Slowly but surely, David Beckham is showing why MLS shelled out the big bucks to bring him to the US. In the days after his signing was announced, the Galaxy announced they had sold 5,000 season tickets. And when the Los Angeles team announced on Friday that they had signed a five-year jersey sponsorship deal with “nutritional products” manufacturer Herbalife, the $3.5 to $5 million quoted was due, in no small part, to a certain Mr. Beckham sporting the company’s name.

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.

Since writing about the long and shameful history of political violence on the soccer field, I’ve been keeping an eye out for current instances of this phenomenon. Sadly, such an incident took only a couple of weeks to occur. Not surprisingly, it took place in Iraq.

The suicide bombing that killed 18 boys as they played soccer in the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Ramadi last Monday was sad enough on its own. At the same time, it illustrates how badly the American military is struggling to contain the violence in Iraq as the country spirals downward towards all-out civil war.

Children play soccer on a Fallujah field after a suicide bombing

On hearing reports of the suicide bombing, the US military went into news-spinning mode. Spokesmen said that there were two incidents that day in Ramadi and that one had been a controlled explosion near a soccer field in which there had been injuries but no deaths.

Only later in the week, with some reporting from the Washington Post, did it become clear that the soccer field attack had indeed occurred. The Post quoted local sheikh Raad Sabah al-Mukeilef, who was likely the intended target of the attack. Mukeilef said of the suicide bomber, “He came in a pickup. Instead of coming in my street, he did it in a small park for children.”

The sheikh also claimed that no members of the US military had responded to the incident. Despite this account, US military spokesman Mark Fox continued to contradict reality. “We ran this down,” said Rear Admiral Fox. “There was no second blast and there were not 18 children killed. The soccer field that was touted in the erroneous report was across the street from the structure that was in the controlled detonation.”

It is sad enough that the US military has so little awareness of, let alone control over, the violence in Iraq. It is even sadder that 18 children had to die playing soccer to make this clear.

Days after the suicide bombing that killed these young boys Ramadi was again the site of violence toward soccer players. The Guardian reports that Mohhamed Hamid and Mohammed Mishaan, both members of the local Ramadi Football Club, were killed on March 2. According to the website Iraq Slogger, both players were killed in the middle of a team practice.

Masked gunmen in Ramadi, west of Iraq, killed football players Mohammed Hamid, 27, and Mohammed Mish’an, 23, from the Ramadi Football Team in front of spectators and teammates while they were in a training session Friday. Three vehicles carrying a dozen gunmen entered the stadium and dragged the two players toward the cars, while people watched in fear. When the two players resisted, they were both shot execution-style, according to eyewitnesses and Ramadi police spokesman Major Tariq Yousif. The two players were accused of being supporters of the Anbar Salvation Council, a tribal group led by Sheikh Abdul Sattar Al-Rishawi, which is opposed to Al-Qaeda militants in the Anbar Governorate.

No word yet on whether the US military plans to deny this latest violence on Iraq’s soccer fields.

Update

NPR ran a great story which is an antidote the theme of violence being perpetrated on the soccer field. The story talks about a mixed Sunni / Shiite league in Baghdad that attempts to bring players from all backgrounds together. Many of the players specifically talked about the league being non-sectarian as a reason why they played in it. Unfortunately, it’s probably only a matter of time before those in Iraq who don’t want to see such unity attack the players in this league.

When former NBA player John Amaechi recently announced that he was gay, he knew it would be controversial. In his soon to be released book, Amaechi writes,

Coming out threatens to expose the homoerotic components of what they prefer to think of as simply male bonding. And it generally is. It’s not so much that there’s a repressed homosexuality at play (except for a small minority), only that there’s a tremendous fear that the behavior might be labeled as such. Or, as I heard the anti-gay epithets pour forth that gay men in the locker room would somehow violate this sacred space by sexualizing it.’

Amaechi knew he would get some negative responses to his decision to come out and another former NBA player, Tim Hardaway, obliged, letting fly on a Miami radio station. Hardaway ranted, “yeah, I’m homophobic,” insisted he “hate[s] gay people,” and said that “[homosexuality] shouldn’t exist in the world or in the United States.”

