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 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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Any list of soccer meccas in the United States would have to include Nevada Smith’s. The bar, located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, has bringing in the soccer faithful of New York since 1994. Today, on any given weekend day, the bar shows games from morning till night. Matches from England, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, the United States and beyond (catering to a group of supporters of SK Brann, Nevada Smith’s even shows Norwegian league) fill the bar’s many televisions spread over two floors. Weekends are “a constant coming and going of people,” Nevada Smith’s owner Jack Keane told me recently. “On a busy Saturday, there’s no doubt that we have between 2000 and 3000 fans that come through the doors.”

Fans at Nevada Smith’s (photo: New York Daily News)

Keane, a jovial Irishman has been running the bar for 15 years. He recalls the days in the mid-1990s when he could only get one game a day from the Premier League to show in the bar. German and Italian games became available around that time too and he would show them as well. But it was really with the advent of Fox Soccer Channel (then known as Fox Sports World) in 1997 that the number of games he could show exploded. As the number of games shown at Nevada Smith’s increased, so too did its clientele.

Looking back on 15 years in business, Keane points to the 2002 World Cup as a turning point for his bar. “If there ever a time that we really captured something,” he says, “it was during that tournament.” With games kicking off at 2:00 AM, 5:00 AM, and 7:00 AM, it was not ideal for New York audiences. “A lot of bars felt there was no business to be done during Korea/Japan. I had the opposite attitude. I thought it was going to be the biggest party of all time, and I was right.” Indeed, fans packed the bar throughout the month of the tournament.

One reason that Nevada Smith’s has had sustained success is because it has become a meeting place for supporters clubs of various European teams. Most notable are those for English teams, many of which have supporters clubs at the bar. These clubs are often made up of expats living in New York for a time, some of whom have told Keane how important they are to them. “There is absolutely no doubt that the pride in which they take in gathering under their club banners. Many of them over the years have said to me that coming here is the most important part of their week. I’ve heard that story many, many times.”

The New York Gooners at Nevada Smith’s (photo: flickr/Jonathan_Hawkins)

British clubs are not the only ones to have supporters clubs at Nevada Smith’s. There are clubs that support teams from across Europe, and those clubs have often received favorable responses when they have contacted the European teams. Keane told me, “We’ve had lads in here who have made contact with the clubs in Europe and have gotten immediate response. I remember the Barcelona peña was formed 6 years ago. Within 2 years, Joan Laporta was here in the bar. Laporta has visited the bar twice this year.”

While many European expats make up the membership of the supporters clubs, their ranks are filled by many Americans as well. This mirrors a shift in the clientele at Nevada Smith’s, which has gone from 90% expats to a 50/50 split between expats and American fans. Keane notes that several clubs, especially Arsenal’s, have a high percentage of Americans. Wherever they come from, members of the supporters clubs who congregate at Nevada Smith’s often go on to become close friends. “People who met in here under football banners absolutely have become friends outside our walls,” Keane says. “There has been friendships born here that have been life-long for a lot of these lads.”

In his 15 years running Nevada Smith’s, Jack Keane has seen many changes in the American soccer scene. He notes the tremendous growth in interest in the game in the US, and is particularly impressed with the knowledge that many American fans possess. “Soccer fans in this country are very knowledgeable. I’m always amazed. Let’s say they’re a fan of Arsenal. They also know what’s going on with other teams, they know what’s going on in Germany.” Of course, Keane notes, soccer fans in the US are a “tiny, tiny percentage” of the population. Despite this, he has been mystified that the American sports media has not put a larger emphasis on the game, and the national team in particular. “I’ve never understood why the media have not gotten behind the US national team. … They get little respect from the media in general. They could have a wonderful result earlier in the day and that night get little attention.”

But Keane sees things changing. ESPN in particular has changed its tune, doing what Keane calls a “360” on soccer. Keane sees the sport behemoth muscling in on rights to the English Premier League because, while the audience for soccer may be dwarfed by that for baseball, basketball, and American football, it is significant enough for the network to see value in catering to those fans. Indeed, ESPN executives need only take a trip to Nevada Smith’s on any given weekend to see proof of the passion that soccer in the United States can generate. But they had better go soon: Jack Keane says that Nevada Smith’s has nearly outgrown its current Lower East Side location. “We don’t expect to be at this location very much longer. We’re looking forward to expanding. We have a group of investors who want to take us nationwide.”

