has her own ideas about how she’d like to see the GRS model used at the tournament. She tells me excitedly that her dream is to do “Find the Ball” at halftime of a World Cup game. “That,” she says, “would be awesome.”

More information about Leah Bellow-Handelman’s work with Grassroot Soccer is available at her personal blog.

But recently he took his follicle interest in a different direction and asked me a question: Why is it that all American goalkeepers are bald? This was just after the United States’ third game in the Copa America, in which Brad Guzan had been given his competitive debut in the net. As my father pointed out, Guzan is relatively young (24) to be losing his hair.

A small picture, but notice Brad Guzan’s hair thinning on top

Is there something about being a goalkeeper that makes people lose their hair? Nearly all of the American goalkeepers in recent memory have been a bit shiny on top (except you Tony Meola, long live the mullet you sported at the 1990 World Cup).

(R to L): Howard, Keller, Friedel (and Robbie Savage)

But is this true of goalkeepers worldwide? Certainly, there are many examples of bald goalies around the world. Two examples:

Former Chelsea and Holland goalkeeper Ed de Goey (L) and Marcos of Brazil

In contrast, how many balding field players can you name? Zidane, of course (and Danny Dichio). The Little Buddha, Ivan de la Peña, also comes to mind, but I’m not convinced that his baldness is natural. Same goes for Thomas Gravesen, Roberto Carlos, Thierry Henry and many more who have razor-enhanced shiny coconuts.

In this supremely unscientific survey, there do seem to be more bald goalkeepers than field players. Why might this be?

My dad wondered whether the stress of being a goalkeeper causes hair loss. There is some evidence to support the view that stress causes baldness, including the work of Mayo Clinic doctor Daniel Hall-Flavin and a study in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology (get your subscriptions today!).

But soccer does provide some evidence against position-specific stress as the main factor responsible for causing baldness. Just think about Jens Lehmann. If anyone should have gone bald from stress, it is surely Arsenal’s German goalkeeper. Every time Lehmann is touched, he freaks out and yells at the aggressor and referee he thinks are ignoring his plight. But he’s got a full head of hair.

And the Manchester United great Peter Schmeichel was known for stressing himself out over every mistake by his defenders (his stress usually manifested itself in him yelling at said defenders). But Schmeichel, too, has that beautifully spiked Nordic hairdo to this day.

What do you think? Is my dad right? Are there more bald goalkeepers? Is the stress associated with being a goalkeeper the reason so many players in this position go bald? As you can tell, my interest in this topic is not backed by much scientific evidence, so don’t feel obligated to constrain yourself in this way.

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Since MLS decided this season to allow its teams to sign jersey sponsorship deals, four teams have done so. In their bids to secure corporate sponsorship, a pattern has emerged. Whether by choice or necessity, several MLS teams have reached deals with companies whose products and marketing strategies are not the most reputable.

Real Salt Lake was the first team to announce a jersey sponsorship deal, when they signed with XanGo. XanGo paid an estimated $4 to $5 million dollars to have Jeff Cunningham and the rest of the RSL team promote their brand.

Dave Checketts gets hooked up with some mangosteen juice

This raises the question: what exactly is XanGo? Well, according to its website Xango is

A delicious dietary supplement, XanGo Juice harnesses the nutritional power of the whole mangosteen fruit through a potent proprietary formula. Just one to three ounces each day unleashes a concentrated rush of xanthones, a vigorous family of phytonutrients. The best part: sensational flavor that’ll keep you coming back for more and more.

What XanGo is still seems a bit murky (Mangosteen? Xanthones? Phytonutrients?). But it is not the first slightly sketchy drink to find itself emblazoned on an MLS jersey.

That honor goes to Red Bull, whose logo has been seen on the jerseys of the team of the same name since it was taken over by the Austrian beverage company. Wooed by Red Bull company head Dietrich Mateschitz’s billions, the league changed the name of the franchise formerly known as the MetroStars and allowed Mateschitz to put his logo on the team’s uniforms before other teams were permitted to sign such corporate sponsorship deals.

The 2006 New York Red Bulls

So, what is Red Bull? Well, the official website is a bit murky, claiming only that “All ingredients used for Red Bull Energy Drink are synthetically produced. Most ingredients are produced by pharmaceutical companies. This guarantees highest quality.” A bit vague.

Wikipedia clarifies a bit (though not much for those without advanced degrees in chemistry), claiming Red Bull contains “Water, sucrose, glucose, acidifier sodium citrates, carbon dioxide, taurine (0.4%), glucuronolactone (0.24%), caffeine (0.03%), inositol, vitamins (niacin, pantothenic acid, B6, B12), flavourings, and colours (caramel, riboflavin).”

So, highest quality synthetic ingredients such as taurine, glucuronolactone, inositol? Thanks, but I’ll pass.

New LA Galaxy sponsor Herbalife is also not quite mainstream. Though it markets itself as a “premier nutrition and weight-management company” with “life-changing products,” every product it sells carries the disclaimer “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

Many of Herbalife’s products deal with weight control. One, called Snack Defense, claims to be

A scientific advancement in snacking control, Snack Defense … works all day to reduce the desire for sweets while it helps prevent the urge to snack between meals. Formulated with a blend of natural ingredients, including Gymnema sylvestre, a cutting-edge herb that targets the body’s response to sweets, plus chromium polynicotinate and Garcinia cambogia extract, Snack Defenseâ„¢ takes weight loss to a whole new level.

Gymnema sylvestre, chromium polynicotinate, Garcinia cambogia extract? Delicious!

(The one counterexample to MLS teams signing deals with producers of sketchy products is the expansion team Toronto FC. Their deal with the BMO, a bank, seems straightforward enough, even if Maurice Edu is a bit skeptical about their mascot.)

The ingredients of XanGo, Red Bull, and Herbalife products are enough to give me pause about those companies. But the sketchiness doesn’t end there.

All three companies have had their business practices questioned publicly. XanGo was issued a warning letter from the FDA telling the company to stop claiming health claims about its product, such as fighting depression, Parkinson’s disease and cancer. Red Bull was banned from being sold in Canada until 2005 and a CBC investigation headlined Raging Bull found that “two people have reported serious adverse health reactions after consuming the Red Bull energy drink.”

According to a 2000 article in Salon, since its founding in the 1980s, Herbalife has “courted its share of regulatory nightmares. Some health experts questioned the effectiveness of the company’s nutritional supplements; Herbalife claimed to increase energy and cure a range of illnesses from venereal disease to bee stings.” Other have criticized Herbalife for being a pyramid scheme (see Dan Loney’s in-depth discussion), though a wildly successful one that made founder Mark Hughes over $400 million dollars by the time of his 2000 death by overdose (ironically, by anti-depressant pills: wasn’t there an Herbalife cure for what ailed him?).

The companies whose logos will be on the chests of David Beckham and fellow MLS players this season are not quite mainstream. But, then again, neither is MLS. It is a ten year-old league struggling to succeed on the field and on the balance sheet. Real Salt Lake is about as well as known to the general public as is XanGo, so in that sense, the teams and the sponsors are at an equal level in their respective fields. But as a fan who hopes to see MLS become a long-term success, I can only hope that XanGo, Red Bull, and Herbalife will be on teams’ uniforms only until they can find more reputable sponsors.