Amaechi took it in stride, telling ABC News he wasn’t surprised. “To me, it’s astonishing that anybody would be surprised to hear them,” he said.

Amaechi’s lack of surprise probably came, at least in part, because he is almost surely aware of another English athlete who came out. When the former Norwich City striker Justin Fashanu came out in an interview with British tabloid The Sun in 1990, he did not expect the response he received. “I genuinely thought that if I came out in the worst newspapers and remained strong and positive about being gay,” he was quoted as saying, “there would be nothing more that [people] could say.” In fact, the opposite occurred.

The denunciations began with Justin Fashanu’s own brother, John, himself a professional soccer player. John Fashanu said bluntly, “My gay brother is an outcast” and disowned him. His manager, the often-lionized Brian Clough, followed suit calling Fashanu a “bloody poof.” Fashanu was denounced by many blacks in England for “bringing shame on their race.” Tony Sewell, columnist for black weekly magazine The Voice, wrote,

[We] are sick and tired of tortured queens playing hide and seek around their closets. Homosexuals are the greatest queer-bashers around. No other group of people are so preoccupied with making their own sexuality look dirty.

Given the response of family, coaches, and members of the media, it is hardly surprising that the British public’s response to Fashanu’s coming out was largely negative. The groundwork for the homophobic chants that would follow from the terraces of stadiums across England was laid by the attitudes of those in power. Fashanu committed suicide in 1998 and the response to his coming out surely played a part in the tragic end to his life.

(Fashanu was a very troubled man, however, and his sexuality was not the only reason for his suicide. At the time of his death, there was also a warrant out for his arrest in Maryland for having sex with a 17 year-old boy.)

So, will John Amaechi in 2007 be treated in the same way as Justin Fashanu 17 years ealier? The United States and Britian have moved forward on issues of gay rights, to be sure, and there is much wider acceptance of homosexuality in society at large. But if Amaechi’s announcement shows us anything, it may be that homophobia retains a strong presence in sports.

Tim Hardaway was not the only NBA player to make his feelings known about gay players. Oliver Irish writes on the Guardian Unlimited sports blog about the responses of several current NBA stars. He quotes the Sixers’ Steven Hunter saying “As long as he don’t [sic] make any advances toward me I’m fine with it.” LeBron James insisted it is all a matter of trust:

With team-mates you have to be trustworthy, and if you’re gay and you’re not admitting that you are, then you are not trustworthy. So that’s like the No1 thing as team-mates - we all trust each other. You’ve heard of the in-room, locker room code. What happens in the locker room stays in there. It’s a trust factor, honestly.

Irish adroitly analyzes the underlying attitudes present in such pronouncements:

You don’t need to be a master of the subtext to see that Hunter, like so many athletes, is pretty far from cool with sharing a locker room with a gay man. It speaks volumes for the rampant vanity of many sports stars today that Hunter would qualify his tolerance - and it is mere tolerance, rather than acceptance - of Amaechi’s sexuality in such terms: “Sure, I’ll play ball with the guy. We’ll just be two sweaty, muscular black men trying manfully to get a rubber ball through a hoop… but if he tries to touch my balls in the showers, boy, there will be a ruckus.”

Even in Britian, a country that legalized gay marriage in 2005, attitudes among athletes toward homosexuality remain stuck in the past. Homophobic chants remain common in stadiums there. When the BBC’s radio program Five Live attempted to poll Premier League managers on homophobia, none returned the survey. The Independent had more luck in getting responses to its survey of professional players in England. The results were not promising, however: 57 percent of all players and an astonishing 77 percent of League One players said that football is homophobic.

There have been efforts made to change attitudes. The English FA recently organized a conference aimed at eliminating homophobia. Barcelona recently announced the formation of its first gay fan club. Three teams in Germany (Hertha Berlin, Borussia Dortmund, and Stuttgart) also have gay fan clubs (see picture below), as do the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks.