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While Fulham’s expats are relatively high profile, there are many Americans playing abroad who are anything but. It’s a truly dedicated fan who knows Eric Lichaj of Aston Villa, Michael Enfield of Sydney FC in Australia or Tighe Dombrowski of IK Sirius in Sweden.

But while teams abroad are snapping up American players (among other reasons, the falling value of the dollar makes them a good bargain), they appear reluctant to look at American coaches. Only one native-born American coach has held a major job abroad (Steve Sampson, who was in charge of Costa Rica’s national team from 2002 – 2004). Scouring the depths of my brain and the Internet for examples of American coaches who have worked abroad was only able to come up with three, all of whom are naturalized Americans born in other countries.

Last week, Martin Vasquez’s career got a bit of a jump. Until then, the 44 year-old was an assistant coach for MLS’s Chivas USA. But then, Jürgen Klinsmann, who will take over from Ottmar Hitzfeld as Bayern Munich manager next season, announced that he will bring Vasquez across the Atlantic with him as his number two man. It will be quite a responsibility for Vasquez, especially if Klinsmann takes the type of hands-off approach he did during his time with the German national team, when many credited his assistant (and now head coach) Joachim Löw with being the driving force behind the country’s resurgence.

Martin Vasquez (photo: Juan Miranda/Chivas USA/Soccer America)

Klinsmann knows Vasquez from his time in Southern California. In a statement, the German legend said, “I’ve known Martin since 2003 when he was training at an elite football camp in the United States. I was impressed by his positive leadership style and I recommended him to LA Galaxy.” Vasquez was a Galaxy assistant for one season before moving to LA rivals Chivas USA. That move was nowhere near as big as his upcoming switch to Munich.Vasquez does not lack experience crossing borders. Born in Mexico, he moved to LA at age 12. Vasquez played college soccer at UCLA before returning to Mexico to begin his pro career. He played for several teams in Mexico and even earned a spot on the Mexican national team, playing for El Tri several times in the early 1990s. Vasquez returned to the US in 1996 to join the fledgling MLS. His play for the now-defunct Tampa Bay Mutiny and the soon-to-be revived San Jose Clash (known today as the Earthquakes) earned him a call-up from then US national team boss Steve Sampson (he was eligible having only played in friendlies for Mexico), where Vasquez eventually earned 7 caps.

Another coach making his name abroad is Iranian-American Afshin Ghotbi. Born in the Iranian city of Jahrom, Ghotbi remained in his homeland until just prior to the Iranian revolution, when his familiy left for the Los Angeles area, home to a large Iranian expat community. He continued to play soccer and like Martin Vasquez was a member of UCLA’s college team (in fact, given their similar ages, they would likely have been teammates there).

Afshin Ghotbi during his time with the Korean national team (photo: Soccerphile)

After his college career, Ghotbi was involved with youth soccer in Southern California. He coached several professional players in their formative years, including John O’Brien, who went to Ajax in part on Ghotbi’s recommendation. Ghotbi worked as a coach for the US national team, then spent time with the LA Galaxy before using his connections to Holland to get a job as an assistant to Guus Hiddink during his time coaching Korea at the 2002 World Cup.

Ghotbi’s biggest move, though, came last year when he returned to his homeland to take over Tehran giants Persepolis. Given the state of relations between his homeland and adopted country, Ghotbi was worried what reaction his return might bring, but he was welcomed with open arms. He has had tremendous success with his club team and has been talked up as a future Iranian national team manager.

The third and final American manager to have worked abroad is Alketas Panagoulias. Born in Thessaloniki, Greece, Panagoulias moved to the US to do university studies. While in New York, he became involved with the Greek American Atlas Soccer Club, serving as the team’s coach. At a time of little professional soccer in the US, Pangoulias’ amateur team won three consecutive US Open Cup (the American version of the FA Cup) titles from 1967-1969.

Panagoulias returned to Greece in 1972 to serve as an assistant coach for the national team. He was promoted to the head coaching position in 1973, and remained in that job until 1981. He took over Greek giants Olympiakos and led the team to the Greek title in 1982 and 1983. In 1984, he returned to the US to coach the Olympic team in the Los Angeles games. From there, he became the senior national team manager.

Panagoulias returned to his homeland in the late 1980s, coaching Olympiakos again and Aris FC. In 1992, he was appointed to a second spell as national team boss. Panagoulias led the team to its one of its greatest ever moments, qualifying for the 1994 World Cup in the USA.

Alketas Panagoulias (photo: View Images)

Why have there been so few American coaches abroad? My guess is that there remains a stigma against them, left over from the decades in which American soccer was a laughing stock. Although American players have become desirable for teams abroad, American coaches have not found work abroad easy to come by at all. Bruce Arena, the most successful American coach of all time whose greatest accomplishment was guiding the US national team to the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup, desperately tried to throw his hat into the ring for the Scotland job recently, but to no avail.

This is perhaps not surprising, as many more European coaches have gone to traditionally less powerful countries to play their trade than vice versa (of the 16 teams in African Cup of Nations, only four are African, though the World Cup Blog expresses some hope that this may change in the future). Even South American countries, who, given the players they produce, know a thing or two about their job, have found it tough to break into Europe (the most notable failure of recent times being Wanderlei Luxemburgo at Real Madrid).

For now, it seems, the only Americans able to break into the coaching ranks overseas are those whose foreign birth gives them a degree of street-cred that native-born coaches lack. Only time will tell if American coaches can become as desirable as the players they are increasingly producing.

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Though not nearly as influential as other aspects of Greek society passed down to us today, several top soccer teams have names that make reference to Greek gods and places. In most cases these names suggest qualities to which the teams aspire (though perhaps don’t always achieve). The list I present here is relatively small, though I don’t doubt that there are other teams with Greek-inspired names (I am not, of course, counting Greek teams themselves in this list). If you know teams with such names, please post them in the comments.

One of the most important teams in the development of soccer worldwide was England’s Corinthians FC. The team was one of the top sides in England during the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th century. Corinithians gained fame by traveling around the game, bringing the soccer gospel to many different countries. So taken were the Brazilians by these visitors that they named a local team after them. That team, Sao Paulo’s Corinthians, continues to play professionally to this day (though were recently relegated to the second division) and has recently had players such as Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano on their books. The English Corinthians merged with Casuals FC in 1939 to become Corinthians-Casuals FC, a team that plays in the Ryman Football League (formerly known as the Isthmian League) today.

The Greek city-state of Corinth, for which Corinthians FC was presumably named, once rivaled Athens for power and prestige. Most notably, Corinth hosted the Isthmian Games. This competition was held every two years and has been described by archaeologist Oscar Broneer as “probably the most popular of all the Panhellenic celebrations.” Although the last Isthmian Games were held in the 4th century AD, the name of the city-state which hosted it was revived by an English soccer team 1500 years late, as was the spirit of athletic competition for its own sake that both celebrated.

An archaeological dig being done at the site of the Isthmian Games (photo: Michael Lahanas)

In Italy, Atalanta are a team known for producing young players, including Italian legend and current national team coach Roberto Donadoni. The team today sits in 8th place, one spot away from qualifying for the Intertoto Cup. The team’s blue and black uniforms give them one of their nicknames, the Nerazzurri. That nickname may be shared with current Italian champions Inter, but Atalanta’s other nickname is all their own.

The team from Bergamo is also known as La Dea (Italian for “goddess”). That is because the team takes its name from the Greek god Atalanta. As the myth has it, Atalanta was so beautiful that she had many suitors, but rebuffed all who sought her hand. Her father convinced her to agree to marry anyone who could beat her in a footrace. Atalanta agreed, and ran many races against potential suitors, winning all of them. Finally, she came up against Hippomenes. Finding him attractive, Atalanta sought to convince him not to run, as losers of the races were put to death. Hippomenes did race Atalanta, but had the god of love Aphrodite intervene on his behalf, placing apples on Atalanta’s path, which she stopped to pick, allowing Hippomenes to pass her. Could it have been Atalanta’s pace and beauty that inspired the Italian team to choose her as their name?