But these remain isolated examples in a sports environment which remains, by and large, wary of homosexuals, if not overtly hostile toward them. In December, Simon Kuper of the Financial Times reported on three gay players in Germany who were set to come out of the closet. As of yet, none has. John Amaechi is to be applauded for having the courage to announce he is a gay athlete. But sadly, the response to John Amaechi’s coming out may indicate not how far the world of sports has come in its attitudes about homosexuality, but how far it still has to go.

By most measures, the NFL has MLS beat. The NFL is one of the most successful and profitable sports leagues in the world with huge attendances, TV audiences, and merchandise sales. MLS, in contrast, has trumpeted as success the fact that some of its teams recently reached profitability and that it signed a TV rights deal in which it would actually be paid (as opposed to having to pay) to broadcast its games.But in one way, MLS is cleaning the NFL’s clock: marketing to Hispanic fans. A recent New York Times article covers the NFL’s struggles in marketing to this segment of the population and also contains some interesting morsels about the efforts of MLS to do the same.

The article cites a survey of “600 senior-level sports industry executives” in which 44% said that MLS was doing the best job of marketing to Hispanic fans of any American sports league. It mentioned that Hispanics account for 35% of MLS fans and that all teams have Spanish-language radio broadcasts.

But the picture is not completely rosy. As Andrea Canales at Sideline Views points out, not all MLS teams have websites in Spanish, shockingly including the L.A. Galaxy. Either Team Beckham has ceded the Spanish-speaking fans to Chivas USA or the marketing department there needs a wake-up call.

For a while, it was the whole league that needed a wake-up call. MLS’s initial marketing efforts were geared almost exclusively at “soccer moms” and their families. Gimmicks like having the clock count up and the shootout turned of may serious fans, including Hispanics. As MLS has matured as a league, so too has its marketing policy. It now promotes itself to suburban soccer families as well as Hispanics.

Some teams have been more successful in marketing to Hispanics than others. The Galaxy’s failure to even put up a Spanish language website stands in contrast to DC United’s sustained efforts to reach out to the large Hispanic population in the nation’s capital. United boast one of the best fan clubs in the league, which is not coincidentally a mix of white and Hispanics. The Barra Brava takes their name from fan clubs in Latin America and sings in both English and Spanish (they also recently brought their brand of support to a Washington Capitals hockey game to mixed reviews). They have a manager of Hispanic relations, whom I have often seen quoted in Spanish-language media in the area.

One interesting aspect of appealing to Hispanic fans is the language in which it is done. As the Hispanic population in this country grows, so too does the diversity within it. In the year 2007, it cannot be assumed that Hispanic means primarily Spanish-speaking. As the American-born population increases, the number of Hispanics speaking English at home has risen as well. (This linguistic shift has not occurred without controversy: see the furor raised by the magazine Tu Ciudad, which is geared toward a Hispanic audience but published since its 2005 founding in English).

The growth in Spanish-speaking Hispanics has been linked with a shift in sporting taste. The same New York Times article quotes a study showing that the NFL is the most popular of all sports leagues among Hispanics who speak primarily English at home. Is this because they speak English or simply because such fans have grown up in this country and feel more connected to American football? According to David Steinberg, general manager of Fox Sports en Español, “the key word is acculturation”

Both the NFL and MLS face a demographic imperative in figuring out how to appeal to Hispanics, both in English and Spanish. The Hispanic population truly arrived in the American psyche when, in 2003, they overtook African-Americans as the largest minority in the country. Today, Hispanics account for “one of every two people added to the population through immigration and birth.” Tomorrow’s America will be more heavily Hispanic than today’s. Whether these Hispanics will become fútbol, football, or soccer fans is the challenge for both the NFL and MLS.

Time was, global superpowers wanting to curry favor with smaller, resource-rich nations would simply provide them with weapons, cash, and UN vetoes. China is taking a new approach. As the rising Asian giant brokers deals with countries across Africa, it is using all sorts of incentives.

Primary among these incentives is the idea that China’s development will come with fewer strings attached than that coming from Western countries. China’s investment in Sudan’s oil sector, for instance, has been welcomed by the repressive African regime, as the Chinese have done little to speak out against the genocide in Darfur.