Atalanta’s logo incorporates an image of the goddess of the same name (photo: Atalanta BC)

No country has more teams named for Greek gods, heroes, and places than Holland. For a country relatively distant from Greece, this is a bit of a surprise (to me, at least). Sparta Rotterdam, a team which nearly always plays second fiddle to city rivals Feyenoord, takes its name from perhaps one of the greatest city-states of ancient Greece, immortalized for its role in defeating Athens in the Peloponnesian War.

Heracles Almelo may be small potatoes even in the modest Dutch league, but the Greek god from which they took their name is anything but small. Heracles, who the Romans would incorporate into their traditions and rename Hercules, was the son of Zeus. Above all, he was known as a great warrior, whose strength and guile enabled him to achieve a mythic status in ancient Greece. Heracles Almelo, who did win the Dutch league in 1927 and 1941, have, in recent years, shown little of the athletic ability demonstrated by the Greek god from whom they took their name.

The Greek god Heracles in action (photo: Jean Oh)

The most famous team named for a mythological Greek hero, however, is Ajax. That Ajax is written about in the Iliad, most prominently when he argues with Patroclus over who will take Achilles’ shield after that hero has been slain. Ajax loses the argument and is enraged. In his rage, he slaughters a flock of sheep. When he realizes what he has done, he feels ashamed and instead of living the rest of his life with this shame, kills himself.

Ajax Amsterdam, on the other hand, have not died (though their teams in the past couple of years have been pretty poor). The team from the Dutch capital has seen two golden periods: one in the early 1970s when, inspired by Johann Cruyff, they won the European Cup three times in a row (1971-1973), and a second in the mid-1990s when, coached by Louis van Gaal, they put out a team of young players (including Marc Overmars, Patrick Kluivert, Edgar Davids, Clarence Seedorf and others) and won the European Cup (1995). Despite the team’s recent lack of success, Ajax Amsterdam – in contrast to other teams with similarly inspired names – are now more prominent than the original god Ajax from which they took their name.

Peter Lupson’s book Thank God for Football! explores the religious backgrounds of many top English club teams (of the 38 teams that have played in the Premier League since its inception in 1992, 12 have their origins in churches). Churches that founded teams often did so for reasons other than pure love of soccer. David Goldblatt, in his history of world soccer called The Ball is Round, has written of the importance of so-called muscular Christianity in shaping early English football. He writes that “the Victorians were quite convinced of the relationship between physical, mental, and moral health” (27).

Drawings of the first international between England and Scotland in 1872 show some of the virtues of the burgeoning British style (photo: Wikipedia)

Lupson told the EPL Talk podcast last year that churches sought to instill 4 elements of character into their football-playing parishioners: courage, fair play, team spirit, and self-control (20:50). Such qualities are still seen today in the English game. Post-game press conferences with English managers almost always focus on at least one of these elements (Stuart Pearce is my personal favorite, rattling on and on about team spirit but with seemingly little concern for tactics and the like).

As soccer spread around the world, diverse styles of play developed that barely resembled the game played in England. In South America, short passing replaced the long ball made popular in England. In Argentina, this style was offered referred to as criollo. David Goldblatt writes that “criollo football and masculinity came to be defined in opposition to the English” who had brought the game to Argentina, and whose economic system was fundamental in shaping the country’s style of play.

The English were focused and disciplined, combining collective organization and physical force – the prerequisites of an industrial labour force turning out an industrial product. On the Rio de la Plata where industrialization had yet to completely stamp its imprint on the economy, landscape or rhythms of life, masculinity was more restless, impetuous and individualistic, spurning crude force in favor of virtuoso agility (204).

This “virtuoso agility” is still seen today in Argentine soccer. Marcela Mora y Araujo has written of the gambeta, which 1986 World Cup winner Jorge Valdano told her has two elements: “The first is ability: to show that I, with my foot, have the skill to do anything; the second is feinting, I have to deceive my opponent, make him believe exactly the opposite of what I’m going to do. This is also very Argentinian, the taste for deceit.”

Maradona gets his gambeta on in 1986 against England (photo: Telegraph)

Not surprisingly, given its proximity, Brazil developed a style in many ways similar to that of the Argentines, complete with intricate short passing and elaborate dribbling. Tim Vickery, South American correspondent for BBC, The World Game, Sports Illustrated, and World Soccer magazine, told me 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.”

Alex Bellos, author of Futebol: Soccer the Brazilian Way, offers several suggestions as to how the “Brazilian” style has developed. The incredible technique that typifies Brazilian players may have come from the “informal kickabouts” in which a bundle of socks often substitutes for a ball would lead “their ball skills to be more highly developed and inventive” (34).

“Alternatively,” writes Bellos, “one could explain the flashy individualism by pointing to the national trait of showing off in public.” Tim Vickery concurs with this explanation. He offered me an example: “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.”

Alex Bellos offers a couple of other possible explanations for how the Brazilian style has developed. It may have had to do with race relations, he writes.

Some historians have suggested that reliance on the dribble evolved because of the racism of the game’s formative years. They say that the style was created by black players who improvised artfulness as a way of self-protection against whites. If you were a black, you would not want to have physical contact with a white player, since this could end in retaliation. Blacks had to use guile rather than force to keep the ball. (35)

Or perhaps, Bellos suggests, the Brazilian martial art of capoeira played a part in developed the country’s soccer style. He suggests that the “hip-swinging body language used by a capoeirista is very similar to samba dancers and Brazilian dribblers” (35).

The Netherlands is another country with a unique style of play. The Total Football style of the 1970s, in particular, was unlike anything ever seen (and though not explicitly employed today, remnants of its influence remain). David Winner, in his book Brilliant Orange, claims that this style has much to do with Dutch conceptions of space.

Space is the unique defining element of Dutch football. Other nations and football cultures may have produced greater goalscorers, more dazzling individual ball-artists, and more dependable and efficient tournament-winning teams. But no one has ever imagined or structured their play as abstractly, as architecturally, in such a measured fashion as the Dutch. (44)

Winner claims that Total Football exemplifies the Dutch conception of space. It was “a conceptual revolution based on the idea that the size of any football field was flexible and could be altered by the team playing on it” (44).

Of course, the size of a football field is not flexible, Winner attributes this mentality to the land the Dutch have been given. A small, low-lying country with a long sea coast and a relatively large population, the Dutch have in fact expanded their land through the use of polders and other elaborate water control measures. Winner sees spillover of Dutch attitudes toward land into Dutch soccer. He calls the Dutch “spatial neurotics” and says that “the Dutch think innovatively, creatively and abstractly about space in their football because for centuries they have had to think innovatively about space in every other area of their lives” (47).

A Dutch goalkeeper ponders his country’s water reclamation projects (photo: Roberta on the Arts)

In 2000, I studied in Japan. At the time, Frenchman (and recent convert to Islam) Phillipe Troussier was coach of that country’s national team. The team had long used an all-action, team game (like that of the Koreans in the 2002 World Cup).

A constant refrain from Troussier, though, was that his team was too nice, too polite, too afraid to really mix it up. Japan’s style of play was too team-oriented, as were his individual players, and he told the BBC that “the Japanese are very organised.”

Even in their free time they need organisation. I gave them a day off and they all want to do the same thing. They take the same photographs, eat in the same restaurant. I had to close the hotel restaurant and told them to go out and do different things.

Troussier’s attempts to change the Japanese style of play ran up against the deeply-held value of group unity.

Troussier also constantly railed that his players weren’t tough enough. Again, what Troussier saw as a lack of toughness may have been a manifestation of the value Japanese place on harmony. Being tough is not encouraged in Japanese society the way it is in Europe, and Troussier saw his role as imposing this toughness on his players. In 2000, he told Sebastian Moffett of the International Herald Tribune that “the younger Japanese players are maybe better than Europeans in technical areas. My challenge is to prepare the players for world football — to play against aggressive foreign sides.”