China promotes its investment in Africa as mutually beneficial, playing up the “we know what it feels to be repressed by Western governments” card. Solidarity of developing countries has some cache in Africa, apparently, as many countries have eagerly agreed to do deals with China.

China is clearly a smart negotiator. Hu Jintao and company know to give African governments what they want. In addition to implicit promises not to speak out on problems of governance, the Chinese are now offering a unique deal sweetener: soccer stadiums.

Part of Hu Jintao’s recent trip across Africa included a stop in Zambia, where he was welcomed as an “all-weather friend.” Part of the deal Hu completed with Zambia includes the promise to build a new soccer stadium in the African country.

Chinese president Hu Jintao with his Zambian counterpart Levy Mwanawasa

African countries need investment in their soccer infrastructure. It is not uncommon that an African nation will only have one grass field in the entire country. But is making deals with China that include funding for new stadiums beneficial in the long term to countries in Africa?

Many are beginning to speak out against Chinese investment in Africa. The president of Zambia, Levy Mwanawasa may call China “a good partner, and a good brother” but his pronouncements stand in contrast to what has become apparent on the ground. Concerns over labor practices in Chinese-owned companies in Africa and dumping of cheap products on African markets are causing some to question the nature of the Sino-African relationship.

In a recent editorial in the Christian Science Monitor Anene Ejikeme, a professor of history at Trinity University, takes a strong stand in saying that, “It’s essential to recall that imperialism is not foreign to China’s long and glorious history.”

Clearly, China’s investment in Africa is not simply an exercise in brotherly love. But where does this leave soccer fans in Zambia who would like to ensure that the new stadium which will take the place of the current Indepdence Stadium will have the financing in place to be built? In a quandary. For surely a stadium in which these are the luxury seats is in need of serious upgrade.

But what will be the ultimate price of upgrading Zambia’s soccer stadium? The future will bring an answer to the question of whether China’s soccer stadium diplomacy can keep Zambians from speaking out against the Asian country’s ultimately exploitative practices.

News came earlier this week that Georges Freche, a politican in France’s socialist party, was forced to resign after saying that,

“It would be normal if there were three or four [black players], that would be a reflection of society. But if there are so many, it’s because whites are no good. I’m ashamed for this country.”

This is not the first time that the race of France’s soccer players has become an issue in French politics. Many have taken note of the diversity of Les Bleus, and used it to promote their agendas. These agendas are varied, ranging from xenophobic and racist to celebrating multiculturalism.

Like Mr. Freche, infamous right-wing politician Jean Marie Le Pen, has on many occassions used the French national team to promote his hateful ideology. In the lead-up to the 2006 World Cup, Le Pen said that “perhaps the coach went overboard on the proportion of colored players.” His racist statements originally came to prominence in the 1900s when he said,

I find it artificial to have foreign players come and play in France and call them the French team. Most French players don’t even know, or don’t want to sing, the Marseillaise.

But the 1998 French team that won the World Cup was also celebrated by those who wanted to promote the image of France as a welcoming and tolerant place. Many attempted to make political gains in promoting that team for being “black, blanc, beur,” (black, white, North African) — a play on the red-white-and-blue of the French flag.”

Jacques Chirac celebrated the team’s diversity as he awarded players the Legion of Honor.

But using the idea of the national team as a model for the benefits or drawbacks of diversity in the country as a whole flies in the face of France’s official government policy of not collecting any kind of racial statistics. The official rationale is that doing so would be in direct conflict with the French motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité. When all have liberty, equality, and fraternity, as the motto states, there is no need to view others differently based on race. But anyone who saw last summer’s rioting in the suburbs of Paris knows that race plays a factor in French society.

The fallout from these riots has led to several changes in France. One group of blacks in France is trying to gain more clout by organizing along racial lines. In doing so, they are seeing firsthand the conflict between the official policy of colorblindness (perhaps this is where Stephen Colbert gets inspiration for his similar view) and the fact that people do, in fact, see race.

Mr. Le Pen and Mr. Chirac may vary on their ideas about the relative merits of a diverse national team, but in speaking about its diversity, they both show the importance of race in French soccer and society as a whole.