Phillipe Troussier works on scaring his players into being tougher (photo: BBC)

If this last example is staring to sound like national stereotypes transformed into ideas about styles of play, it’s because it is just that. And it’s far from the only such example. One hears constantly about Germany’s Teutonic efficiency, Italian players’ sneakiness and diving, and many other examples that are nothing more than simple stereotypes put in the context of soccer. These stereotypes can at times come across negatively, especially when reference is made to African teams’ lack of discipline. Grant Wahl of Sports Illustrated has written: “[I]t sometimes strikes me as a veiled form of racism (especially when a European journalist asks an African coach if his team’s “lack of discipline is a reflection of the national character,” which actually happened during the 1996 Olympics.)”

Today, the traditional styles of play that have typified footballing nations for years are less pronounced than in the past. With more and more players and coaches crossing borders and games being broadcast across the globe, it’s often hard to pinpoint a style as coming from one country. David Winner wrote in March of last year that Arsenal – a team based in London but coached by a Frenchman and who rarely feature an Englishman in their lineup – are the only team that best typify Total Football today. But Arsenal are different, a team that actually seeks to play with style. Most are content to play with whatever style (or lack thereof) will win them the next match.

As an American, I have often thought about whether there is an “American style.” As a country of immigrants, it would make sense for our style to reflect the people who have come to the United States. But for most of our soccer history, I don’t think this has been the case. The historical soccer connections between the US and the UK have meant that American soccer has often been more British in its style than anything else. That may be changing today, though, especially with the influx of immigrants from Latin America.

Jay Martin, longtime men’s soccer coach of Ohio Wesleyan University, laments the fact that for too long American soccer has not had its own identity, but has simply sought to replicate that of other countries. He hopes to see the development of an American style, as he wrote in an article for the National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) in 2006.

The fact is we are Americans. We are not Brazilians, Germans, Dutch or French. We cannot play the style of those countries. It is simply not possible. We cannot replicate the Brazilian culture and society. These factors influence — no, dictate — how the Brazilians play. Social, economic, political and cultural forces directly impact how any national team plays. Nor can we replicate the club systems of England and Germany or the youth system of France and Holland.

American soccer is unique. America is unique. We can and should learn from other soccer nations, but we should develop and play an American style. There is no question that there is a great deal to learn from other soccer-playing nations. We should, however, take these lessons and use them in the context of an American style.

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So, my fellow gringos (and others), what do you think? Is there an American style of play? If so, what is it? Because frankly, I don’t have an answer to that question.

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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Dutch giants Ajax were founded by a young man named Floris Stempel, who, in 1900, invited several of his friends to join him in his new endeavor with a letter that read: “Hereby the undersigned invites you politely to grace us with your presence in one of the upper rooms of Café-Bar ‘Oost-Indië’, at number 2, Kalverstraat, on Sunday morning at 9 hours and 3 quarters, to discuss the establishment of an entirely new Football Club.” Were they alive today, Stempel and co. would probably be surprised to realize how big their club has become.

Many clubs throughout the world have their origins as teams formed by British expatriates. Such is the case with many teams in South America as well as Italian giants AC Milan.

The 1901 AC Milan team, made up mostly of British expats (photo: Wikipedia)

British expatriates were not the only ones to form teams outside of their homeland. Many prominent teams were founded to represent immigrants settling in foreign lands. So it was that Palmeiras initially represented the Italian community in Brazil (the original club name was Palestra Italia but was changed during World War II). AEK Athens was founded by Greek refugees fleeing Istanbul and oppression under the Ottoman Empire. Celtic quickly came to represent the Irish community in Scotland, founded by members of a Glasgow church with many Irish parishioners.

Celtic are far from the only team to have grown out of churches. So too did Everton, Birmingham City, Bolton, and Tottenham, among others. In France, Auxerre was founded in 1905 by a priest named Father Deschamps (I’m assuming that to be a common enough name to not indicate any relation to Didier).

Soccer today is big business, but at the time many teams were founded, they were intended simply to provide a recreational outlet for company workers. It was for this reason that Dutch electronics firm Philips started PSV. Similarly, Bayer Leverkusen was begun as team for workers of the aspirin-making firm (its logo includes lions surrounding a white pill with Bayer written on it), and Sochaux was established for workers at the Peugoet car factory.

The lions attack the aspirin (photo: UEFAclubs.com)

Living under capitalism is not a prerequisite for having soccer teams organized at work; several Russian teams were begun during communist times to represent workers of particular trades.

Given their prominence today, it’s hard to fathom, but several teams were founded as just another team at large, mulisport clubs. Brazil’s Flamengo, for instance, was originally a rowing club that only later developed a soccer team (its official name, Clube de Regatas do Flamengo, hints at this past). Argentina’s Gimnasia y Esgrima de La Plata were founded as a gymnastics and fencing club and only later developed a football wing. In the northeast of England, both Newcastle and Middlesbrough were originally cricket clubs, and their football teams were only founded to help players keep fit in the winter.

The rules of soccer were first codified at British schools in the middle of the 19th century. Since that time, the sport has been extremely popular in schools throughout the world (I have seen it played at recess in schools on several continents). Many prominent teams have their beginnings in educational institutions.

Turkey’s Galatasaray was founded by students at their school of the same name. The team logo and colors were clearly taken from that of the school. Real Madrid also have their origins in a school. “Football was introduced to Madrid by the professors and students of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. They included several Oxbridge graduates. In 1895 they founded the club Football Sky, playing on Sunday mornings at Moncloa.” From these humble beginnings arose one of the most successful club teams in the world.

Istanbul’s Glatasaray Lisei (photo: Wikipedia)

In Belgium, Standard Liege got their start at with students of the College of Saint-Servais in 1900. France’s Strausbourg was founded by several primary school students, whose efforts were coordinated by their school teacher. Germany’s Schalke was founded by high school students in the city of Gelsenkirchen.

The part of the world with the most student-founded teams, though, appears to be Latin America. Many teams in that part of the world have names that indicate their scholarly beginnings. They include Mexico’s Pumas, a team with its origins in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). The team began with students filling its roster, although this changed when the club went professional in 1954. Despite this shift, the club remains known as a producer of quality youth players. And to this day, Pumas draw much of their support from UNAM students and alums.

Many teams throughout Latin America have “Universidad” in their names. Most share a similar past with Pumas: founded as a university team though since having obtained professional status. Chile has Universidad de Chile and Universidad Catolica, teams whose fans indicate the type of student each attracts. The more left-leaning U de Chile fans attend that large public university while Universidad Catolica fans often come from wealthier backgrounds. (When American Jonny Walker played there, jokes were often made playing on his name and that of the eponymous scotch, which, it was claimed, only Catolica fans could afford to drink.)

Across the Andes, Argentina has Estudiantes de la Plata, which was formed by college students fed up with the gymnastics and fencing played at city rivals Gimnasia y Esgrima. And in Rosario, graduates of the English High School formed a team and named it after their former coach, Isaac Newell. And in Peru, Cienciano, winners of the 2003 Copa Sudamericana (South America’s equivalent of the UEFA Cup) were founded in 1901 by students at the National School of Science of Cusco.

An early Cienciano team (photo: Cienciano)

Students have been primarily responsible for founding teams at schools, but teachers have also gotten into the act. Sunderland was founded in 1879 as the Sunderland and District Teachers Association Football Club and drew its ranks from local teachers. A year later, they opened their ranks to outsiders and the Teachers bit was later dropped from the club name. Today Sunderland AFC find themselves in the Premier League with a full roster of professional players. But having taken only 17 points from 20 matches, Roy Keane’s men are sitting precariously close to the relegation zone. Historically-minded fans of the northeast team must have wondered at times this year whether the original teachers could have done much worse than the current crop of players.

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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.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a dramatic change in American soccer. It moved out of its almost exclusive home in ethnic communities and was adopted by suburban families across the country. Soccer became the sport of choice for many suburban parents, who gave the sport a unique character. In his book Soccer in a Football World, David Wangerin writes about the ideals that some suburban soccer messiahs brought to the game.

It would be an exaggeration to claim soccer for the counter-culture, yet the sport often found its most fertile soil among those with egalitarian leanings. In 1964 a Californian named Hans Stierle founded the American Youth Soccer Organisation, which treated the game more as a highly participative, fun activity than a competitive sport. Its ‘everybody plays’ motto contrasted sharply with the win-at-all-costs philosophy of other youth sports. Kids were guaranteed to appear in at least half of every AYSO match, and to avoid lopsided scores leagues spread their talent equally across the teams. Though many perceived this as patently un-American, others were inspired. Soon soccer organizations with similar philosophies emerged across the country, signing up children by the thousands. (149)

AYSO Soccer (photo: Christopher Michael Darrouzet-Nardi)

The boom in soccer’s popularity indicated that these ideals appealed to many parents. But the egalitarian nature imposed upon the game made it slightly unsavory to another group of Americans. The culture wars of the past few decades have pitted Americans with very different ideals against each other. In his book How Soccer Explains the World, Franklin Foer claims that “[soccer] has become a small touchstone in this culture war” (246).On the side of the debate are traditionalists, those who Bill O’Reilly would refer to as “real Americans” (and Stephen Colbert would jokingly refer as the Colbert Nation). They, of course, play American sports like baseball, American football, and basketball. On the other side are the egalitarian-minded parents whose kids play soccer.

Franklin Foer writes that “[w]hen they adopted soccer, it gave the impression that they had turned their backs on the American pastime. This, naturally, produced even more disdain for them – and for their sport (239).”We Americans are traditionally known for our independent spirit. So the idea that soccer encouraged, even demanded, people to work together strikes some as contrary to our nature. Writing in Slate in 1998, David Plotz claimed that soccer was “vaguely un-American” due in part to its having “too much cooperation.”

Most notoriously, former New York Congressman (and later vice presidential candidate) Jack Kemp said on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1986, “I think it is important for all those young out there, who someday hope to play real football, where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands, a distinction should be made that football is democratic, capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist [sport].” Kemp, who, not coincidentally, was a one-time professional American football player, later (sort of) apologized for his remarks, writing on the conservative website Townhall: “in the interest of America and Kemp family harmony, (seven or eight of my 16 grandchildren have played, or are playing soccer), let me now say in print, I love soccer, but it’s still boring. Oops, there I go again.”

Jack Kemp (photo: Wikipedia)

This was not the first crude attempt to explain the virtues of sports relative to the life lessons they can teach. Mark Salisbury writes of a similar attempt nearly a century before Jack Kemp.

While football was portrayed as a manly, virile game representing all that was good about capitalist America, soccer was reintroduced as a return to the gentlemanly ideal of amateur sportsmanship. Football was often called “a moral agent” or “a training for life.” In a 1905 editorial in The Independent, the author proclaimed football to be the very “epitome of our commonwealth, the real national game, the symbol of our civilization.”

It may come as a surprise to those in other countries where soccer is the epitome of masculinity, but soccer in the US is viewed as being not very manly. Salisbury also writes that soccer was played among some American colleges between 1869 and 1875, but not at Harvard. That school, he writes, “refused to compete under the soccer rules, proclaimed the rugby rules more ‘manly’.”These types of views about soccer remain today. It doesn’t help that soccer and American football are often played in high schools during the same fall season, putting them in direct conflict with each other. The American football coach at my alma mater often used colorful language I won’

It reprint here to describe his feelings about soccer and those who chose to play it. Shock jock Jim Rome has made a living, in part, by questioning the manliness of soccer players.

The fact that soccer has become so popular among girls in the US gave our women’s national team a head start in international competition, but reinforced notions about the masculinity of the sport. How good a sport could soccer be, some wonder with different degrees of openness, if girls can also play it?

There are several other reasons people have used to support claims that soccer is, somehow, un-American. It’s too slow, it’s too low-scoring, there are not enough meaningful statistics, there aren’t good breaks for television advertisements. All may be true to a certain degree, but I won’t go into depth on them here.

The last reason I will suggest why soccer has been painted by some as un-American is simply that Americans are not the best at it. We Americans are not known for being modest (we insist on calling the champions of our baseball, American football, and basketball leagues “world champions” despite there being no international competition, unless you count the few Canadian teams allowed in). So how much fun can it be for us to watch a national team that is decent, but not great? Only our women’s team has won a World Cup (though even that was close to 10 years ago now), but that won’t convince anyone who already thinks soccer is a bit “girly.” I think it’s only a matter of time before the US becomes a world power in soccer (demographics and money will rule in the end, I believe), but will a World Cup victory convert any of the people who believe the sport is un-American? I doubt it.

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